Re: RFC: GtkPreview library

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> > https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK%2B/Preview
>
> Hey, thanks for starting this discussion!

Ditto!

> I think the document would benefit from a section listing some
> expected use cases: where do we expect this preview to be used ?
> nautilus, filechooser - anything else ? Having that list will make it
> easier to judge whether the "embedding" api is suitable for all those
> cases.

> From a design point of view, nautilus and the file chooser (or future
incarnations of it) are the primary initial focus. Previewing could
also be interesting for the system sharing dialogs [1] (as a way to
check the identity of a content item, before it is shared).

Theoretically, previewing would be interesting whenever an app wants
to provide a view of a content item - that could be useful for chat,
social messaging, mail, or download/transfer applications. However, I
haven't done any detailed work into how this would look. One question
in this area is whether applications would need to be able to change
the UI controls for the preview.

> Also, it would be good to list some of the things that you expect to
> preview: documents, videos, music, images - anything else ?

My understanding is that we would want to provide previews for as much
common content as possible. Things like contacts or presentations
could easily be added to the list.

> Having
> that list will help to get a sense for the interactivity that will be
> required from the preview.
...

The UI present today in Sushi is a good reference point, and I would
expect similar controls to be provided by the new library. I have
promised UI designs for this.

Allan

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Sharing#Mockups