Comments on fullscreen dialog

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Hi all,

With Stephene's help, I've managed to get the most recent svn build 
working with my existing photo db.

So far my impressions of the changes over the last few months are 
positive, except for the dialog that shows up in fullscreen mode when 
you press a key or move the mouse.

I have basically 2 main use cases for full-screen mode:
   1: showing photos to people.   I rarely use slideshow mode for this, 
because there's no pause, forward or back controls.

   2: reviewing photos - here I regularly use the forward and next keys 
to move between photos, and quite often press '1' and scroll around in 
full resolution mode to see how sharp the picture is.

In both of these modes, the current dialog is far more annoying than 
useful   It's near the bottom 1/3 line of the photo, where a lot of 
people say you should put the interesting things in your photo, and it's 
 big, quite a bit larger vertically than it needs to be.

Having this big grey oblong rectangle on the screen while trying to view 
or scroll around your photo, is really annoying.    I usually view my 
photos on a laptop with only 1024x768 resolution --- I need every pixel 
usable.

Some specific suggestions:

  1:  make the dialog much smaller.   Do you really need a drop-down to 
select photo transitions on it?  Can't this be on the  preferences page? 
 Can we trim the surrounding grey space?   Or make the window transparent?

  2: move it to a corner of the screen - it's far less likely to be in 
the way there

  3: don't show it when a valid action key is pressed.   If I press the 
'next' or 'previous' key --- you shouldn't pop up the dialog.  Also 
don't show it when the mouse is moving with the mouse button pressed. 
If I'm panning around a zoomed in picture, I don't want to see the dialog.

Normally I'd just put my code where my mouth is and submit a patch --- 
but I've been really busy lately, and I'm not sure I'll have time to 
look at the code...

Warren