Re: [Usability] UI-Review of ggv on Friday, July 16th at 19:00 UTC

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-08-10 at 07:50, Shmyrev wrote:
> >
> > Can we get the merging of ggv, gpdf and eog (ala Apple's "Preview", which
> is
> > used for print previews, document/image viewing, etc) back on the agenda,
> > perhaps for the next release? :-) There was some discussion about having a
> > united frontend last year, would be great to find out where this is at.
> >
> 
> I want to see dvi viewer integrated in such application. We have a nice gdvi
> rendering widget, that is not fully usable, but already can display dvi
> documents.
> 
> We had discussed this problem about a month ago with Martin Kretzschmar and
> the result was a decision, that it should be common shell for bonobo
> components like gpdf or ggv shell. The viewers can implement corresponding
> bonobo components and thus provide a way to render documents like pdf, ps or
> even djvu. Also there is possibility to improve code reuse by creating
> common library to implement such components with utility things.

Does it really have to use bonobo in this way? I'm afraid we'll end up
with a shell that does almost nothing to help the components, and every
bonobo viewer reimplementing a lot of code, so it'll end up being
essentially two different apps embedded in the same window. 

We want to make it really feel like one app, that just happens to be
able to view several formats. As such, it should share the same user
interface and behaviour for things like: page previews in sidebar,
contents list, document properties dialog, preferences, page navigation
with mouse and keyboard, default page size setup, etc.

Its for sure possible to do this sort of integration between components
using Bonobo (by creating new corba interfaces and stuff), but it
strikes me as a lot of work for little gain. The more traditional
approach of just integrating the ggv and gpdf codebases using some
shared code for the user interface, and two backends with a common C
interface for extracting document info and rendering the document to a
widget sounds much easier to me. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a globe-trotting crooked inventor with nothing left to lose. She's an 
elegant blonde fairy princess with only herself to blame. They fight crime!