@eboehnisch I agree with your points to not overload the UI, but on the other hand, there’s a design principle called ‘form follows function’, which - in software design - means you should be able to (intuitively) use the software made for it’s (desired) purpose.
Since DT is mainly about collecting documents, document-management features should ‘win’ over simplicity, because the main purpose of DT is ‘collecting and organizing documents’. The very nature of document-management software is, that every user has their own strategies and preferences, so finding a ‘sweet spot’ (heuristically) for everybody is a tough task.
In this case, however, I don’t see the problem: The ‘i’ pane at the bottom already lets you change various settings (e.g. ‘show hidden objects’ - which in my understanding is much less important than showing a file’s suffix, which is a hint on the file’s purpos, whereas ‘hidden’ is just a unrelated viewing preference.). So adding a line ‘Show file suffixes’ won’t clutter your UI at all, because you would add just one line to the list… and since the file-suffix is an important part of document management, there should be a way to make it visible.
@Greg_Jones I don’t agree with you at all:
- The file-type in DT for IOS is only shown on some document types.
- some show the same type (e.g.
.txt
and .md
),
- some show the same icon (e.g. ‘.png’, ‘jpg’ and scanned ‘.pdf’ )
- some show their type (but only pretty small and using medium-grey font-color, so they are really hard to read)
- some show their icon, but here’s a quick test for you (please don’t cheat ): How does an
Excel
-icon looks like? Or Numbers
? How quickly can you differentiate a Word
icon from a Pages
icon?
And then: how about this:
FileOne.doc
FileOne.xls
FileOne.pages
FileOne.numbers
?
All that being said, just please add a setting to show file-suffixes - they simplify things a lot.
And here’s just one more example out of my daily life: I quite often search (in Finder on the Mac) for e.g. ‘Sketch’ files I changed one week ago.’ For this very search I also use the file-suffix, because that’s what I want (no Sketch-plugins, -patterns, -libraries or whatever was created by Sketch, but only the design-files).
Sorry, this reply has gotten longer than expected, but I wanted to underline the importance (for me).