Re: BonoboPreview initiative - png in a control

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2001-12-10 at 09:08, Jens Finke wrote:
> 
> Well, your point is to use a BonoboControl for displaying all this. Let's
> assume you have a dir with 30 different files in it. I don't believe it's
> very efficient to start multiple controls to create a preview for all the
> different file types.
> 
> My idea is to define a standard way of storing such previews on the
> filesystem level. If we provide some helper functions for managing these
> an application can create a preview image together with the original file
> during saving. Then write a bonobo control which reads the thumbnails from
> the filesystem level.
> 
> At least the Gimp developers consider these mechanism too. And it's also
> open for non-Bonobo applications.

So that this way for every document I have on my system I will be forced
to also store a second image file?

Honestly, if the components are very light, and if they are designed
intelligently (i.e., they "throttle" themselves down so they don't eat
99% of the CPU), you'll end up with a progressive update of the image. 
The machine won't slow down that way during image generation.  Also, if
the components "keep-alive" for a while, they can cache some images (not
too many) so a user that switches between viewing documents a,b, and c
won't have to wait for them to be re-rendered every time.

If you guys *do* decide to go with a stored thumbnail (which, I guess,
would be good for certain users) at least make this an option somewhere,
so people with lots of processor and little hard-drive space (/me waves)
don't suffer too much.  I went thru and deleted a bunch of backup files,
cache files, and a couple thumbnail directories (which I'm not all to
sure why they were there...) and free'd up 70% of my used hard-disk
space.  I don't like unneccessary caches.  ^,^

Sean Etc.

> 
> Regards,
> 
>    Jens
> 
> -- 
> "Wer die Freiheit aufgibt, um Sicherheit zu gewinnen, wird am Ende beides
> verlieren." -- Benjamin Franklin
> 
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