Empty "Create Document" menu

[Mikko Ohtamaa]

>
>
>
> You do not need to be a C programmer nor  do you need a computer
> science degree to open your home folder and see a folder named
> "Templates", wonderfully translated into the language you read. And
> you do know, as you just told me what directory it was yourself an
> email ago.


You mostly do need some kind of background information. If we look things
from the bigger perspective this is not like "fonts" - there are templates
used in web programming, macro recorders and so on and so on.... It does not
help that the templates folder is empty - if there were sample items the
clue would be obvious. My/your grandmother might not even know what a
template means, in computer sense. Also, Templates as a home folder level
item is giving a bit too much visibility for such a minor feature.


So here's the problem indicated here: it's not discoverable enough of
> a feature. So why don't we talk about why it's not discoverable, and
> try to solve that problem? We can add some documentation to point
> people here in Help, for example. This is a very good reason to file a
> bug, like this one I just filed for you:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558435


This is very good idea. The last item of the Create Document menu could be
"Customize document templates".

Users are unlikely to customize their templates even if they are given an
option to do so - there are some desktop tweakers, but they rarely present
the large user population. The users, like I, are also dumb lazy and giving
them easy life makes them happy. I still see it an attractive option to have
sane defaults in this folder - maybe we could create few items when we
create an Ubuntu desktop user as an example:

- OpenOffice doc, calc, presentation

- Text document

The behavior having multiple entries for the same file type like "OpenOffice
document", "ABIWord document" is bad. This menu should be tied to the file
type and then use the default application for this file type. Preferably
this could be configured from "Preferred applications." E.g. Windows has an
dialog to priorize applications targeting the same file types.



>
> They compete for time, from people like me and you, time in bugs, time
> in I/O, and on. They distract us from real issues, like one I pointed
> out. We have better ways to spend our time working on Nautilus. It's a
> very nasty solution to a very trivial problem, which is the entire
> point I was making.



-- 
Mikko Ohtamaa
www.redinnovation.com
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