Re: [gnome-love] Re: Re: anyone wanna help with gnome-backgrounds

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

In response to Mark's mockup, and the other mockups he posted here from
Luca, I have created a happy HIGificated mockup, of what the background
tab in a "Desktop Appearance" properties capplet would look like.

http://www.gnome.org/~dobey/gnome-background-properties.png

On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 15:39, Erik Grinaker wrote:
> Good suggestions, I have a few comments:
>
> - Using a thumbnail display is absolutely the way to go, but it should
> also include the filename - or at least part of it

Not really. The filename is an almost useless thing to know when you
have a thumbnail being displayed. More interesting information might
be file size, aspect ratio, or the comment/title from exif data. It's
too bad people don't like html mails, because they can be useful. Like,
I could put a mockup of a row in the list view, here.

> - I don't know about the idea of editing settings for individual
> backgrounds, I don't think this would be entirely intuitive (altough it
> is a smart solution). I think we should use "global" settings, but
> attempt to set sensible defaults based in the image size:
>
>     - Image is less than, say, 25% of the screen; tiled
>     - Image proportion is roughly that of screen; stretched
>     - Image proportion does not match screen: scaled
>     - I think very few people actually use center, so manual only

Trying to be clever doesn't work very well most times. You have to be
really clever instead. We should calculate some kind of action to do
in a programmatic way, different from what you suggest here, as a
default. However, we should store metadata in the list of images that
are in the list, for each image, to specify what method the user
actually prefers from an image, rather than having a global and trying
to only be halfway smart about it. The rules you propose are a good
start, but have a few immediate flaws. What do you do if an image is
just over 25% of the screen size, but still in the same aspect ratio?
Clearly you don't want to stretch it, unless you really like images that
are very pixelated. Center is actually used a lot, for the translucent
png images, where you just set a background color, and the image is
composited over top of it. What we probably want to do here, is add
support for having the image in the 4 corners as well as the center of
the screen. This would be useful for the default gnome config. We could
just have a gradient, and a watermark foot in the bottom corner. There
is a lot we can do here, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only being
halfway smart if we are going to implement something like this. :)

> - It should be possible for normal users to add backgrounds. One visitor
> on your blog noted that storing copies of images in
> ~/.gnome2/backgrounds/ or whatever wastes a bit of disk space, and just
> storing the path would be better. But most "normal" users don't want to
> think about this, they just want to set the image as a background, and
> then do whatever they want with the original image. But a "remove image"
> option in a context menu or something could be a good idea.

Storing backgrounds in ~/.gnome2/ sucks. Storing backgrounds in
~/Backgrounds makes more sense. This is where I put all of my wallpaper
images anyway. However, it may make even more sense to do something like
$XDG_DATA_HOME/Backgrounds/, so that it becomes user-configurable,
follows some sort of spec, and doesn't shove more crap in ~/.gnome2 or
other dot-directories. It should be possible to drag and drop an image
from a web page, or smb: share, or afp: share, or somewhere else
completely random, and have it work. This is what gnome-vfs is for.
However, since we can't reliably use gnome-vfs for setting the
background image (may log in without network, etc...), we should save
the image to a local store of images. Normal users don't need to think
about it. That's what the program is supposed to do.

-- dobey