slideshow vs. fullscreen

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Hi all,

I was just reviewing the patch for bug 318931 - adding controls in 
slideshow mode, and comparing it to the patch I did for a very similar 
purpose.

All of this got me thinking about whether it really makes sense to have 
both a fullscreen mode and a slideshow mode as separate options.

I've been planning on either implementing some of the slideshow 
functionality in the fullscreen mode, or some more of the fullscreen 
mode functionality in the slideshow mode --- but I'm starting to think 
that the two should just be merged.

I think that at any point in full screen mode, a user should be able to 
press a key to start a slideshow --- and conversely in slideshow mode if 
the user pauses the slideshow they should have all of the functionality 
available in fullscreen mode.

This is certainly the behaviour I'd prefer --- it's similar to what I'm 
used to from iPhoto, but it also seems like a fairly natural way to 
work...  When I'm reviewing photos I might start out slideshowing the 
pics --- then when I see an interesting one I can pause, zoom in and 
scroll around (eventually I want to be able to add tags, etc.) while 
paused I should be able to navigate to previous and next images easily, etc.

Currently I really dislike full-screen mode because the incremental 
redraw is *really* annoying --- on my 3 month old dell d410 laptop 
(pentium M 1.7 ghz) it takes 3-4 seconds to draw an image with no load 
on the system.  When there's anything else going on it can take 20s or 
more.  It is substantially faster to redraw in slideshow mode, and the 
perceptible speed is even better, as long as you view each image for a 
few seconds, the image appears immediately.

Unfortunately I also dislike slide-show mode (even with a patch to allow 
pausing and moving from image to image) --- since I can't zoom in to see 
how the image looks at the pixel level...

What I envision is probably moving the missing functionality from 
slide-show mode into fullscreen mode (timers, pre-caching, etc.) and 
then the slideshow button would just put you in fullscreen mode with the 
slideshow timers turned on...   This way if more functionality is added 
to fullscreen mode in the future (like setting tags, etc.) - it's 
automatically available in slide-show mode...

Does this make sense?

Warren