From: Alan Horkan (horkana_at_maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Mon Dec 15 2003 - 12:58:48 EST
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 07:26:30 -0800 (PST)
> From: Dom Lachowicz <domlachowicz_at_yahoo.com>
> To: abiword-dev_at_abisource.com
> Subject: Re: commit: Document server code for AbiCommand.
<snip>
> This sounds like a genuinely bad idea (tm). It's
> probably not yours, but I still feel that this has to
> be said.
This is what I thought before, way back when Nautilus first started
thumnailing text based documents (although I used harsher language and
probably mentioned White Elephant a few times).
Martin explained that he found it extremely useful because he (in an
extremely organised manner) puts a title or description at the top of
every document, so a thumbnail/preview of the first few lines is actually
useful (and as result I've tried to be more organised and do something
similar). It strikes me that the Title, description, or other metadata is
what would be most useful in a File Manager. There may be other
circumstances where graphical thumbnails of abiword might be useful but I
dont think the file manager or the 'document asssociation engine' (aka
Dashboard) is it.
I use very little formatting on my documents and I may be able to
distinguish some jotted down notes from a formal letter but most of the
time a thumbnailing feature is not much use. Maybe I should start putting
background images in all my documents? Aaah, even better would be if I
could specify a custom Icon for anything I wanted (and maybe some sort of
pen emblem on all the Wordprocessor documents. Being able to label the
folder icons all sorts of 'hot colours' too, or even as I've seen in some
file managers, overlay the folder icon with thumbnails of some of the
files inside it. I'm getting a bit nostalgic for all the messing with
icons i used to do on the old Mac (and rambling wildly offtopic).
Thumbnailing of web pages works slighly better because at the moment so
many websites have a lot of graphic design and you have some chance of
distinguishing one website from another but not much chance of
distinguishing pages within a site.
I had a point there somewhere but I think I've lost it. I'm sure this
work will prove useful to some people and interesting to a whole lot more,
but I agree with Dom that the application of this idea is a bit odd but I
suspect that other interesting uses will come out of this.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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