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

[Mark Finlay <sisob-lists tuxfamily org>]

On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 04:37, 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

That looks pretty promising. Tell me - would that use thumbnails then?
I assume it would since there is no preview like in the Ximian one.


> Not really. The filename is an almost useless thing to know when you
> have a thumbnail being displayed. 

Agreed

> > - 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.

So you are saying that for each image in the list it would remember the
style last used for it? If so then that fits in with part of what I was
saying in my blog, and does what I was trying to achieve even better
than the way I tried to do it.

Also - if that was the case does that mean that we could choose
individual defaults for the images we are shipping as gnome-backgrounds
? We really should be able to specify that the tiles we ship be tiled
and not streched or centered.

Only things I can say about it is that maybe it should be "Add
Images(s)" and "Remove Images(s)" and that maybe "Style" should be
indented because it isn't a preferences for that Background tab, but for
the image selected.

>  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. :)

Sounds good - if there was a way to check if an image is a tile (ie left
lines up with right and top with botton) that would be useful too ;)


> , 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.

Agreed, otherwise people will think the picture is installed and delete
it.

Dobey: I think we both came off like we weren't listening to each other
b4. I just had some ideas I needed to get out of my head. My
imlementation of those ideas may have been flawed, maybe the ideas
themselves, but we're making progress now and I like your mockup.

I really needed to know how images would be displayed to the user before
setting about putting together this module.

-- 
Mark Finlay 
Computer Science Student

E-Mail:	sisob_AT_tuxfamily_DOT_org
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 	http://advogato.org/person/sisob