Re: filesel notes

[Thomas Leonard <tal00r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Sat, Mar 09, 2002 at 10:06:22PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I got really sick of bugzilla today, and do think the filesel widget
> is a very high priority post-GTK-2, so I went ahead and collected the
> following data.
> 
> This document has _nothing_ to do with the UI, other than making sure
> the API doesn't depend on it. So don't get excited about another
> lengthy filesel thread about what buttons it has. ;-) This thread is
> boring.
[...]

Could I add the ROX GtkSavebox stuff to 'prior art'? It would be really
great for us to be able to have ROX-style saving in all Gtk apps (and for
ex-Windows users to have GNOME-style saving in ROX apps).

See bug #51051.

Basically, our savebox is very minimal, with just a text entry for the
pathname and a draggable icon representing the file. The user can either
enter a complete path and press Return, or drag the icon to a filer
window.

This is more-or-less possible with the current API, except that we need
the MIME-type for the data to choose the icon, and notification of when
the save is complete.

However, we also allow dragging the icon directly into another program, in
which case the data may be sent via the X-server, or via a scrap file (in
either case, the data shouldn't be marked unmodified). This could be used,
for example, to drag an image from the Gimp directly into Gnumeric, etc.

Finally, we allow dragging to a filer running on a remote machine, in
which case the data may go via the X server, but the data IS marked
unmodified on success!

Separate from the widget in the bug above (which has recently been
converted to Gtk+-2.0, but the new version isn't attached to the bug)
there is alsa a python implementation of the widget. This is described in
some detail in this tutorial (scroll to the 'Saving' section):

	http://rox.sourceforge.net/tutor_edit.php3

The mechanics of the saving system are descibed in the XDS protocol:

	http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/

But, at the moment we'd just like the API to include this. The above only
applies to saving data (all our loading is done by drag-and-drop anyway).

Thanks,


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r ecs soton ac uk		tal197 users sourceforge net