[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Crash recovery dialog

[Mirek M.]

Hi everyone,

On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Stefan Knorr <heinzlesspam at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Kendy, Michael,
>
> Additional to the problems you both describe (not very context-aware,
> recovers read-only documents, recovers even empty documents), one of the
> more depressing things is how much waiting [1] it often takes to get
> through the wizard (or clickery to finish it prematurely).
>

I agree.

>
> One hopefully simple way to get rid of the assistant on the start of
> LibreOffice would be to use one of our shiny new info bars instead,
> asking something like
> "LibreOffice seems to have crashed the last time you used it. Would you
> like to recover the 2 documents you had open? [Recover] [Close]"


> Then simply open the two documents and you've gotten rid of the whole
> wizard...
>

Here I disagree.
This goes against the specification at
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Infobar in a few ways:
a) The infobar isn't related to the current document. Instead, it's related
to the application in general.
b) There's no way to get back to the choice once you've closed the infobar
(at least you didn't describe one).

a) is bad, because it breaks ux-natural-mapping and ux-interruption.
Consider this scenario: A translator opens several files they're working
on. Either an infobar is shown on all of them, or just on the first one
opened. In case it's the former, the user has to dismiss or recover these
files in all of the windows. In case it's the latter, the user has to be in
the right window to recover files that have nothing to do with the document
in the window. The association is arbitrary.
And in any case, the files to be recovered might have nothing to do with
the currently open file(s), so being forced to deal with an infobar is
unnecessary interruption.

b) is bad, because if you accidentally choose "Close", you don't know how
to get back to recovery and you lose your data.


So, for now, I would opt for Kendy's solution.

Some other things we could do better about the crash recovery ... partly
> stolen from your two mails (in order of perceived increasing hardness):
>
> * Detect empty (i.e. equal to the default template) and read-only
> documents and don't even save those for recovering.
>
> * Detect when the last auto-saved document is the same as the user-saved
> one.
>
> * When a document is not recovered after the first restart, offer the
> user to recover the specific file again when he is opening it.
>
> * Write incremental diffs as auto-save files, not always the complete
> file.
>
> * Write auto-save files asynchronously.
>
> * It should save more often. Gmail saves every single keystroke I make,
> ~so should LibreOffice. Maybe there is a solution where you'd have a
> helper process (that wouldn't go down with LibreOffice) that saves any
> changes to RAM first and to disk every two minutes or when LibreOffice
> crashes (this wouldn't help enough with power outages, though).


Agree on all of these.
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