Re: gnome-utils branched for GNOME 2.16

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Bryan;

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 11:49 -0400, Bryan Clark wrote:

> > That would be a welcome addition, yes. However, please make it a global
> > option in the dialog instead of the double timeout widgets in Gimp's 2.2
> > series...

> Wow, it's gnome-utils branch deja vu all over again! [1] :)

Indeed. :-)

Last time the thread died out pretty quickly, and since I had to push
back the UI work on the screenshot app, I'd like to nail it down for
real this time.

The first, obvious transition is to a save dialog window with the same
behaviour of the GtkFileChooserDialog, to use the tab completion + full
path editing of the destination file; the currently used layout (preview
+ save stuff + (save, cancel, help) buttons can be bolted without much
effort on a GtkDialog with an embedded GtkFileChooserWidget in save
mode.  This is the structural change that I have in mind at the moment.
Using a vertical layout might be the next move - I think there's too
much wasted screen real estate in the current dialog.

> I think it's time to take a couple steps back from this and talk about 
> the experience you're expecting to enable with the screenshot app.  
> We're starting to wind down the hole of adding in features and I'm not 
> sure where we're going with it.  I'm pretty sure I designed the current 
> screenshot dialog last year or so with jrb and our goal was to let you 
> quickly see the preview of your screenshot, the file name and the 
> directory that file would be saved to.  The use case was something like 
> shaunm or other people who are taking a number of screenshots of 
> different windows and the whole desktop and I think we nailed that 
> pretty well.

Yep, and it works well - also, having drag and drop support makes the
"edit in GIMP button" feature kind of a moot point: I can drag the
preview on GIMP and have it ready to be edited.  This might pose a
problem for the a11y people, though.

> Of course this addition is only for the the application menu launch 
> which I think is a nice trick to help out new people and advanced 
> users.  However on my long drive to work this morning I was wondering if 
> we couldn't just take individual screenshots of the applications as well 
> as a whole screenshot all at once.  Doesn't composite or something allow 
> this?  I mean we don't have flying cars yet in 2006, but I was hoping we 
> could at least get this little improvement.  And I think it would help 
> everyone (first time screenshotters, plus advance types) if the 
> screenshot dialog just gave me a screenshot of the whole desktop plus 
> individual screenshots of each application.  Maybe it allows me to 
> select which one I'd like to save?

This could be a nice idea.

I'll open a bug to block on, with a dump of the UI ideas of the thread,
but I'd like more comments on it; I'll also blog about it.

> [3]  I'm pretty sure there's a bug somewhere I got CC'd on about opening 
> screenshots directly into GIMP, I feel like this is the wrong place for 
> that.  Instead I think we could do something like tagging a screenshot 
> with 'screenshot' category and GIMP should be aware of new screenshots 
> created when I go to use it (just an idea).

This is part of the recent files support that I'd like to add to the
screenshot app now that we have the API in GTK+; adding a custom
"Screenshot" when saving a screenshot is not a big deal.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net