GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 150249
Standard "Save As" dialog?
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:20:16 UTC
There's a need for a standard appearance/behaviour for Save As dialogs, as reported here by Robert Staudinger: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2004-August/msg00077.html FWIW, my (very gut) feelings are that: - Any extension the user types should over-ride the default file type selection, and update the file type list accordingly. The app would potentially need to have a preferred format for each extension in this case, e.g. various flavours of Word document all map on to ".doc". (If the user pre-selected one non-preferred .doc format though, e.g. Word 97, then typed .doc in the filename field, the list/format *shouldn't* update to the preferred .doc format.) - Haven't quite made up my mind what should happen if the user makes a manual file type selection, and then types a different filename extension :/ My first instinct would be to keep to the 'what you type over-rides what you select' rule, but maybe since this is a corner case, an alert listing the possible options (save using selected file type, save using filetype suggested by extension, and a choice of whether to use either or both extensions in the actual filename) would be acceptable here. - There should be an option to add the correct extension automatically, which would be added to (not replace) any extension the user typed. (I can see arguments for replacing it too, but they go somewhat against the usability principle of least surprise). - The user should be able to save a file as a particular type without an extension if they so desire. It would be very annoying to have to save a README file as "README.txt", then rename it :) So to satisfy all that, the relevant part of the file selector might look something like: Filename: [MyReport ] File Type: [ MS Word 97 |v] <-- includes a "Determine from Filename" item [x] Add correct filename extension <-- disabled if File Type = Determine from Filename) As hinted at earlier, to have this work most transparently you'd probably need the extension list to update dynamically based on the extension typed, and also on whether you'd pre-selected a filetype or "Determine from Filename", to leave the user in no doubt as to what format their file will actually be saved in. That could be a tricky little interaction to get just right; I haven't really worked through all the scenarios. Of course, ideally this would all be part of the file selector widget anyway, as it's a common enough scenario that applications shouldn't all have to be implementing the same (or worse, slightly different) behaviours :)
Of course, the new file selector doesn't have the filename at the bottom, so I guess it would really look something more like: Name: [My Report ] Save in folder: [Documents |v] File Type: [MS Word 97 |v] [x] Add correct filename extension > Browse for other folders [Cancel][Save]
Maybe saving without extension should be restricted to "generic" formats like plain text, i.e. which are understood by a wide range of applications. Can't think of any other than plain text ATM though. Maybe the need to distinguish between known file-types and random "." in the filename will arise. Example: "test.rtf" vs. "test.draft" / "test.draft.rtf" If the extension is "random" (not known by the app) we might want to default to the selected extension and append it.
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/designs/filechooser-spec/ This is "One of the things that never got finished"...
I would probably go against the 'what you type over-rides what you select'. I think we'll run into situations of people typing in "java and .net" for the file name and perhaps ".net" is a recognized extension. We would end up saving as ".net" even though the person selected "Word 97" format before or after typing in the file name. It seems that if you manually select a format we should be appending the appropriate extension no matter what you type so we don't run into miscalculations based off the file name. If a person hasn't selected a format I would like to see the file type change dynamically if you type in ".doc" as your file extension and the default format was "Rich Text", it would change the format to "Word 97" (whatever the most appropriate one is). This would give at leaset some feedback to the person that we've just seen the extension they've typed and we're going to use it.
This does not seem to be an issue anymore in 2018.