Re: BonoboPreview initiative - png in a control

[Josh Steiner <joschi eds org>]

> my point is not to use BonoboControl because I want to, but because it
> seems the best solution, IMO. Of course, having lots of controls at the
> same time could be bad, unless those controls are made really
> lightweight.
> If there's a better solution than using BonoboControl, it's fine for me.
> But I don't think the thumbnail idea is a good idea for non-image files.

I'm not sure how else you are going to display 64x64 representation of a
file of any soft other than with a "thumbnail" of sorts.  I think you are
being a little limited in what you think the word thumbnail means, it
doesn't have to be a screenshot of the app running.  whatever
representation you want your component to show of itself in a file open
dialog can be displayed and cached as a thumbnail to terrific efficientcy
gains.

> > 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.
> > 
> and force all apps to generate the preview for all the files it saves?
> It seems to me a lot of wasted disk space

in the long run when tons of apps share the same previews then it will be
a big cpu and disk space saver.  why have konqueror, gimp, nautilus, etc
do this on their own and duplicate the disk space they consume?

> > At least the Gimp developers consider these mechanism too. And it's also
> > open for non-Bonobo applications.
> > 
> the thumbnail idea makes a lot of sense for image files, I agree
> completely with you, but what about other kind of files? For instance, I
> may want to have a .oaf file preview, which just shows a list of the
> components defined in the file, and not the XML itself. How would I
> generate a thumbnail for that?

quite simple really, if the component can render itself in a 64x64 square
to fit in a file dialog, why can't it save a thumbnail of itself?

Cheers,

-Joschi

________________________________________________________________
Josh .. Yoshi .. Joschi .. xiphoidprocess.com .. eds.org/~joschi