Written by bogdan_5844 the 1 May 08 at 21:52.
Category: Accessibility.
Related project:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
Rationale
I don't know where I saw this (windows or mac machine)but I tought it was neat.
In the file browser,when right-clicking a document file,it had an option to preview,without opening the program needed(e.g. read an .odt or .doc file without opening Writer)by showing it in a side panel.I tought it was neat,and it could be adapted to photo and video/music files too :-)
I guess it is a bit hard,but I think it's neat to open a file without having to wait for the full-blown editor/player to load.
A security consideration to keep in mind is that many users do not seem to realize that 'preview' is still opening the file. If there is any exploit that one can trigger by opening the file, one can trigger it by previewing it as well.
The difficulty with doing this is one needs to embed comprehension for basically every file type into the browser. I personally think it would be a better idea to optimize the various editors/players so that they start quicker.
Google mail does something similar with e-mails by showing the first line of an e-mail before you decide whether to open it or not, similar to Ubuntu with sound files where we just rest the mouse over the file and it plays the first few seconds, the same thing could happen to text files and even video files.
It could be done by letting a little box popping out when the mouse is rested for a few seconds on the top of it, and the size of the box could be chosen by the user with a little menu when you right click on a file.