Re: Eog collection suggestions [was Re: [PATCH] EOG Collection]

[Bryan W Clark <clarkbw clarkson edu>]

Hey Jens ~

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 13:26, Jens Finke wrote:
> sorry for the delay in my reply (have been busy and then forgot about your 
> mail :/)

no problem at all, thanks for taking the time to reply back to me.

> On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Bryan W Clark wrote:
> > IMHO the idea of the collection viewer is to provide a filmstrip /
> > slideshow for the user.  I think that in order to design for the
> > filmstrip model we can't providing a quick overview of all images at the
> > same time; the two design paradigms are mutually exclusive in our
> > current view.
> 
> Actually I don't see a big problem here. Maybe we can change the
> behavior for the collection view to filmstrip mode, if it is used as 
> nautilus view. 

Woah!  I think you just turned everything I know upside down.  All of my
collection suggestions have been directed solely at the Nautilus view; I
had no idea that you could open up directories in EOG by itself until a
minute ago.  That is really neat, but not the part I was after. :-)

Consider everything I've suggested before and from here on to be only
towards the Nautilus component _only_.  I can see lots of value in
keeping EOG feature rich and I would love to continue to help if you'd
like; but my main concern was and is the Nautilus View	 component.

> I don't have a clue how to integrate the libjpeg functionality into eog 
> nicely yet. There is libeog/eog-image-jpeg.[ch] already, which provides  the 
> jpeg saveing functions only at the moment. This is probably the best place 
> to add more jpeg specific image functions. 

Hm, I don't know anything about this either.  The best I can offer you
is that I'll look and ask around for anyone with experience with this
stuff so we could get it done right.

> Yes, the documentation has definitely a lot room for improvements.  
> Although there were some updates recently, haven't look at them yet.

It seems you have some great ideas towards making this piece easy to use
without providing more docs for people to read.

> But I am in this 'small' group, so the feature will stay :). Maybe there 
> is a way to make it more user visible, beside a better documentation.

Totally agreed that this should stay.  The user group who would take
advantage of this are not to be trifle with :)

Again, I think my only concern was for the Nautilus view; and if we make
this the _only_ way to change images I can't figure a way to convey it
to the user in an intuitive enough way that many people will take
advantage of how cool this part really is. 

I'm at a brick wall of ideas to make this work so that people would just
know what it's doing and how.  My problem is that I'm stuck in this
mental model for users [1] and maybe you can steer me to another one.

The mental model that I see the user having is of a physical "photo
album" or slide projector system.  This is why I was thinking of the I
change the rotation of the picture in the album/slides and it stays the
way you last rotated it automatically (physical pictures tend to follow
this property of Newtonian physics :).  Without asking if you're sure
afterwords.  The one at a time viewing with knowing which picture is
next comes from expanding the album idea as well.  

I'm interested in making the Nautilus View as simple as possible even if
that means losing extra functionality (not that we rip the functions
out, just that they aren't easy to get to from within nautilus).

So if I'm way off on this, or you have a different user mental model I
can stop crying about this. :)

[...]

>  BTW: Eog remembers the transformation 
> state during a session. If you load an image, rotate it, load another one 
> and than later the first one again, eog will rotate it for you 
> automatically. 

Oh, cool stuff.  I think I experienced the reset session after shutdown
and open up again of EOG and so this didn't occur to me.

> > To throw out an idea to solve the "rotated it the wrong way" situation,
> > we could try to implement a high feedback rotation system, similar to
> > what the new GIMP does does for image rotation.
> 
> Yes, but than you don't have a stateless user interface anymore, which
> sucks IMO for a 'simple' image viewer.

Totally right, the idea is really overblown for the problem, just trying
to throw out something new.

> Do you have a link for more infos? Never heard of GUP team.

Oh, GUP, I should have said the GNOME Usability Project,
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/

[....]
> IMO this is pretty clear, what don't you understand here? 

I guess it just relates to the user mental model that I've constructed
for this component.   In the Nautilus view I think we're going to the
least experienced people vs. the EOG view mode.  In EOG what you are
working towards feels like a file/photo manage type model which I don't
think relates to people using the Nautilus view, but again this might
not be the model you're working with and we're just missing something in
the communication of these things.

> Well, we can do it better. We have the thumbnails for all the images we 
> are showing. So we can show the user the files which changed.

Definitely!

Thanks for all your time,
~ Bryan


[1] User Mental Models - Simply put is how users view what is actually
being done vs. what is really going on behind the scenes.  (example
being, everyone knows how a T.V. works right?  You turn it on and see
shows, but no one wants to think about how the CRT actually draws on the
screen, although things like the wonderfully outdated VHhold button had
us scarily close to understanding the phase shifting that was going on.
But T.V. designers have since dropped the VHHold button and other things
because over time they knew that people just want to surf channels, not
mess with the inner workings. )

-- 
Bryan W Clark
Graduate Student
Math && Computer Science Dept.
Human Computer Interaction Group
Clarkson University
Potsdam, NY USA
 
http://www.clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/