9

A common scenario is for the user to download a .zip (or another archive type) from a web page and then unzip it somewhere to access the archives contents. Currently, this is a cumbersome process and requires a fair bit of experience of using KDE. The current common ways to do this are:

- The user goes to a website and clicks a .zip link to download.
- Currently, the user can either choose between
1. Save the archive: they pick a directory, click save, then they have to open dolphin, navigate to the download (I find novice users tend not to be able to find files they've downloaded as they don't take note of the save directory), right-click the archive, then click "extract", then enter the extracted folder. This process requires a lot of knowledge about using KDE.
2. Open in Ark: this requires you to select the "extract all" operation and select a directory. There is an option here to "open in destination folder". Unfortunately, the Ark interface has a huge number of options; this can be very confusing when all you want to do is unzip the whole archive (which is easily the most common use case). Novices are also tempted here to open files while they are archived, which causes problems.

My idea to streamline this common use case is to present to the following interface:

1. The user goes to a website and clicks a .zip link to download.
2. The user is prompted with: "The file you are about to download contains a collection of other files. Do you want to A) just save this file B) extract the contents of this file?". "Open in Ark" can be a hidden (i.e. press a "advanced>>" button to reveal) advanced option.
3. If B is chosen, the user is asked for a destination directory D and is given a checkbox option to "open this directory after extraction".
4. The system then saves the file to a temporary directory, extracts it to D and optionally opens D in dolphin after.

This approach requires significantly less work (e.g. clicking, selecting, opening things) and is much easier for a novice (they don't need to know about how to use the Ark interface, they told that they probably want what's inside the archive, they don't have the task of finding the archive and working out how to extract it).

The easiest way to implement this I think would be to add a "--download-extracted-file" option to Ark that would display the above interface.

No comments anyone?