Re: Exciting GNOME?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Dave Ahlswede wrote:

> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 04:31:43 -0500
> From: Dave Ahlswede <mightyquinn letterboxes org>
> To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: Exciting GNOME?
>
> On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 09:11 +0100, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> > Jeff Waugh wrote:
> >
> > >More and more, I'm getting the balance of these two: The icons look good,
> > >but the colours are dull (which is somewhat on purpose, because we don't
> > >want to overwhelm the user, but they tend to come across very brown [1]).
> > >
> > >
> > yup, "brown" is the same comment I got... after asking it turned out
> > that the cause of this impression is not the whole icon theme, but just
> > the folder icon... what about making the folder icon more yellowish?
>
> As a slight counterproposal, could we perhaps offer folder icons in
> several basic colors, and have it selectable on a global, and then
> per-folder basis? (Possibly through the color/emblem selector) Perhaps
> the background color chosen for a folder could influence its icon
> color.).
>
> I know this is adding another preference, but picking a color seems
> relatively harmless. I envision a combobox at the bottom of the bottom
> of the icon theme selector that looks for gnome-fs-directory-<color>,
> and contains a list of all <color>s.
>
> Recolorable folders would be helpful for when you have a lot of folders
> (which seem to be the kind of icon that gets grouped together with other
> visually identical icons most often), and none of the available emblems
> seem quite right, or when you want to add distinction in addition to
> emblems, or are dealing with folders that have emblems assigned to them
> already (links, shared folders, nautilus-vcs controlled files).

I always liked being able to change the folder colour back when I was
using Mac OS Classic.  If I recall correctly you could also set any icon
you wanted for any file you liked, not just for shortcuts and such like
(it was in the Get Info dialog but it may have been more restricted than I
recall).  If you wanted to be really crazy you could automatically assign
the folder colour based on the folder contents, like a mood ring or
something (or like that lava lamp tool I read about which provided an
abstract view of system activity).  Okay so that last bit was crack but
coloured folders could be quite useful especially if the colours had some
kind of semantic meaning.

More recently I have seen thumbnailer programs (and windows XP i
think) that will take images/other files and superimpose thumbnails of
them on the parent folder.  Here's an example I grabbed thanks to google:
http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/winxpb2/graphics/screenshots/06_my_pictures.jpg

Certianly there is room for improvement here, I'd be surprised if the
Nautilus developers didn't already have some ideas in mind.

- Alan H.