Re: GEP-2 Theme Sets (aka Metathemer)

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 10:00:28AM -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 07:01, textshell neutronstar dyndns org wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 11:45:14AM +0000, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > > Spacebar could "apply" (through its usual meaning of "activate item), 
> > > so you would not have to navigate to/click on an 
> > > "Apply" button either, though we might include one to make the 
> > > non-instant-apply nature of the list visually explicit.
> > > 
> > 
> > Well even if I'm repeating my thought: What would be wrong with a "full 
> > size" preview that shows the theme the mouse is currently over? For key 
> > nav we could use the same UI as for listboxes with multiple selections 
> > that way even keynav users can easyly preview without applying all the 
> > theme to the whole UI.
> > 
> > Just tell me why this can't/shouldn't be done and I shut up... But i hope 
> > this could improve the UI.
> 
> Is such a feature used anywhere else in GNOME?

Not exactly as this but I think the idea behind tooltips is quite similar it's
just for things bigger that just a line of text. (We *could* as well use
tooltips but maybe that i a bit of abuse).

>  It might be visually
> disconcerting to some users to have the "preview" change on mouse-over,
> just as many users prefer click-to-focus over mouser-over-focus in their
> WM.  (such as me. ~,^ )

Well I'm just that kind of person ;-) I prefer click-to-focus and double click to
open(in file managers). But as no further interaction with the selections aside
from preview and select is possible i think this shouldn't be a big problem.

> 
> You'd also have to, in order to make the preview change be quick and not
> sluggish/jerky on many machines, pre-load all the preview images, which
> could drastically increase load time for the capplet, and still be slow
> on low-memory machines;

I don't see why we need to preload the previews. At least with pixmap based
previews my parents P133 has no trouble to load moderatly(say 400x300) sized
images without much delay. Modern (and some years old) harddisks are fast.
With previews that really use the theme (i.e. not pixmap based) I'm not
competent to say how much time it takes to get the preview on the screen,
but it would be quite nice if that would work (at least on high performant
machines), too.

> there's a reason  fancy websites that do that
> kind of stuff often have a low-power/non-fancy version of the same
> data.  ;-)

Old browsers, slow internet links, latency in network operations...

I think this discussion would need some hard facts, maybe someone (or even me)
should implement a test program to see how it works out in reallity.


Martin H.