[Bf-committers] Bugtracker login does not work and two rendering bugs

[Douglas Toltzman]

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Alexander Ewering wrote:
> Can hardly be considered a bug. I find it totally annoying when
> applications think they're smarter than me and deliberately RENAME
> the files I create with them to something DIFFERENT than what I
> told them.
> 
> There may be situation where I *want* the filename to be "foo", and
> not "foo.jpg".

Just yesterday, I was exporting an image from Apple's Preview application
as a TIFF, and I tried to change the file extension to ".tif".  A popup
appeared, telling me that the extension wasn't valid.  My options were
to have the application change it to ".tiff", append ".tiff" after my
extension, or cancel the operation!  It's even more audacious on the Mac,
where file extensions aren't even required.  Of course, I just let it save
it as .tiff and renamed the file, but it is a little offensive.  I can
forgive an application like "Preview", but I'd find such hand-holding to
be unacceptable in an application that targeted a professional user base.

I'd vote for a user-friendly approach without enforcing a specific policy.
A checkbox for appending the extension might be a friendly option.  It
surely couldn't hurt to offer a ".png" in the file name textbox as a
suggestion.  The user can prepend their name, or wipe it out and start
over.  Software should facilitate our work, without enforcing arbitrary
conventions.

Douglas Toltzman
Hubert, NC