Re: [Utopia] [patch] gvm property name changes

[Bryan Clark <clarkbw clarkson edu>]

On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 12:11 -0400, Joe Shaw wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 17:41 +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
>
> > So it would be nice to reserve the capability 'camera' to devices that
> > actually resembles the physical devices with a lens and so on.
>
> Hmm, I'm not so sure about this.  This comes back to the whole "what is
> it" versus "what can it do" argument.  The basic function of plugging in
> a camera is, in my experience, to copy the photos off of it.  Whether
> that's by plugging the camera in directly or using a card reader, I
> think the experience is pretty much the same.  If there were some extra
> functionality provided by these proprietary interfaces then it makes
> sense to me to add more capabilities for those, but the difference seems
> largely semantic to me.

Agreed, I'd say the user experience here is that they have a device with photos on it that they intend to import into their photo collection.  If that device is a card reader or a camera, that is just a hardware detail of the device; it doesn't actually effect what they are attempting to do.

I think the extra capabilities of knowing the device is a camera could enhance the user experience, perhaps we could do more for the user with extra knowledge of the devices capabilities.  So if this doesn't interfere with the base case of our user experience, i.e. just a semantic difference then I'd say it's purely up to whatever is easiest for the developers.

~ Bryan