Re: [gnome-love] Re: Re: anyone wanna help with gnome-backgrounds

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 03:53, Mark Finlay wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 04:37, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > In response to Mark's mockup, and the other mockups he posted here from
> > Luca, I have created a happy HIGificated mockup, of what the background
> > tab in a "Desktop Appearance" properties capplet would look like.
> >
> > http://www.gnome.org/~dobey/gnome-background-properties.png
>
> That looks pretty promising. Tell me - would that use thumbnails then?
> I assume it would since there is no preview like in the Ximian one.

It would use thumbnails. Reference my complaint about the anti-html
bigotry in the e-mail community where I would have placed a mockup for
the layout of a row in the list, if it weren't for the fact that many
people would whine about mail being in html.

> > Not really. The filename is an almost useless thing to know when you
> > have a thumbnail being displayed. 
>
> Agreed
>
> > > - I don't know about the idea of editing settings for individual
> > > backgrounds, I don't think this would be entirely intuitive (altough it
> > > is a smart solution). I think we should use "global" settings, but
> > > attempt to set sensible defaults based in the image size:
> > >
> > >     - Image is less than, say, 25% of the screen; tiled
> > >     - Image proportion is roughly that of screen; stretched
> > >     - Image proportion does not match screen: scaled
> > >     - I think very few people actually use center, so manual only
> >
> > Trying to be clever doesn't work very well most times. You have to be
> > really clever instead. We should calculate some kind of action to do
> > in a programmatic way, different from what you suggest here, as a
> > default. However, we should store metadata in the list of images that
> > are in the list, for each image, to specify what method the user
> > actually prefers from an image, rather than having a global and trying
> > to only be halfway smart about it.
>
> So you are saying that for each image in the list it would remember the
> style last used for it? If so then that fits in with part of what I was
> saying in my blog, and does what I was trying to achieve even better
> than the way I tried to do it.

It would remember the style selected, and if the calculated selection
was the user's preference, it would remember that, even though no real
user interaction took place. All in all, we really only need to do the
calculation of scaling options only once.

> Also - if that was the case does that mean that we could choose
> individual defaults for the images we are shipping as gnome-backgrounds
> ? We really should be able to specify that the tiles we ship be tiled
> and not streched or centered.

Now that I've made the suggestions for watermark images, I have to say
"yes" here, since it only makes since that watermarks being overlaid on
top of images are allowed to be set by the vendor. So, having said that,
I need to think about how that would work a little more. :)

> Only things I can say about it is that maybe it should be "Add
> Images(s)" and "Remove Images(s)" and that maybe "Style" should be
> indented because it isn't a preferences for that Background tab, but for
> the image selected.

Why the duality of the s in the "Images(s)"? Or is that a typo? Yeah, I
guess "Style" should be indented. The "[] Random Image" thing needs a
bit more thought too. I just threw in a checkbox so people wouldn't just
continually ask if randomizing images was part of the design. :P

> >  The rules you propose are a good
> > start, but have a few immediate flaws. What do you do if an image is
> > just over 25% of the screen size, but still in the same aspect ratio?
> > Clearly you don't want to stretch it, unless you really like images that
> > are very pixelated. Center is actually used a lot, for the translucent
> > png images, where you just set a background color, and the image is
> > composited over top of it. What we probably want to do here, is add
> > support for having the image in the 4 corners as well as the center of
> > the screen. This would be useful for the default gnome config. We could
> > just have a gradient, and a watermark foot in the bottom corner. There
> > is a lot we can do here, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only being
> > halfway smart if we are going to implement something like this. :)
>
> Sounds good - if there was a way to check if an image is a tile (ie left
> lines up with right and top with botton) that would be useful too ;)

I do *not* want to be doing the math involved with that. :) I think we
can make some safe assumptions based on image size, aspect ratio, and
the alpha channel, whether or not it's a tiled image.

> > , we should save
> > the image to a local store of images. Normal users don't need to think
> > about it. That's what the program is supposed to do.
>
> Agreed, otherwise people will think the picture is installed and delete
> it.

What I meant was, if people delete the picture, it's metadata would just
be removed and it would not show up in the list. This is really the only
sane way to do it, without copying images all over the place. Then the
user will delete an image on the file system, and then see it not be
listed in the list of backgrounds, and make the association that she
removed it from her drive. If not, she'll whine on a list or IRC
somewhere, and we will just tell her what she did.

> Dobey: I think we both came off like we weren't listening to each other
> b4. I just had some ideas I needed to get out of my head. My
> imlementation of those ideas may have been flawed, maybe the ideas
> themselves, but we're making progress now and I like your mockup.

Great.

> I really needed to know how images would be displayed to the user before
> setting about putting together this module.

I'll clean some things up, and post another mockup.

-- dobey