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

[Francis Whittle <fudje phreaker net>]

On 2003.08.30 13:37, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> 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

Nice.  The single dialogue with tabs is looking a liiittle too much  
like Windows to me though :-/

> 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.

Filename would be better.  Otherwise a very probable scenario is a  
whole lot of images listed as "Made with GIMP".  Possibly some external  
metadata where a user could name their background would be even more  
still ;-)

> 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.

Again with the metadata.  I originaly didn't like the idea of metadata,  
but this is one place where is really is useful!  Users' preference  
should always rule these.

> 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. :)

Center and eight Cardinal points (N NE E SE S SW W NW ... four true and  
the corners that is)... don't limit use to the corners.  And possibly  
add on top of that a tag that allows you to place the image precisely  
on the screen.  This sounds a lot like the old e15 background editor, I  
know.

> 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.

~/.gnome2/ is definitely not good.  Background images are not settings,  
and shouldn't be hidden.  I would go for system-wide in eg.
/usr/share/backgrounds/, metatheme-provided backgrounds in
(theme_dir)/backgrounds/, and then user backgrounds can be referenced  
on a per-URI or per-directory basis (with one default in, say,
~/backgrounds/) as specified by the user - all of this can then be  
sotred in a vfolder so that the user can de-select backgrounds they  
don't like, etc.  Remote images could be cached?

cheers,
	Francis.