[Digikam-devel] New UI mockup on KDE brainstorms

[Risto Saukonpää]

On Tuesday 18 May 2010 09:35:03 Julien Narboux wrote:
> This would remove the need for these labels, we would only need a way
> to say that the system is still busy loading the full size preview.

I think best would be some simple and clean way to notify the user that 
the preview is simple one. And then offer in one click to load the full 
size preview. I would not place the preview to be automatic in background 
because we have situations like:

1. Laptops running on battery. Generating full size preview takes lots of 
CPU.

2. There would need to be a loading animation what would give many a 
exception to wait something to happend or feel that digiKam is slow. And 
when suddenly the preview gets changed, it can feel somekind magic.
 
> What IMHO would be also nice to have in the thumbnail view is a 
> reduction  of the empty space.

Those should take only in place when user has configured the UI to be 
without tags, comments, rating or file name. I had a understanding from 
your idea that the space would be generated automatically. Like if the row 
has no tags, then that row is closer to other rows, what might have tags?

In that case (if I did not misunderstand) the UI would look very weird. 
Some photos would have big space around them and some would not. The 
thumbnailview would look more like loose post stamp book than photo album.

The one great usability effect the current grid layout is that is all the 
times same size and eyes has easy to follow the thumbnails when there is 
not different spaces.

> -4- maybe the mouseover buttons to rotate and select and give stars 
> could be above the thumbnail.
Rotate and select should be above thumbnail. But rating should be under. 
Example in touchscreens, you can rotate and select without seeing the 
thumbnail. But rating can change even then when just placing rating. And 
it is normal to see what you point. On rotating you already have made the 

> -5- the size of the thumbnails could be ajusted such that it divides the 
> width of the thumbview, the selector for thumbnail size would be changed 
> to a selector for the number of thumbnail per row.

That could be nice thing. It just would fix the problem with the right 
side what can leave bigger space if there is just not space for a 
thumbnail. But it is depending the size of the sidepanel.

And that might depend lots of the thumbnail resizing functions. Would the 
thumbnails be needed to be generated again if scaling the sidepanel or 
hiding/showing it?