Re: GNOME online desktop - (some of the possible) next steps

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> On 10 Aug 2007, at 17:45, Bryan Clark wrote:
> > I'll try to put together a mockup or two for a new background chooser
> > that incorporates this.  Right now my current mockup could be called a
> > mashup between the background chooser and the screensaver dialog as it
> > has pieces of both.
>
> I had a quick think about this during the week as well, as Alberto was 
> bugging me :)  Trying to keep things as simple as possible, my first 
> attempt was:
> http://www.gnome.org/~calum/bg-feed.png
>
> Background images that have come from a feed are just tagged with a 
> little RSS emblem, sorted in with your local background images.  
> Whenever you use a syndicated image as your background, it's cached 
> locally for future use[1], at which point the feed emblem may 
> disappear (or change?) to indicate that it's no longer a transient 
> image that will disappear from the dialog at some point in the 
> future.  Tooltip gives you more information about where the image came 
> from:
> http://www.gnome.org/~calum/bg-feed-tooltip.png
>
> The new dropdown at the top just offers choices of things like "single 
> background" (the current behaviour), "random from selected", "random 
> from feeds", "random from all backgrounds".  The 'random' choices 
> would change your background periodically.  No UI for setting the rate 
> of change at the moment, but I'm sure that would be trivial :)
>
> The 'Edit Feeds' button would open whatever centralised feed editor 
> somebody might like to devise...
Cool!  Sounds we're on the same track for how the system interacts.  
Here's the mockup I was working on... enlarged to show how powerful it 
is!  Perhaps we can combine ideas were appropriate and come out with 
something.

http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/images/backgrounds-dialog.png

I kept the current list format of
  [thumb] /info/
  [thumb] /info/
  [thumb] /info/

I planned to use the right hand side for a "preview" mode, maybe showing 
the background on your desktop.  The idea is to be more explicit about 
scaling images, hoping it would be helpful for showing the screen size 
vs. the image so you can easily fix stretching and other scaling aspects.

While I made my mockup dialog fairly large I don't actually think most 
of the browsing will be done in here.  I'm making the assumption that 
the dialog is designed for choosing from a set of backgrounds or 
subscriptions you have already and that the web site will allow you to 
pick new individual backgrounds to download (which then appear in the 
dialog). 

When trying to design this once before, people wanted to be able to 
choose an individual image from a subscription and just keep that one as 
their background.  I made a button for keeping current image from the 
subscription, however in practice you find that people really want the 
image that was just replaced and not really the current one.  I think 
there are a lot of ways to make that better, but one easy one was to 
assume the web site allowed people to dig into a subscription and click 
[get this background!].

Cheers,
~ Bryan