Re: Some Ideas about Previewing and Multiple Media handling in Nautilus

[Ryan McDougall <ryan mcdougall telusplanet net>]

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 12:17, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 06:40, Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote:
> 
> > Then we add an item to the toolbar called "Preview" or something like
> > that... it would turn the cursor into something like a magnifying glass
> > furthermore a window would be spawned... when the user's mouse is not
> > over an icon, this window prompts the user to do so... when the user
> > hovers over an icon, on one part of this window, file information is
> > displayed... on the other part of this window, a preview can be seen...
> > so for images an image appears... for an mp3 an embedded mp3 player
> > starts playing it... text files and word processing documents can be
> > previewed... This window could in fact be a hack of the universal
> > previewer...
> 
> Haven't been following this too closely so far so apologies if this has
> already been said, but...
> 
> Rather than opening another window, you could probably preview most file
> types fairly reasonably in the sidebar (like XP does, but potentially
> better, since XP doesn't do audio previews of audio files, or animated
> previews of video files). Text files could be a problem in such a small
> area, but I guess you could allow zooming in or out. 
> 
> I guess it depends whether you really mean "preview" or "view", which
> are two different things: to me, a "preview" shows you enough to
> determine whether you've selected the right file to open in another
> application, and a "view" is a read-only but complete rendition of the
> file that you can use *instead* of opening it in another application.
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.

I think we are using your definition of view, although I can see how the
two can be confused by a user, after all arent they "viewing" the files
with their own two eyes right now? :) Since we are talking about views
the menu button might be called "View Mode" or "Zoom Mode".

I think you have hit the nail on the head with regards to the
inflexibility of the XP approach, the windows is simply not capable to
handle "small" ( sound/movie ) and "large" ( images/text ) data views.

Cheers,
Ryan