Re: Introducing Photos

From: Adam Dingle <adam yorba org>
To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: Introducing Photos
Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 09:04:32 -0007

Debarshi,

hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.

Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below: to be a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting basic manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on. If the GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those goals, we're highly interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or improved to get there. Integration with GNOME has always been a top priority for us and we're open to prioritizing development tasks that core GNOME developers feel are important. If it's felt that some features in Shotwell are unnecessary for a basic photo program, we're also open to factoring those out of the base program into plugins. We have an active development team and an enthusiastic user community. I'd love to see us work together rather than embarking on separate efforts.

Hello everybody!

Around 10 days ago I started implementing Photos as laid out in these designs:
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Photos

The Git tree is at: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-photos

Currently the application does not do much other than showing a blank window,
but most of the underlying plumbing is in place and from here on I expect the
program to start becoming useful.

A guiding principle of mine has been to share as much of the UI code and the
basic structure of the application with Documents. Documents and Photos have
a lot in common, and even though one is not going to be a clone of the other,
it makes sense not to reinvent the wheel.

Why u no like _javascript_?!
--------------------------

I toyed with the idea of writing Photos in _javascript_. However, af ter spending
an evening fighting with a Python 3 / gobject-introspection based application
and failing to get anywhere, and the fact that I am not familiar with all the
ins and outs of GJS, I decided to stick with something that I know inside out.

Having said that, the custom widgets written for Documents are written in C,
so we just copy them over into the Photos tree. Also, the relevant widgets
from Eye of GNOME, if required.

This brings us to ...

Eye of GNOME, GThumb or Shotwell
--------------------------------

It is my understanding that Jon had discussions with the developers of these
applications, and for various reasons it was decided that writing something
from scratch is better. For EoG and GThumb the reason given was that their
maintainers did not have time to work on a major redesign, and for Shotwell it
was an architectural issue with the program.

Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenti ng something. :-)

Future plans
------------

At the moment I am not going to push Photos as a widely publicized feature for
GNOME 3.6, but I do expect it to be functional in a "preview release" sort of
way.

Will keep you informed as things unfold.

Happy hacking,
Debarshi