Re: Use of emblems to combine generated thumbnail with file type icon

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 18:58 +0100, David D. Lowe wrote:
> Are they any guidelines on the use of emblems to indicate file types?
> 
> Currently, gsf-office-thumbnailer generates previews for OpenOffice.org
> and Office files. These previews are simply the front page's thumbnail.
> This makes it difficult to distinguish between different kind of
> documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings: they all look like
> pieces of paper with minuscule text.
> 
> ooo-thumbnailer uses imagemagick to overlay the file type icon in a
> corner. The trouble with this solution is that it cannot stay up-to-date
> with the user's current icon theme.
> 
> A solution suggested by "migash.r" in a bug report [0] was to use
> emblems instead. It seems quite elegant to me: keep with the current
> icon theme without regenerating the thumbnails. However, it could
> compete with any emblems that the user has set.
> 
> So what are the guidelines on emblems? Should we just follow Dropbox's
> lead and define our own application-managed emblems?

We've cut down our use of emblems a bit, only supporting automatically
added, because as a UI it really didn't work out. I don't think we
should further our use of it without careful consideration.

Having the emblem always be on the icon might help when the thumbnail is
shown, but its also gonna be visible when the thumbnail is not used,
which is gonna look weird. Its also gonna cover the preview making it
even harder to see.

If all OOo documents look the same at the size of a thumbnail maybe we
should not thumbnail them? We're thinking of adding some form of larger
preview functionallity for 3.2 which might be a better fit for this. Or
alternatively, you might want to make the thumbnails show of the type of
document in some other subtle way. For instance, the video thumbnailers
add a tape-like frame to the thumbnail. Maybe something similar could be
figured out for e.g. spreadsheet docs (make the cell borders visible or
suchlike).


-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's a superhumanly strong dishevelled grifter with a secret. She's a 
sharp-shooting psychic detective married to the Mob. They fight crime!