Re: GEP 7 - icons and thumbnails

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Dave Malcolm wrote:

> On Thursday 19 September 2002 14:12, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > I have put gep nr 7 in the gep cvs module. It concerns moving the new
> > nautilus icon + thumbnailing code to a common library.
> >
> > Discussions about this gep should take place on
> > gnome-libs-devel gnome org, and in fact the discussion was already taking
> > place like normal before I wrote this silly gep.
> 
> Some thoughts:
> (i) Emblems:  If icons are going be consistent between the file manager and 
> e.g. the file selector, recent doc lists, etc should icons also embed any 
> emblems, or is this a separate system?.  Though this touches on issues like 
> "should the file selector allow emblem editing" etc etc.

That cannot happen before we get a common metadata framework in gnome-vfs. 
This doesn't seem like it's probable for Gnome 2.2.
 
> (ii) Directories:  Is this GEP limited to files, or does it cover directories 
> as well?  See (iii) below; also:  are there two icons for a directory, 
> reflecting "open" versus "closed" folder states?

Of course it handles directories. 

Whenever an icon is a drop-target for a copy/move Nautilus tries the icon 
with "-accept" prepended. This means that if you put an 
gnome-fs-directory-accept in your theme (there is one in the gnome theme) 
you will get that in nautilus while dropping files in a directory.
 
> (iii) Change notification:  Is there an explicit system for change 
> notification?  The following events might imply the icon should change:
> 	- change of theme
> 	- change of file content (so that the thumbnail needs regenerating)
> 	- for certain directories, there might be separate icons represening state 
> (e.g. empty versus non-empty trash, mounted versus unmounted zip drives etc), 
> which ought to update when various state changes occur.
> 	- change of emblem (if emblems are implemented by embedding within images)

Icon Theme changes emit "changed" on the GnomeIconLoader. The other things 
are handled by the app using the API. Nautilus does all of this, but there 
is just no way that it can be made generic.
 
> (iv)  Are icons supplied as images, as widgets, or as canvas items?  Having a 
> system to manufacture widgets/canvas items for icons might allow emblems and 
> change notification to be handled internally to the object, without requiring 
> client intervention.  It could also transparently provide a right-click 
> context menu.  It would also support lots of eye-candy ideas I won't bore you 
> with (the real reason I'm proposing this...).  But it might make the API much 
> more rigid.

Icons are names that can be looked up to image filenames using 
GnomeIconLoader. Did you actually look at the API?
 
-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an unconventional skateboarding firefighter living undercover at Ringling 
Bros. Circus. She's an enchanted gold-digging snake charmer with a 
flame-thrower. They fight crime!