Re: [Utopia] Gnome VFS Icons

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 12:07:35PM +0100, Jono Bacon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Forgive me if this has been suggested or implemented, but I installt he 
> GNOME VFS Debian binary, and it struck me that when a user clicks on the 
> Computer icon to see their drives, the icons for different drives should 
> be different. As an example, if a partition is VFAT, this should maybe 
> use a Windows icon, and if it is EXT2/3 it should use a different icon 
> (I was going to say Linux, but I know EXT2/3 are used in other OS's 
> commonly). It may be an idea to give the EXT2/3 partition the normal 
> disk icon, and then simply make a Windows/Mac/OS2 partition have a 
> different icon. At the moment that all have a drive icon and the name of 
> the drive, but I cannot tell which partition is which as I use the same 
> model drive.
> 
> The other thing to note is how to seperate USB storage devices that use 
> VFAT or FAT as their filesystem. I assume you could check the HAL device 
> class to determine this and change the icon to that of a device.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 

In take 3 of the GNOME VFS patches that I'll be sending tonight there
is an option to use a more rich set of icons. It's not as easy as it
seems to choose icons; there's emblems to consider as well! And there
is a fine line of what information should be conveyed in the icon and
what should be conveyed in the name of the icon.

So, basically what I've been thinking is that the icon (without any
emblems) should represent 'what the device is'. Thus, the following
icons are used

 - removable              Unmounted volume, generic
 - removable-usb          Unmounted volume, connected by USB
 - removable-ieee1394     Unmounted volume, connected by Firewire
 - harddisk               Mounted volume, generic
 - harddisk-usb           Mounted volume, generic, connected by USB
 - harddisk-ieee1394      Mounted volume, generic, connected by Firewire
 - disc-cdrom             Mounted volume, CD-ROM
 - disc-cdr               Mounted volume, CD-R
 - disc-cdrw              Mounted volume, CD-RW
 - disc-dvdrom            Mounted volume, DVD-ROM
 - disc-dvdram            Mounted volume, DVD-RAM
 - disc-dvdr              Mounted volume, DVD-R
 - disc-dvdrw             Mounted volume, DVD-RW
 - disc-dvdr-plus         Mounted volume, DVD+R
 - disc-dvdrw-plus        Mounted volume, DVD+RW
 - compact-flash          Mounted volume, Compact Flash
 - memory-stick           Mounted volume, Memory Stick
 - smart-media            Mounted volume, Smart Media
 - sd-mmc                 Mounted volume, Secure Digital/MMC
 - music-player           Mounted volume, from a music player
 - camera                 Mounted volume, from a camera

The latter six icons will only be shown given device information files
(as the hardware won't tell is through e.g. a ioctl(2)), but I believe
that with sufficient infrastructure, e.g. 

 a) the gnome-device-manager I've talked about at GUADEC
 b) some central repository of device information files

Hopefully this way we can get a lot of device information files, and 
distributors can pick the ones they like.

Now, on the emblems. Now, above I said the icon was 'what the device
is' and if you are careful, you'll see that there is no 'disc-audio'
icon. This is intentional - whether you got audio on a CD-ROM (or a
CD-R or CD-RW for that matter) doesn't depend on 'what the device is'
- it's 'what is on the device'.

Therefore, I foresee the following emblems being useful

 - disc-audio            Media contains CD audio
 - disc-mixed            Media contains both CD audio and data
 - media-<fs>            Media contains a <fs> filesystem, <fs>=ext3,vfat etc.
 - media-movie           Media contains movies
 - media-photos          Media contains photos
 - media-music           Media contains music
 ...

So, if you put in your DVD-Video disc it should show a DVD-ROM icon
with a movies emblem :-)

Anyway, I'll post the patch and screenshots tonight when I get home;
they look kind of nice; stay tuned :-)

Cheers,
David