Ideas for Arora: the download location
I would like some intuitive way of choosing the download location in Arora.
From what I’ve seen:
- A lot of people just always use the desktop. Maybe just because it’s their browser default setting, but they adapted their behaviours to it. They want all their downloads to go straight to it.
- Some people use some “Downloads” directory the same way as the desktop. They don’t want to be worried about the download location each time but want to choose it once.
- A fairly small amout of users prefer choosing the download location each time.
I propose a Arora design that will suit all those people by staying, IMHO, intuitive.
If no default location is chosen, this dialog is shown (I have no idea if it’s easy to extend the QFileDialog to get something like that; otherwise, we might open some simple dialog after it for the first download):
By default, the “Always here” checkbox is unchecked, except for the first download (as it is the behaviour most people will expect).
The preferences pane would be changed to this (I’ll skip the handmade draft for a real mockup this time; you can thank me):
Edit: Here’s a new version, as some think that a checkbox is counter-intuitive. Please give your opinion in comments!
Edit 2: As Arora’s developers prefer to keep the native file dialogs (under Windows and Mac OS X), there are no hooks to implement the first download checkbox. Another (maybe better) solution could be to use this kind of dialog on the first download then:
It would be better to default to “Yes”, I guess.
4 Comments to “Ideas for Arora: the download location”
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The most important aspect is the first statement which is the ability to have Arora prompt the user each time a download occurs for the location. This option should definitely be provided. Comparing the two dialogs I asked my wife to explain the checkbox, she couldn’t tell me what would happen if you unchecked the checkbox, but she could explain to me what each radio button did. So my vote is for the second dialog.
The second version with the radio buttons is indeed more intuitive IMO. As for using a dialog instead of a checkbox for the first download, i believe the dialog to be a slightly better option; as a checkbox might remain unnoticed by some users.
The dialog better default to NO or have a slight 1-3 second timeout before the buttons become active, because it may accidentally receive an ENTER keypress event after the file save dialog.
Also considering general user stupidity having a default of YES might be undesirable.
Assuming your users are stupid is the road to unusable software. A default behavior of “choose each time” with the possibility to change it in Settings (using radio buttons) is fine for me.