GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 337267
Change Open/Save Dialog boxes to be consistent with Windows
Last modified: 2006-05-13 21:29:46 UTC
This is NOT the same as bug #300581 Most Windows applications have a consistent user interface. One of the things that is consistent is the open or save dialog box. However, the GIMP open/save dialog box is much different. From a UI design point of view, this is a Bad Thing. A user should not have to learn a new way of performing a common task, such as saving an image to a network drive. I recommend that the open and save dialog boxes be made consistent with the windows interface. The steps performed to open a file from a file share (like \\my file server\some folder\image.png ) should be the same as if the user were using any other windows application.
I'm working with many windows applications each day and the one thing that is different in many of them if the file dialogs. As you mention network drives explicitely, is your main concern that they aren't supported in this dialog?
Although the file dialogs are slightly different, most of it is consistent. For example, look at the open/save dialog boxes of the following applications: -Mozilla Firefox -Adobe Reader -Wordpad All three look very similar. Then look at the GIMP open/save dialog box. It's very different. My concerns are twofold: one, the user experience for GIMP should be consistent with other windows applications; and two, the UI should support saving to a network drive. It is far more important that the application be consistent with other applications on the same platform than the application be consistent with itself cross-platform.
WEll, this report is probably more appropriate for GTK+ then, as this dialog is based on the GTK+ file chooser. BTW, I don't have problems saviong to network drives, are you maybe talking about UNC paths? Anyway, there shouldn't be two seperate issues in one bug report, we should focus on one here and you should open another report for the other (after you did check whether there already are exiting reports).
Apart from the fact that I judge it more important that GIMP is consistent across all supported platforms, I don't think we have the resources to write and maintain such platform-specific code. There is only very little help coming from the Win32 community (whatever that is) and there are other more important features waiting to be implemented. The screenshot plug-in for example just needs a single function to be implemented to work cross-platform. Still, after more than two years, it is still unimplemented. I vote for closing as WONTFIX or reassigning to GTK+.
I haven't found such an enhancement request for GTK+ so I will reassign this one to GTK+ now. I am interested in getting an opinion from the GTK+ developers.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 337093 ***
(In reply to comment #4) > Apart from the fact that I judge it more important that GIMP is consistent > across all supported platforms Most users do not use many platforms, they use one.