[haiku-bugs] Re: [Haiku] #14277: Shortcuts: Improve interface
- From: "Haiku" <trac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipients: ;
- Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:55:37 -0000
#14277: Shortcuts: Improve interface
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Reporter: Janus | Owner: leavengood
Type: enhancement | Status: assigned
Priority: normal | Milestone: Unscheduled
Component: Preferences/Shortcuts | Version: R1/Development
Resolution: | Keywords:
Blocked By: | Blocking:
Has a Patch: 0 | Platform: All
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Comment (by pulkomandy):
Replying to [comment:17 humdinger]:
And one UI complain: I think the textfield/browse UI is a bad idea. No
one is going to edit application paths manually.
The textfield is handy if you let the user specify parameters for the
launched app. It also makes it easy to copy to clipboard, in case the user
wants to share the info or plans to use it in a script etc., or to quickly
adjust a path (maybe you renamed a volume or want to redirect to another
version).
I would still use the browse button and not allow the user to set an
invalid path by careless hand editing. The text field just makes things
more confusing.
Of course, most people will use the Browse... button, so it's not an
afterthought, but the main means of setting the app. The text field serves
to inform e.g. which version of an app it's pointing to (for example the
app from the HPKG or the debug-build you did).
The browse button can open the directory with the file selected as a
filepanel. This is much more handy than a path that you can only paste to
Terminal with the default Tracker settings (otherwise you could enable the
location bar in Tracker and copypaste the location here, carefully
removing the app name itself from it).
We can have the app name and icon shown, and double clicking that opens
the relevant Tracker window. Why would you bother with showing and
allowing to manually edit the path for this?
Again, this is what Backgrounds does, it allows you to reach the recently
used files, or to browse for more. Just what we need here too, and it's
easier to locate apps (they are all in /boot/apps) than to locate
backgrounds (they are pretty much anywhere in your home dir)
Please use a popup menu as done in the Background preferences, which
allows quick access to known values and opening a filepanel if needed.
This is a good approach if you'll be using the same couple of common
locations (like home, desktop, downloads...), but it's less useful for a
one-off selection of a specific app.
Looking at the MacOS screenshot above, it doesn't even have a browse
button. It has a preset list.
I think the browse button for looking for apps is not great. The user
should not need to know where the apps are stored. Ideally we would just
use a list like in "open with" when we need to list applications, except
here we are probably more interested in scripts and command line tools.
But if the point is essentially running custom scripts, maybe Shortcuts
should manage these completely. You drop them in a "shortcuts" directory
somewhere in your settings dir and maybe the app offers to edit them from
the UI. And this also makes more sense for sharing your nice shortcuts
than painfully copypasting them, one by one, from a small textfield.
The textfield is clumsy for picking an app, the browse button will not
know what to do if the previous text field content had arguments to the
app, should these be preserved? And the text field will be too small for
editing the full path and no one wants to be using full paths here - they
will just want to do the same thing they do in Terminal.
I think we should be able to do something like htis based on
"getsuites".
The issues I can see with "getsuites": Most apps don't have those
implemented and you just cannot fix them all. Also, the app has to be
running to query it.
The app has to be running for the shortcut itself to do anything as well.
Are we going to use this for anything else than servers anyway? Are there
use cases for automating things in regular apps from Shortcuts? (I can
imagine something like autohotkey, but I'm not sure Shortcuts is the right
place for it?)
As for apps not implementing this yet, well, let's fix that. If they don't
support this, how are users supposed to discover what messages they can
send? Check out the app sourcecode?
--
Ticket URL: <
https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/14277#comment:19>
Haiku <
https://dev.haiku-os.org>
The Haiku operating system.
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