[haiku-development] Re: The ways of Reboot. Acknowledge or not?

Henri Vettenranta schrieb:

On Thursday 30 April 2009 12:15:48 Fredrik Holmqvist wrote:

With the warning (think of a popup clip) it will be this on shutdown:
"Hey I'm your email, do you really want to save?"
"Hey I'm your editor, do you really want to save?"
"Hey I'm Firefox, do you really want to close those tabs?"
....
This makes me think, maybe we could have a single dialog with a list of the applications that have unsaved data. Next to the name of each application would be a save button, unless the application has such complex needs that they can't be supported by a single hook. Each application could also be expandable to show the documents of that application. Another option would be to show just the documents instead of applications if this fits the Haiku philosophy better, but in this case document-less applications would become a problem (such as Firefox with its tab list).
After pressing the save button the document, or all the documents open in one application, will be saved and will disappear from the list; after saving all the documents in an application, it will disappear. If the user directly interacts with the application (quits it or saves the data from inside it), the list will also be updated. At the bottom of the dialog you could have buttons called "Cancel", "Save all and Shutdown", and "Discard all and Shutdown", where Shutdown could be replaced with the actual action ("Reboot" or "Power Off").
Then again, the API changes required for this may be so large that this would better fit in the Glass Elevator discussions.
There is a number of things that applications can do wrong in this situation, but instead of this dialog, I'd rather like all applications behave well:
1) Automatically switch the current workspace to where the document window is displayed. Until a couple month ago, Pe did this wrong for example. A lot of other apps may still do this wrong.
2) If the documents are displayed in tabs, make sure the respective tab is showing. This is important in WonderBrush for example (well, no tabs, but a list).
If both of these points are implemented, it will make sure that I get to see the context of the document, and even better than a preview, I get the real thing. All of this helps me to decide if I still wanted to save that document or not.
On top of these arguments, what you propose takes a lot of work and introduces another protocol that applications must follow. So I don't like this idea. Ubuntu was recently updated to implement something in this direction. You get a dialog listing applications that still have unsaved documents, I think they even list the documents individually. Unfortunately, they forgot to also let you switch workspaces still, to actually save your documents, should they be on another workspace (!) and the only option in this dialog is to force quit the apps. In any case, from this experience I know that I want to see the actual document, not some indirection like this dialog that only adds work for app developers and Haiku developers. 

Best regards,
-Stephan

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