Indistinguishable from Jesse

I didn't manage to write down or even hear all of the suggestions that came up at today's design lunch, but these ideas appealed to me:

More options for file upload controls

We could attach a menu to each <input type="file">, containing commands like:

• Paste as a text file
• Take screenshot...
• Enter path...
• Choose file...

The "Paste" option should be able to accept text, images, and files.

The "Enter path..." option should support tab completion and tell you if the file doesn't exist. It could evolve into some kind of light, cross-platform file picker.

It would be really cool if this menu could include a list of files the user has touched recently. Both Windows and Mac OS X maintain global lists of "recent documents", and we could simply show items from these lists. Alternatively, we could use file system APIs to find out whenever a new file is created, but this is tricky because we want to include files that users created manually (e.g. by saving them in an other application or by specifying them as a target on a command line) but not files that are created in the background (e.g. logs and caches).

This could be a pane instead of a normal menu, creating room for previews (e.g. for "Paste") and hints like "or you can drag files here".

Remember file upload forms

When a form contains only a file upload control, Firefox could offer to let users upload additional files without visiting the page that contains the form:

• Add an icon to the Firefox toolbar or the Mac OS X Dock that functions as a drop target.
• Add to the menu that appears when you right-click a file in Explorer or Finder.
• Add to the "Send To" menu on Windows.
• Create a special folder, where all files saved to that folder get uploaded. The site's favicon could be used as a badge making the folder look special.
• Add to the Services menu on Mac. This would let users add keyboard shortcuts to other applications to perform actions involving web sites!
• Add a shell command, allowing power users to do things like "flickr *.png" or "hg diff | pastebin".

This approach may be limited by the fact that the destination is often not a service in general, but a specific person or bug report or forum thread.

Let sites offer files

More and more of users' data is in the cloud, and this includes the things they might want to "upload" to other sites. Let users move data from one site to another without dealing with the file system.

• Whenever a site offers a download, instead of making the user pick a location, just put it in a temporary location represented as a "shelf". Once the file is on the shelf, it can be dragged to Finder or to another web site.
• Let sites offer draggable objects that represent files, so users can drag from the site directly, skipping the "shelf" step.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Mozilla, User Interfaces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.