Re: GNOME online desktop - (some of the possible) next steps

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 10 Aug 2007, at 17:45, Bryan Clark wrote:
> I'll try to put together a mockup or two for a new background chooser
> that incorporates this.  Right now my current mockup could be called a
> mashup between the background chooser and the screensaver dialog as it
> has pieces of both.

I had a quick think about this during the week as well, as Alberto  
was bugging me :)  Trying to keep things as simple as possible, my  
first attempt was:
http://www.gnome.org/~calum/bg-feed.png

Background images that have come from a feed are just tagged with a  
little RSS emblem, sorted in with your local background images.   
Whenever you use a syndicated image as your background, it's cached  
locally for future use[1], at which point the feed emblem may  
disappear (or change?) to indicate that it's no longer a transient  
image that will disappear from the dialog at some point in the  
future.  Tooltip gives you more information about where the image  
came from:
http://www.gnome.org/~calum/bg-feed-tooltip.png

The new dropdown at the top just offers choices of things like  
"single background" (the current behaviour), "random from selected",  
"random from feeds", "random from all backgrounds".  The 'random'  
choices would change your background periodically.  No UI for setting  
the rate of change at the moment, but I'm sure that would be trivial :)

The 'Edit Feeds' button would open whatever centralised feed editor  
somebody might like to devise...

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] And/or its URL pushed to your online desktop background storage  
service :)
--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems