Re: Some ideas for eog

[Jens Finke <jens triq net>]

Hi Tim,

Tim Gerla schrieb:
> A little bit of introduction is in order: I am an old-time GNOME hacker. 
> I was approached by Miguel "back in the day" to port my Gtk-based CD 
> player, gtcd, to GNOME. I ended up maintaining the gnome-media set of 
> packages for several years.

congratulations and good luck with your plans. Your appointment is a 
good news to eog and all eog users.

> I have a couple of ideas for eog:
>
> 1. Port the application shell to Python and pygtk. This would improve 
> maintainability of the GUI sections of the code, and as long as we left 
> the heavy-duty pixmap-reading code in C, there should be no performance 
> hit.

Is it finally allowed for core gnome applications to be written in 
languages other than C? If so, its probably a good idea to use some 
high-level language, let it be python. If you follow this way, the only 
interesting part of the existing codebase will probably be in libeog/ 
and there especially eog-scroll-view.c. This contains 90% of the 
scaling/zooming code.

> 2. Reorient eog's purpose back towards a single image viewer. Nautilus 
> and f-spot can already do a great job of displaying thumbnails of a set 
> of images, so eog's list view is kind of duplication of effort, and not 
> very featureful compared to what f-spot and nautilus can do.

My experience is, that you need some kind of image-collection feature.
In my opinion, one of the main use cases will be to view all pictuers 
form a directory. A really usefull and often demanded (see bugzilla) 
feature is, to open a single image from a directory and then 
subsequently browse through the list of all images in the dir by 
clicking next/prev buttons.

> 2.1. Since eog would be the premiere single-image viewer in existence, 
> we could do a lot of things right, such as printing.

Aargh, printing. Its certainly the most missing feature. :)

Regards,

  Jens (former eog maintainer)