Opinion: Preferred Applications & Removable Drives and Media

[Andrew Farris]

Mark wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I would like to know the developers opinion about the double preferred
> applications.
> 
> You have:
> "Preferred Applications" which does:
> - Internet
> - - Web Browser
> - - Mail Client
> - Multimedia
> - - Multimedia Player
> - System
> - - Terminal Emulator
> - Accessibility
> - - Visual
> - - Mobility
> 
> And you have:
> "Removable Drives and Media" which does:
> - Storage
> - - Rem. Storage
> - - Blanc CD and DVD
> - Multimedia
> - - Audio CD discs
> - - Video DVD discs
> - - Portable Music players
> - Cameras
> O well.. you get the point till here.
> 
> Now what i mean is that those 2 programs each manage there own
> preferred applications which is really confusion. I just spend a few
> hours to find out where to change the Autoplay for DVD's (and i'm
> close to a advanced linux/fedora user) which was set at totem and i
> wanted to have mplayer.
> 
> My idea would be to drop the 2 existing applications completely and
> create 1 new application to handle the preferred applications for all
> programs (internet) and hardware (video dvd).
> 
> The advantages
> ---------------------
> - One place for all preferred applications
> - Preferred apps can be found where they are expected
> - way more user friendly (that's what fedora wants right?)
> And i'm sure there are a lot more

IMO it would be better to keep the two applications, and simply move the choice 
of DVD player to Preferred Applications (where it really belongs).  The 
removable media app would still decide *what to do* when the DVD is installed, 
i.e. play it or not, the preferred applications would decide what player to use.

The configurable 'autoplay' type behavior for removable media is not intuitively 
a 'preferred applications' issue, so combining those becomes almost as 
non-obvious as the current situation.

So the same change needs to be made for CDs, Cameras, etc, to separate what to 
do from what application will do it.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> <ajfarris at gmail.com>
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No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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