On Tue, 2004-05-25 at 11:17 +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote: > Folders and Catalogs are on another level. Image mode should be handled > independently from them. I disagree. While they are implemented on "another level," conceptually they're not really. gThumb's view menu has a grouping of 3 items, Folders, Images, and Catalogs, each with the accelerators alt-1, alt-2, and alt-3 respectively. To my mind, this establishes to the user three primary modes of gthumb, where each of them are (again, conceptually) on the same level. Selecting any of these options from the menu (or using their accelerator) changes gthumb's layout significantly enough that they "feel" like different modes. Things are blurred a bit, however, depending on the layout you're using. If you use the default layout, layout 3 (folders left top, image preview left bottom, thumbnails right full height), then Image mode differs enough from Folders/Catalogs mode to feel like you're in a different area of the program. That fact that the toolbar changes as well strengthens this perception. However, with layout 1 (folders top left, thumbnails bottom left, image preview right full height), going into image mode simply makes it look like you're closing or hiding the side pane, and making the image preview occupy the full window. This isn't the case, however, because again the toolbar changes, and also the icons on the info bar changes. (As far as gthumb's implementation is concerned, in fact this _is_ what's happening, but the UI changes enough that this does feel like another mode.) So, because the View menu has a grouping of Folders (alt-1), Catalogs (alt-2), Images (alt-3), and because the UI changes significantly enough when you select each of the three items, it certainly does feel to me that these are three distinct modes. And because the menu has all three, so too I think should the toolbar, because it gives the user obvious feedback when he changes modes (by double clicking a thumbnail, for example, he goes to image view mode, and the toolbar will reflect that by depressing the Image button in my proposal). > And how about placing catalogs directly in the filesystem? They could > be organized in folders. Backup would be simpler. Filling them by That might not be a bad idea. Definitely outside the scope of my gthumb-hacking abilities, however. Maybe Paolo will consider it. > If Folders and Catalogs will be kept seperated, tabs might be a solution. > Because only that part of the screen is affected. I don't like this idea at all. A tab bar will waste a significant amount of screen real-estate. I suppose that could be solved by putting the tabs inside the side panel only, however this only really makes sense when you use layout 1. > > folders/catalogs, I suggest removing these buttons from the > > primary toolbar, and creating a secondary toolbar in the > > folders/catalogs pane with these buttons. This will more > Yes, I would suggest the same. I tried to hack this last night, but instead wound up pulling out hair due to the horrid lack of documentation for Bonobo. I'll have to plea on gnome-devel-list for assistance. :) > The prev/next buttons should be present outside of image mode, too. Agreed. Cheers, Jason.
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