How it looks... with preview (feb 25)

How it looks... without preview (feb 25)

Open Dialog

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• New (feb 25): single clicking in the bookmarks list should take you immediately to that location rather than requiring a double click. Long term: if you are in a location that corresponds to a bookmark, that item in the bookmarks list should be highlighted (duplicate bookmarks can be disallowed if that makes highlighting easier, or the first instance of the item can be highlighted).
  
• New (feb 25): when the bookmarks pane shrinks so that the add/remove buttons don't fit, they should turn into [+] [-] buttons. If the pane is shrunk further they should just disappear, allowing the pane to be further contracter. Clicking the expander should collapse the bookmarks pane to have no width. This allows people to get rid of bookmarks. See screenshot in the preview section to see how this looks.
  
• New (feb 25): (may be long term), replace [/] with a button showing the appropriate image. We might also do this for the start of other roots, such as a remote fileshare (of course we would use the network drive icon for this, not the hardisk icon). See screenshot in the preview section to see how this looks.
  
• Note (feb 25): the file panes are illustrative in most of these mockups and were swiped from Nautilus. Thus the number of columns is off. There should be two columns: "Name" and "Date". The date column should long term present dates the same way as Nautilus (which should in turn be the same as Evolution).
• Ctrl-L pops up an auto-complete entry like Nautilus'. It would be nice to actually display a short list of files beneath the entry (perhaps 7 items or so), that updates in the background as you type, providing feedback as to the options from the current location. If a filename is typed, after accepting the popup dialog, not only should the folder should be changed, but that file should be selected. Thus specifying a file involves the keystroke series: Ctrl-L, type path name, Enter, Enter.
  
• Alt-Up changes to the parent folder, like Nautilus
  
• Alt-Home changes to the home folder, like Nautilus
  
• No entry widget means list selection is a direct manipulation, rather than going through a layer of abstraction. Conceptual model is "List selection chooses items to open" vs. "List selection changes the entry widget, the entry widget indicates the file name to open from the current path".
  
• Selecting a folder in the file pane and clicking [Add] will add the selected folder to the bookmarks list. This is the default behavior people will look for. If no files are selected, the current folder will be added (provides the ability to add "/", among other things). Dragging a folder from the file pane to the bookmarks list also adds a bookmark. [Remove] should only be sensitive if an item in the bookmarks list is selected.
• Path widget (above the file pane) combines display of current file pane state with the ability to change the current state. Also avoids the archane concept of path strings, which we don't expose elsewhere in the interface (and e.g. aren't exposed on Windows or MacOS).
• Clicking one of the buttons in the path widget changes the file pane to display the contents of that folder, and updates the path widget to only show folders up to that point. E.g. if the path widget shows [/] [home] [seth] [folder], and I click on [home], the path widget should display the contents of /home, and the path widget should change to be [/] [home].
  
• The file pane is focused by default
  
• Long term: It might be nice to not "destroy ahead" in the path widget, and only update the path widget when the path shown is inconsistent with the current heirarchy.
• Long term: Should consider using the hard disk icon in the button instead of displaying "[/]" (still have to have an a11y string that says "root" though).
• Long term: typeahead in the file pane allows selection of files (even in nested folders) using the same set of keystrokes as the list widget

Open Dialog with Preview

The long term goal for preview (not really doable currently):

Save As Dialog

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• Ctrl-L pops up a location dialog. If users type an existing directory into the dialog and accept it, the Save In Folder changes to that location. Alternatively, users may enter a full path with a new filename, which will also change the "Name" entry. Thus the flow for somebody wishing to specify a path would be: Ctrl-L, type path, Enter, Enter.
• The most common use for Save As is to save a file in the default folder offered.
  
• Thus, most important operation in "Save As..." is naming the document. Prominence in the interface is given to choosing the name.
• Most people will occasionally put files somewhere besides the default folder. Usually they will want to put the file in a "standard" folder: their desktop, a device such as a zip drive, or a network share. Also they may have a bookmarked folder they commonly use (for example, a project folder). Thus we provide convenient (though not of primary prominence) access to saving files to the same list of locations as provided by the bookmarks list in the Open dialog. "Save in Folder" should contain the same items as the bookmarks list.
• Another operation most people will have to do some times is select the file type. This is less commonly needed by Windows users (the default is fine almost always), but Linux users will realistically have to save as, e.g. MS Word from time to time.
• Long term: it may not be possible to have programs specify icons for each file type with the current API, but it would be good to have this long term as it reinforces the mapping between file types and icons at the first point people encounter them, and increases the ease of recognition in selecting from different file types.
• Long term: Ctrl-Home should change Save In Folder to the Home folder.

Save As Dialog (expanded)

• A smaller but important set of users will want to save files into arbitrary locations. Also, "normal" people will occasionally need to do this (though it is not expected that most people will need this in everyday work). "Browse for other folders" is an expander that expands to provide full browsing capabilities, paralleling those of the Open dialog.
• Wasn't able to convince Glade to do this, but when "Browse for other folders" is expanded, "Save in Folder" should be insensitive as it duplicates the functionality of the bookmarks list.
• Long term: in the path widget, to the right of the last selected folder, put a [New Folder] button, using the stock "new" icon. This creates a new folder at the current location.