I recently came up with an idea of what could be a nice/useful detail for a desktop, so I thought I'd throw the idea here (not sure if the idea is original/unexplored, or even if it has been already done).
Anyway, it's related to the Recent Documents, or rather, the Recently Used Files in the applications. The idea is quite simple; instead of (or in addition to) having just one Recent Documents in the "Places" menu, each particular menu item for an application could/should have a sub- menu with the recent documents. Also, and I think this is the nicer part of my idea, *the launchers* should have a sub-menu as soon as there are documents recently used for the corresponding application. If the user clicks on the launcher itself, then the application opens as usual (e.g., with a blank document); if the user clicks on the little arrow next to the launcher (the "drop-down" arrow), then the Recent Documents list opens underneath the icon. I put two silly images to illustrate the idea. This is what the Panel, with an OpenOffice Writer launcher, would look like when I have not opened any Writer documents: http://www.mochima.com/tmp/gnome-launcher_no_recent_docs.png Then, as the user opens/saves Writer documents, the launcher would now look like this: http://www.mochima.com/tmp/gnome-launcher_with_recent_docs.png (notice that this one is what it looks like *when the user clicks on the little arrow* at the right bottom corner of the launcher icon). The launcher could have an effect like the toolbar buttons (what I'm describing here is typically done with toolbar icons --- for instance, the "New Document" icon in OpenOffice has a drop-down selection of Writer / Calc / Presentation / etc.), where the button gets a "double outline" to make it obvious that we want the drop-down list. Of course, for the menus I didn't create an image --- it is quite obvious for the menus --- the menu item corresponding to the application gets a sub-menu with its related recent documents; and it is obvious for the user what it means and what to do about it. Does it sound like an interesting and implementable idea? Carlos -- _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
