Re: About folder backgrounds

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 06:08, Daniel Borgmann wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> There is this nice arstechnica review of GNOME 2.6, and they complain
> about not being able to set the background for each folder individually
> (which would make sense from a spatial POV). Of course we know that's
> possible, just slightly hard to discover.
> One user at another place brought up an interesting question. He asked
> whether it would be possible to apply a background to "this folder and
> all children". His reasoning for wanting this was, that with spatial
> navigation you can easily end up with very similar folders which are
> hard to distinguish (imagine a set of the users files and a backup of
> exactly the same files). If the user could set the background of a whole
> tree, he could immediately identify to which tree this folder belongs. 
> 
> So in general, I'm getting kinda excited about the idea of using
> backgrounds to specifically mark certain folders or even trees. Lately I
> noticed that I'm getting an increasingly hard time to distinguish
> individual windows on my desktop, which seems to be a downside of too
> much consistency. :) Everything looks the same.
> 
> To sum it up, my suggestion would be to make "Set as background for this
> folder" the default (or always pop up the choice menu) and a very nice
> feature would be to have child windows inherit the background of their
> nearest parent window with a custom background (unless it has its own
> custom background).
> 
> What do you think? I believe this would make the custom backgrounds not
> just a visual gimmick but a very powerful feature.

Dave has been experimenting a bit with having colors as markings for
directories in such a way that both the folder icon and the background
of that directory when viewed would have the specified color. This has
some advantage over e.g. emblems, in that the same "item" (the color)
can be used for both background and icon, and that its easy for a user
to pick a color to mean something to them, whereas drawing an emblem and
a matching background isn't something normal users do.

Interesting ideas...

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a scarfaced albino firefighter whom everyone believes is mad. She's a 
bloodthirsty red-headed angel with the soul of a mighty warrior. They fight 
crime!