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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: [Idea]Context Sensitive file dialog
From:       Frank Osterfeld <frank.osterfeld () gmx ! de>
Date:       2006-09-30 21:29:25
Message-ID: 200609302329.40989.frank.osterfeld () gmx ! de
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On Saturday 30 September 2006 15:41, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> I have a idea for a context-sensitive file dialog for KDE. I don't know if
> anyone has had this before. Basically when a user downloads or saves a file
> the KIO system can analyse the file metadata to decide what should be the
> default location to specify in the save dialog. For example for
> mp3/ogg/other audio files it could be ~/Music, for OO.o/KOffice files
> ~/Documents and stuff like that. And of course the user could set his own
> custom directories from the control center.
> What do you think?

In general, it would be cool to save time spent navigating through folder 
hierarchies by suggesting the "right folder" to the user. However, to get 
it "right" is very hard. Mimetype-based folders might work in certain cases 
like with music files, but in many other cases it won't. For me personally it 
wouldn't make much sense. mimetypes of files are mostly orthogonal to the 
categories I use to archive them. 
Other advanced ideas would be to play with text similarity and the like (and 
Mandriva's Nepomuk integration will probably also experiment with using 
metadata for classifiying items) to find the right folder for a file. 
However, this all is highly experimental and should be well tested until 
turned on by default (and before being tested, it must be implemented :P ). 

Also I think the interface should only _suggest_ folders (e.g. in a list), not 
entering dirs without interaction. If the system unpredictably jumps between 
folders without asking it becomes really annoying.

I propose to add some relatively generic interface for such suggestions so 
that interested developers can plug in and test their approaches. Do you want 
to work on a context-sensitive file dialog yourself?
I am CCing Sebastian from Nepomuk, maybe this integration is already on his 
agenda.

Regards,

Frank

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