Re: Rethinking emblems

[Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se>]

Hello Alexander!
Thank's for the feedback.

Alexander Larsson wrote:

> On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 15:15 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
>  
>
> > I have done a small writeup on some smarter way of using emblems.
> > Currently most of them are nothing more but pretty pictures you can 
> > attach to your folders, but they have a lot of potential.
> > Some of the stuff have been brought up before, like the watermarking of 
> > folders.
> > Well, anyway, here is the text:
> > http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/rethinking-emblems/
> >
> > Hope you can live with some misspellings.
> > - Andreas
> >    
>
> All interesting ideas. I like the automatic embleming. Some random
> musings:
>
> We would need a watermarking image to go with each emblem. This
> complicates the custom emblems handling, as i doubt many people will be
> able to draw both an emblem and a watermark. Of course, some people do
> really use custom emblems, so maybe we should allow those without
> watermarks?
>  
Ideally, the emblem and the watermarking image would be the same 
(svg)-image, and I have comitted some scalable emblems to g-i-t. I hope 
to finish the full set real soon.
Perhaps some kind of solution along the lines of using the emblem as a 
watermarking image, if it is scalable. If the image can't be scaled, no 
watermarking image.

> The question of inheriting watermarks is interesting. We have some
> requests for the background setting feature to be recursive. I think
> watermarks should probably be recursive.
>
> What if one folder gets several (automatic) emblems. Say it contains
> both jpegs and mp3s. What watermark do we use then?
>  
I assume you're thinking of a user that also put the covers of albums in 
his/her music folder (or something like that). In that case the number 
of sound files outnumber the image files, so (if the system could keep 
track of that) the music emblem should show up. In other cases both 
emblems should show up.
I really need to get back to the drawing board on this one, hopefully I 
can figure out a nice solution.
Seeing my home folder on the desktop with eleven different emblems don't 
sounds too neat.

There is also the issue that not everyone is as anal as I am when 
sorting my files :).
I realise that many users don't put all their music, and only the music 
etc. in one folder. Apps like Beagle and Rythmnbox are also allowing 
folks not to work as file clerks, so you have a really good point here.

> Are emblem watermarks really useful for the case of auto-detected
> emblems from the contents of the folder? I mean, when we're displaying
> the folder itself the folder type should be visible from the icons of
> the files in it.
>  
Yes, combined together, the features create a somewhat deadly duo and 
adds only noise. Good point. It never crossed my mind.
Perhaps watermarking would be more usefull for special places like the 
trash, the templates folder and stuff like that. As long as telling 
folders apart get easier (witch is the main point).

Finally, I must point out that I am an artist with no ability to code, I 
just draw the pretty pictures. Just so noone expects a patch with all 
this stuff fixed or something. :(

- Andreas