Re: GWorkspace next release (Was: Re: GWorkspace's Tabbed Shelf)

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 15:26 Uhr -0500 18.02.2005, Charles Philip Chan wrote:
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> On February 18, 2005 5:23 am, M. Uli Kusterer wrote:
>
> >    In my projects, I use a method that takes a filename and, if it
> >  exists, appends a number to the name (*before* the suffix). That way,
> >  I always get a unique name. GWorkspace may benefit from that. I could
> >  provide you with that code if it'd help.
>
> Yes, I have seen this is other software as well. However, I still think a
> dialog for naming is good. LiveSearch1.lsf doesn't really convey too much
> info as oppose to something like sales_reports_2005.lsf or
> tracks_by_the_the.lsf.

 Maybe we could combine the two? It should be possible to loop over 
the search criteria and generate a name from that, shouldn't it? IMHO 
it's always better to use sensible defaults and let the user change 
them the regular way, than adding yet another dialog window. E.g. if 
the search is:

        Suffix: TIFF
        Name contains: "Angel Boris"

then it could generate a name

        "TIFFs containing Angel Boris.lsf"

It's always nicer if the computer tries to do the right thing 
already, IMHO. And if it was wrong, it's easy to change the name. To 
make this algorithm work good, the app would probably internally have 
to assign an "importance" to each kind of search criterion, and maybe 
only use the three most important criteria to build the name from.

>  >   As to "hunting down" a folder or file: Does GNUstep do
> >  type-ahead-selection yet?
>
> I love type ahead selection. Unfortunately we don't have that yet.

It' not hard to do. Make the view become first responder, append any 
keypresses to an NSMutableString. After every keypress, look for an 
item whose name starts with that sequence and select it. If the 
previous keypress was longer than a certain time ago (one second or 
two), clear the string before inserting the new key.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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