[Shotwell] shotwell live mode

[Jim Nelson]

Hi Frederik,

Glad to hear you're having a positive experience with Shotwell so far.  More
features are on their way, so stay tuned.

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 8:38 PM, Frederik Sdun <frederik.sdun at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> But first I want to make some change the style of the gphot2 vapi:
> Instead of many several types with long names i want group the like:
>
> class Camera {
>    class File {
>        enum Type{
>        }
>    }
> }
>
>
The names in libgphoto2.vapi are not arbitrary; they correspond to the
library's C functions and types.  The VAPI format does allow you to get
creative in naming but (a) it was my first VAPI and I didn't know all the
ins-and-outs, and (b) I wanted to stay as close to the libgphoto2 API so it
was clear what was being called in the Shotwell code.

Many other VAPIs for pure-C libraries follow a similar convention, as ugly
as it may wind up appearing.

Since the use of libgphoto2 is limited in Shotwell to CameraTable and
ImportPage, I don't feel this decision for verbosity is all that onerous.
You're free to submit a patch -- I'd be more than happy to consider it --
but I don't feel it's all that pressing or stopping people from
contributing.


> Next step would be to write a camera widget which uses gphoto's
> CameraWidget to build an UI. I think it's not possible to get the TFT's
> picture into shotwell yet, but preview should already be possible and
> remote control. As an addition I want to add features that the camera
> doesn't support, e.g. time lapse.
>

Before you jump in, I would suggest discussing further here how this feature
would look in Shotwell and filing ticket(s) in our Trac database (
http://trac.yorba.org).  We here at Yorba are sensitive about how new
features are implemented, and even whether they belong in Shotwell at all.

Frankly, I'm not convinced Shotwell is the place for this kind of thing -- I
feel like it would be better served by a separate app.  (Take a look at
Cheese for a good example of a photo app that does one thing really, really
well.)  However, if you can describe how this would look and work inside
Shotwell, we might be convinced that it's a Good Thing.


>
> But here's my first question:
> shold I add a new entry to the tree or add a button to the ImportPage to
> switch to live mode? They're quite exclusive on my cameras, don't know
> about others.
>

That's a good question to start with -- since the ImportPage is tied to the
camera in the sidebar, I would think the button would go there.  If the user
clicks it, Shotwell would presumably jump to a new page where the live
preview was shown, options for time lapse, etc. would live.

-- Jim