Handling Projects and Files
Starting new Projects, renaming Projects, copying Projects, switching between Projects in the Open Movie Editor has always been a question that I liked to spend time on. I am not quite happy with the current solution implemented, so I am exploring different approaches. I could do what everyone else is doing, but I am not happy with that. Sure, this is what a lot of people are used to, but just because it is common doesn’t mean that it is good. 
So, here is how Project, or probably better Document Management is done in Open Office Writer:
If you open the Program, write some stuff and close the Programm, the following happens:
If you select “Save”, there are two things that could happen. In Case #1, you started a new Document, and now you need to save it using the file selector in the next image. In Case #2 the file already had a filename, and it is saved silently. This poses the question whether the dialog before was necessary anyways, and why it wasn’t just saved silently without asking? Sure, but what if you really wanted to get rid of what you had written? Well, I think the default should be to do what is most likely, and to keep the questions as few as possible.
The file selector is an ugly monster, and I am not going to comment on its design.
But what happens if you enter a filename of a file that is already there on the disk? A case that is probably unlikely, but the dialog that shows the warning somehow implies that even if it happens that accident is about as likely as intention:
It is an interesting problem, and there are several solutions. It is even possible that different situations would need a different behaviour, which on the other hand violates the rule of consistency.
For Example, when editing a Document or a Movie Project, it is likely that you do not want to overwrite other files, because well, the file is a single entity of original work, and what would you want to overwrite anyways.
On the other hand, if you are rendering a Movie Project to a Video File, it is quite likely that you want to overwrite an older revision of that rendering, because you made some slight adjustments to the project, which could happen quite often.
So, would you implement the same solution for those very different cases, for the sake of consistency?
One solution for a place where overwriting is unlikely and probably undesired would be the following mockup dialog:
Advantage: Suggests the user to do the right thing and not overwrite any precious files.
A quite different Problem is the one of opening and finding Projects and Files that already exist, but I guess I will discuss that another time.
btw. In the Open Movie Editor saving is always implicit, except for the “Save As” Command, which essentially creates a copy of an existing Project, the menu only has two entries related to Project handling:
And the “Save As” Dialog looks like this:
Have fun,
Cheers
-Richard
PS.: Read the Humanized Weblog
Tags Development, Open Movie Editor
February 18th, 2008 at 7:54
Hi Richard,
You can read a post about OME here at Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4353397#post4353397