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gristlabs / grist-desktop

Desktop Grist, packaged with Electron
Apache License 2.0
166 stars 7 forks source link

Does not work if you disallow ~/Documents access #25

Closed fulldecent closed 1 month ago

fulldecent commented 7 months ago

When you first open grist-electron.app on macOS, a popup immediately and with no context asks if you want to grant this application full access to your files in ~/Documents.

I selected no. Because I'm just evaluating for now, and I can save files elsewhere.

You are allowed to start editing files.

Then after a few seconds the app becomes unusable and you get errors all over. Also, clicking the "report a problem" button from there fails.

Screenshot 2024-03-14 at 12 01 37 Screenshot 2024-03-14 at 12 01 33

This has been my first experience with the app so far.

I'm new, checking this out for the first time, I'm excited about Grist, so hopefully, this first 60 seconds of experience with the app can be improved.

Suggestions

  1. If access to ~/Documents is absolutely required for the app to function, (e.g. it is going to make a bunch of huge hidden files somewhere that I'll forget about) then:
    1. clearly explain this to the customer BEFORE they get the permissions popup box.
    2. if permission is denied, detect this, then explain to the customer how they can change their mind if they clicked NO
  2. Remove the requirement to access ~/Documents. When creating a new file in the Electron app, allow the customer to select their own file path wherever they want. Do not create hidden, automatically located magic files.
  3. Fix the report a problem button.
  4. If the report a problem button is broken, instead show a hyperlink to a website to report a problem using a browser.
fulldecent commented 6 months ago

Also I want to say that I absolutely love how Grist is doing local and web-based SQLite database/spreadsheets with the same code. Super cool, and it's like the year 2100.