Re: Thoughts on the collection view

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

On Sun, 2002-11-03 at 05:16, Jens Finke wrote:
> Hi Dave,
> 
> thanks for testing the collection view.
> 
> On 14 Oct 2002, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> > 1. It would be nice if the nautilus collection view was a split screen
> > view, the bottom showing icons of all the images in the dir and the top
> > a view of the currently selected icon. This feature really makes the
> > winxp photo view really useful, and I'd like to see it part of eog (I
> > also suspect that this feature is one of the reasons people seem to like
> > gthumb). Without such a feature, a simple icon view doesn't really
> > provide much beyond the nautilus icon view (exception is the really cool
> > fullscreen).
> 
> You are right. This isn't there just because no one done it yet.

Another thing you might want to consider is talking to the nautilus
maintainers about having this put in nautilus directly so that you can
use the nautilus icon container (which is a little nicer imo, it kind of
sucks though that you can't depend on libnautilus-private out of process
:( ). Perhaps you could just cut and paste the icon container code, i
think gthumb does this. oh if only knew how to hack :( 

> 
> > 2. The eog thumbnails look flat. Nautilus adds a slight background to
> > its thumbnails that make them look 3dish, would be cool in eog did this
> > as well
> 
> This is purely eye-candy, which can be added later (especially, because we
> can just use the nautilus/eel code).

Yeah...just thought i'd bring this up :)

> 
> > 3. It seems like eog creates new thumbnails whenever it is used to view
> > a folder.
> 
> Yes. This is due to the stupid implementation. It will use the new
> thumbnail framework by Alex Larsson soon.

Excellent the thumbnailing stuff he did in nautilus is really great, I
now have icon previews of mpgs in nautilus via gstreamer.

> 
> > 4. could the background color of the view be switched to match the one
> > used in nautilus icon view.
> 
> Is it hardcoded in nautilus resp. a specific nautilus option? Or does
> it consider the selected theme?

It uses themes, dave camp did most of the work on it. The only issue for
me is that it doesn't respect pixmap themes, but i'm not completely sure
if that is really a bug or not.

One last thing, when I last used the view, it had "move to trash" in the
context menu of pictures. I'm not sure if you guys should be providing
file management options here (especially since you can't build on top of
fm-directory-view out of process), since it leads to ui inconsistencies.
It might be better just to say this is a special purpose picture view,
that is not meant to be used for actual file management. (at least for
the time being until nautilus is more extensible, i know alex wants this
in the long term as well).

I recommend you talk to dave camp about this, as he has expressed
interest in such a nautilus view in the past and has much more insight
into the nautilus internals than I ever could :)

Anyway thanks for the hardwork, this definitely a step in the right
direction.

dave