Re: BonoboPreview initiative - png in a control

[Joergen Scheibengruber <Joergen Scheibengruber informatik uni-ulm de>]

Hi!

I have read through your discussion, and i have this strange feeling,
that you guys are talking about different things. 

Jens is pro thumbnails, cause he says, that having a folder with a lot
of files and (maybe) a different component for the preview of each file
would overload every cpu. I think he's perfectly right there. But I
think the point was not to have the preview in the "files-view" as with
the thumbnails in nautilus. The idea was having a preview of the file in
the side-panel of nautilus, when you click on the file, as in windows.
That's a complete different thing, if you're talkin about performance
(You just need to do it for one file at a time). And this preview can of
course be larger than just 64x64 pixels. The cool thing about such a
component would be that you could also use it in a file-selector, or
(like in file-roller) a preview in a unzip-utility.
There are two more disadvantages of using a thumbnail for the preview.
First, you always need to open and save a file with the apropriate app
in order to have a thumbnail. And second a thumbnail just isn't good for
every file-type. What example for a mp3? Ok, that works already fine
with nautilus, but what about movies? Wouldn't it be cool to have a
preview of them, too? (0k, maybe that's exaggerated, but a component is
much more flexible, if you understand what i mean, you can still have a
thumbnail for all filetypes, where it's the best way)

So, as resumée, what I wanted to say is: to display previews for a whole
folder of files, thumbnails are of course the better (if not, the only)
solution, but for a preview of _one_ file a component is much more
flexible.

Ok, thanks for listening,
Jörgen
 
-- 
There are two major products that come from Berkeley : LSD and UNIX. We
don't believe this to be a coincidence.

Jeremy S. Anderson