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Comment by jmitcheson | Hacker News Reader

The combinations of web intents and Google's GDrive implementation / Dropbox seem interesting. I could link a file with a web intent, you use your Chrome App or similar to edit it, save it back to your Dropbox / drive - then your editor makes you another link which you can share with others to start the process over again.

When you think about it this seems to align well with the original philosophies of the web. Exciting times.

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The key is that it decouples the services, we won't have to wait for service x to implement the api of service y. Instead you just say implement this intent and then boom you can use any service that supports that intent.

This is huge for web apps, and is a huge blow for local file system fans.

So what if I have 5 apps that can edit the file type. Do I have to choose which app I want to use, every time? That is the way it works on Android, and it is bad UX.

It depends. The UI in Chrome doesn't yet have a defaulting mechanism, but the intention is to have this so that you can set your preferred app to use and have it work seamlessly.

Defaulting is not enough. It has to be easy to switch to another. On my Android phone I have 5 web browsers installed. If I add a bookmark to the homescreen it asks me which web browser I want to use to open it. Every time I click on it.

I could, as you suggest, set a default, but if I do that then that browser owns all of my links and the only way to change it is to hunt down the setting to disable the default (which is buried in the settings UI I suppose).

So I live with the (extreme annoyance) of clicking on a link within the browser that then prompts me which browser I'd like to use to open it.

Getting the UX right on this is by far the most important part of the project.

I'm annoyed by the exact same thing. Chrome Beta is good, but it is still a beta. For some sites, I've found the built-in browser to be better. A proper UX solution, in my opinion, would be using a 3-4 seconds dialog ("Opening with Chrome") with a Change button. That way, you can change the default app at the moment you notice it. Of course, it comes with a delay, so it wouldn't work well for others.

A 3-4 second delay on every app launch? No way.

Replacing the currently indefinite delay with a 3-4 second one sounds like an improvement.

That only works if you launch the wrong app every time. Extremely unlikely.

I'd rather see a long tap bring up options related to a shortcut.

It's less discoverable than a delay, but it is also far less annoying in the common case.

I too agree with this. Though web intents is really good and necessity for web but UX, by far, is the key for this. Just on the side note - there will be lots of other services (like translate etc) which would be intentified, and anything other than providing in-line UX will kill intuitiveness.

I don't think we disagree with the need for a strong user experience, and this will happen over time as everyone learns how users, developers and publishers use the system.

We do have an inline disposition, but it is not as in-page inline as I think you are suggesting, and even then it is up to the service how it chooses to be opened.

> and this will happen over time as everyone learns how users, developers and publishers use the system.

That right there says to me that UX is not the focus and it absolutely should be. Don't ship a feature that you haven't figured out the UX for.

UX is the focus, however we will still learn what happens as more users use it.

Surely this depends on the browser, rather than the mechanism in HTML itself?

This is why I can't wait for more integrated speech/command based interfaces. It is great for infrequently used commands: "change this icon to open with safari." Only someone highly experienced with the details of a UI are going to be able to change settings faster than they can say them.

No offense but your an edge case. Most users will have only 1 main browser they use.

Well Google itself ships two browsers-- Browser and Chrome, and Chrome is default almost nowhere, so it is an issue for almost every Google target user.

This is a problem every major desktop OS solved years ago, by making the settings in a convenient and readily-accessible place, both for one-time overrides and changing the defaults (right-click -> Open With or similar). Hopefully the folks implementing this come up with something similarly usable.

> On my Android phone I have 5 web browsers installed.

For what percentage of users is this likely to be a concern?

I get that popup whenever a file can be handled by multiple apps (youtube links: browser or native app, images: browser or some editor/viewer, etc.).

It happens occasionally to me and I'm not a smartphone "power user".

I would think that for a set of common intents, most users have more than 1 app that can handle it. It is bad UX to ask every time, and it's also bad UX to force them to choose 1 forever. I don't know what the solution is.

I would imagine this would work somewhat similarly to Android, so you get a list of intent providers you have, and a way to make one the default:

http://android-er.blogspot.de/2011/03/pick-file-using-intent...

It's not only the intention, code is being written as we speak :)

It's so much worse in iOS- to share a picture on Facebook you need to close the camera, open up FB, then find the file and upload it.

After switching from Android to an iPhone, I miss the powerful User Experience that Android provides.

This is one of the use-cases I am pushing.

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