Re: Rethinking emblems

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 15:15 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> I have done a small writeup on some smarter way of using emblems.
> Currently most of them are nothing more but pretty pictures you can 
> attach to your folders, but they have a lot of potential.
> Some of the stuff have been brought up before, like the watermarking of 
> folders.
> Well, anyway, here is the text:
> http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/rethinking-emblems/
> 
> Hope you can live with some misspellings.
> - Andreas

All interesting ideas. I like the automatic embleming. Some random
musings:

We would need a watermarking image to go with each emblem. This
complicates the custom emblems handling, as i doubt many people will be
able to draw both an emblem and a watermark. Of course, some people do
really use custom emblems, so maybe we should allow those without
watermarks?

Another thing we've discussed before the old macos way of marking stuff,
by just using colors (chosen from a set). Colors are much easier to use
by the user for custom stuff, as you don't have to draw something, and
its easier to "connect", say blue files with "files from the foobar
project" than a pre-drawn emblem like the current ones. Also, you can
then use the color as a background/watermark for the folder.

The question of inheriting watermarks is interesting. We have some
requests for the background setting feature to be recursive. I think
watermarks should probably be recursive.

What if one folder gets several (automatic) emblems. Say it contains
both jpegs and mp3s. What watermark do we use then?

Are emblem watermarks really useful for the case of auto-detected
emblems from the contents of the folder? I mean, when we're displaying
the folder itself the folder type should be visible from the icons of
the files in it.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a gun-slinging drug-addicted jungle king haunted by an iconic dead 
American confidante She's a cosmopolitan mutant widow in the witness 
protection program. They fight crime!