Folders are broken

Folders are broken

Posted Oct 26, 2010 12:02 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)
In reply to: Folders are broken by hickinbottoms
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)

The main problem is the "Save As" dialog box; where you have to re-navigate to the folder that you already have open on screen. RiscOS presented it's own "virtual" folder view of the file to save, and you just drag it to where you want to save it.

I agree completely. As a RiscOS person back in the day I'm surprised that after maybe 20 years there still isn't another implementation that does this on any major desktop that I know of (all the ones on Linux, OSX, Windows).

I used RISC OS back in the day, too, but I seem to remember using Open Look applications on Sun workstations also having drag-save: the text editor had an icon above the document text which could be dragged onto a file manager window. (I just checked this in the user guide downloaded from the SourceForge project and it's there on page 57 of the file, or page 17 according to the book numbering.) That was arguably more radical, since you didn't need to open a "save" dialogue at all.

I don't know whether RISC OS's standard "save" dialogue was supposed to resemble a folder view itself, but Computer Concepts' Impulse (in its non-operating system incarnation) was supposed to support the notion of a running application having its own filesystem, although I don't think this was ever integrated with the rest of the system.

From what I can remember now of discussions about adding such features to KDE, I think the developers just didn't see the point: users would supposedly be running their applications maximised and not want to juggle windows. Of course, that doesn't remedy the existing problem of being forced to repeatedly navigate to a directory through a keyhole, which was supposedly a usable solution. No wonder people save everything to their desktop...

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