Kuickshow's UI

[Carsten Pfeiffer]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 05:55:03AM -0500, Andreas Pour wrote:
> 
> If I might, I think I have some useability issues with Kuickshow that
> transcend the usu. image viewer debates about thumbnails and layout and
> whatnot, but undoubtedly I will be shown wrong on that score:

Thanks for those comments -- I'll try work on them.
 
>   (1) First I could not find the size of the image - which to me is
> pretty fundamental in an image viewer.  After playing for quite some
> time with it, and benefitting from a shorter file name, I noticed the
> size is in the titlebar - I never would have thought to look there,
> plus, when you have a small image, you cannot see any of the title bar,
> even the window controls are smushed together into one unusable
> combination.

The browser's statusbar will get an entry to show the current image's meta 
information, like size, color depth, etc.
 
>   (2) Not that I knew at the time it was kuickshow, since nowhere did it
> say that.  No menu, no tool bar, nothing useful in the caption, a
> right-click menu without access to help or other info, I had to figure
> it out using 'ps'.

Hm, indeed, it's not a KMainWindow, so it doesn't automatically get the appname 
appended. Will fix.
 
>   (3) The 'ps' did show that the argument "-caption Kuickshow" was
> applied, but, the titlebar in kuickshow instead showed the path to the
> temporary KIOfile, and since this was a temporary download file, it was
> just, useability wise, a distraction and confusion, a confusion b/c it
> did not at all reflect the URL I had clicked on, and a distraction b/c
> its complexity, length and presence of a long string of numbers did
> quite effectively hide from me what I was so earnestly looking for, the
> size of the image.

Ok, I can make it show the real url. Additionally, a "Properties..." entry in the 
contextmenu would help, right?

>   (4) Later I tried running Kuickshow w/out a file name argument, and
> you get something which looks like some cross between a file dialog and
> a main window, with a toolbar but no menu.  If you open a file using

I don't think it needs a menubar. The few options in the toolbar would only be 
duplicated in the menubar.

> this window, the window stays around, but if you open kuickshow with a
> filename on the command line, I could not find a way to get at this
> window, so that I may open another file for viewing.

After you found the mainwindow, you didn't find the help button? ;) You can press 
the space bar to toggle the browser.

This makes for a very efficient way to work: showing an image (e.g. kuickshow 
/foo/bla.jpg) will show only the image, in either fullscreen or a window. That's 
what I expect when I want to view an image...

If you want to view more images in that directory, either hit PageUp/PageDown to 
switch to the previous/next image in that directory, or hit the space bar to show 
the filebrowser.

Choosing every image with a File-open dialog would be very ineffecient. And just 
using Konq for filebrowsing would be take quite some time and resources to start 
one kuickshow process all the time.

Cheers
Carsten Pfeiffer