SpecEnhancedPreferredApps

Revision 2 as of 2007-01-08 21:41:20

Clear message

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Summary

This specification outlines how I feel the default (preferred) applications dialog should be.

Rationale

The current default applications dialog lets us choose our preferred apps for web browsing, email reading and terminal(-ing?), and I think it needs to be expanded.

There are many different filetypes with many different editors or viewers, and these need an easy way to choose the default application that they are used in. For example, there are filetypes such as pdf, torrent, txt and so on which have many different applications they can use.

Use cases

  • Fred is a new user who has downloaded the free software magazine as a pdf, and it instantly opens in Evince. This surprises Fred because he wanted it to load in his newly installed Adobe Acrobat reader. He is slightly miffed. No problem, Fred opens up the 'Preferred Applications' dialog in the aptly named Preferences menu and set pdf files to open with Acrobat. No problem.
  • Hubert is a windows and linux user, who has Microsoft Word installed through wine. One day he receives a letter as a .doc file. When he opens the file he is confused to see it open in OpenOffice and wants to make .doc files open in Word under wine. Using his inititive he trys to find somewhere where change it. After seconds he find the 'Preferred Applications' dialog and all is good.

Scope

This specification covers Ubuntu and Gnome.

Design

  • There should be another tab in 'Preferred Applications' to be used for assigning different mime types to different applications.
  • There should be a way to choose an application from the main 'Applications' menu, and also a button which lets the more advanced user find the program by finding the executable itself.

Summary

I am proposing simple, centralised way for users to choose what program they want to open their files.

Rationale

At the moment users have no central way to choose what program opens their files, I believe this would be a very powerful feature. This would be very usful to everyone, especially those new to Ubuntu.

Implementation

This shouldn't be too hard to implement, as (if I understand it correctly) all that the new dialog would need to do would be to read from and write to the mime type database, and then have a gtk frontend coded around it.


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