User Centered

The good thing about PDF files on the internet is... you can have them offline anytime you want- they are stored on your computer and ready to rock.

The bad thing about PDF files is... wait for it... that's right, they are stored on your computer and ready... always there, long after you've forgotten about them. They are the "King Sized" Burger King cup on the shoulder of the highways that make up our files sytems.

Observe- this is just a small sampling of pdfs I've picked up from browsing- you'll see some have been downloaded several times. Remembering the page I got a piece of information from is easier than remembering if and where I downloaded it to. Sometimes, I don't even remember *how* I consume the information- "did the website have a product page describing the product? Or did I download a PDF brochure?" -we don't think about that stuff- we go to page, click "product description" and consume our information, leading to a littered file system on our local machines.

Then, as you can see, VERY FEW of these files have names that make any sense as I go back through to find ones I can delete.

But this post has nothing to do really with PDFs, they are just the representative whipping boy. This is about browsers. Some might be more organized than I- when you download a PDF, you make the determination then if it's a keeper or not, and put it in a temp folder or something... but that's a serious detractor at the task at hand. I'd like to simply check a box at download or something that says "temporary" that would delete the file on browser exit. I'm not sure how FireFox handles this, but Opera almost has the solution- there's a "transfers" (re: download) panel that shows all the files you've downloaded. It would be nice to delete them (from the OS) right there. Maybe a "cleanup" button or just allow us to hit the 'ol delete button. As it is now, delete just removes it from the list,not the file system, but you can right click and get the windows context menu and delete it (one file at a time) that way. Seems like strange behavior.