On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 05:29:10PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 12:11 -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
Actually, there are two independent issues here:
- How paths are presented to the user This is user preference, and should be a registry setting
Yeah. It'd be nice to improve this, but we're limited by the dumb design of the open dialog API. We can't change its UI design very much and we can't use native file dialogs because apps can customise them. Unless we're OK with apps having a mix of native and win32 dialogs of course.
There's also the confusion from selecting /home/mike/Foo.doc in the open dialog but having the title bar say X:\foo.doc or whatever.
This is why it's a user preference. But this, mind you, has nothing to do with a native dialog. This preference would control the behaviour of *our* dialog. Our vs. native dialog is a completely different setting, and it's a app-specific one, as noted below.
- How paths are presented to the app This is something that needs to be per app. One way to do it would be to follow Miscrosoft and ornate apps somehow (the same they do for themable apps) via some sort of manifest that would request Unix paths instead of DOS ones. Same mechanism could be used for other things, like requesting native open dialogs instead of ours, etc.
Mmmm, the manifest thing seems horribly complicated to me. Seems like a use of XML just for the sake of it. When extending win32 we don't have to follow their dubious design decisions (one reason why I'm not keen on magic PIDLs and such).
I have no idea how their manifest looks like, be it XML or not, but I find the idea OK. Being an app specific setting, it should be bound to the application somehow. And being able to "stamp" the app with ceratin settings sounds better then inveting all sorts of apps, for things that are truly app global.