Re: GTK+ replacements for libgnomeui widgets

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

"James M. Cape" <jcape ignore-your tv> writes:

> > Well, the GnomePixmapEntry widget has always been a usability
> > nightmare and I strongly hope that no such widget will ever make it
> > into GTK+. If you want users to choose an icon, then present them with
> > a set of icons, not with a file chooser widget. The user shouldn't
> > have to care about the location of the icon/image file on disk.
> 
> I agree with this sentiment, but there are cases (such as gdmphotosetup,
> the panel background picker, and the evolution contact editor) where
> there is no central repository of images or (currently) reasonable place
> to start looking. Also, the user may very well want to use random image
> file X (say I want "/mnt/smbserver1/Images/someimg.png"), there's no way
> for GTK+ to do that currently. In those cases, a plain file-chooser is
> definitely preferred over nothing :-).

Sure, that's why libgimpwidgets provides GimpFileEntry. So there is
probably a need for this. But then it should be a widget which is not
specific about icons or images. If it provides a more general API as
you already suggested yourself, then it's certainly useful.

Here's the (not very sophisticated) GimpFileEntry API:

 http://developer.gimp.org/api/2.0/libgimpwidgets/GimpFileEntry.html

> The sticky part of doing an ImageChooser like those above is
> handling directories with lots of large images
> (e.g. /usr/share/backgrounds), the best option is for which some
> kind of of simple thumbnailing API to work with GdkPixbuf &
> ~/.thumbnails, e.g.:
> 
> GdkPixbuf *gdk_pixbuf_thumbnail_new (const gchar *filename);
> void gdk_pixbuf_thumbnail_save (const gchar *filename, GdkPixbuf
> *pixbuf);

There is libgimpthumb which can be used w/o The GIMP but isn't
packaged stand-alone yet. I wouldn't object to making it more
generally available (and changing the namespace). As it stands it has
a dependency on libgimpmath (for generating MD5 sums) but except from
that it only uses GObject and GdkPixbuf:

 http://developer.gimp.org/api/2.0/libgimpthumb


Sven