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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: WM: Grouping applications (GAI?)
From:       Evan Roberts <evanroberts () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-01-25 0:34:11
Message-ID: ac5df7040901241634q244b9695od9eabacdd854c7d4 () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Maciej Pilichowski wrote:
> On Thursday 22 January 2009 18:37:18 Evan Roberts wrote:
<snip>
>> only with a GAI will native applications
>> be able to compete with web apps in the future. At the moment they
>> are losing the battle due to the dominance of the web browser in
>> computer use.
>
> It is some kind of "press-fact" ("fact" that was created by newspaper,
> and it actually never existed) or there are some data in the
> background?
>

I am not one for empiricism, but I do believe that the increasing use
of web apps for mail and office documents is fairly well documented,
though this is mainly down to portability reasons not some kind of
fetish of the web browser.

>> No one wants to exit their web browser to check their
>> mail,
>
> a) weekend-users as I observed -- they are scared about complexity so
> they tend to have as little opened apps/tabs/etc as possible
> b) power-users -- they switch
>
>> so they use gmail rather than Kmail, google docs rather than
>> open office.
>
> I didn't notice. I know one person who uses gmail (via web) and google
> docs.
>

Ok, I got a bit carried away, exaggerating my own experiences than
stating what is real. It was never my intention to argue over how
people currently use their computers, or argue about current trends.
As I said, I'm not interested in usability empiricism.

I do believe that the germ of my point though is fundamentally correct:

The tabbed web browser is a better organizer of documents than any
desktop environment is an organizer of applications. You can open any
web page or web app document within a single web browser window, but
each native document tab has to be contained within its own
application. Tabs are better visually than the taskbar. A GAI would
put web documents and native ones on an even playing field in this
respect.

The URL bar is an extremely powerful means of opening documents and
navigating within them. I believe it should be adopted for desktop
applications as well. Though I'm not as keen as I was before and this
idea should probably be dropped from discussion if no one agrees. In
any case it would take to much effort to implement.

History and session tracking is pretty useful, and should also be
adopted universally. This implies though that applications would have
to adopt support for some kind of URL system as discussed above. I.E
applications give their name, favicon, current working document or
open dialog and inversely, would be able to open the particular item
of the address link. for example app://gwenview/music.jpg would launch
gwenview and open the music.jpg image inside your documents folder.

It is interesting to note that Gmail added support for URLs (/compose
etcetera) , not for technical reasons,it worked before without them,
but because people wanted (back/forward) navigation to work properly
and to be able to bookmark particular labels or navigation points.

This is the last I hope to say on the issue, as It looks as if I have
only confused and sidetracked the main issue. I am probably guilty of
thinking aloud (or rather - emailing) and getting carried away with
ideas I actually had many years ago.

The benefit of universal tab support though, or it's more advanced
form, GAI, I remain convinced.

Evan

> Cheers,
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> kde-usability@kde.org
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>
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