Integrating Gwenview in kdegraphics?

[Lubos Lunak]

On Thursday 18 January 2007 15:28, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 January 2007 17:58, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> > Of course I won't claim to have an objective view, but I think it would
> > be better to have only Gwenview, if I can make sure it provide all the
> > features Kuickshow provide and can be as fast as Kuickshow (I like
> > challenges! :-) )
>
> I like this 'if' there.  Not really a good idea to replace kuickshow until
> its at least on-par.

 Yeah. While we're at it, I suggest not replacing KEdit by Kate/KWrite until 
they're at least on-par. And, thinking of it, Kicker really sucks in some 
areas compared to KPanel.

 Waiting for Gwenview to provide all the features of Kuickshow and be as fast 
is more or less unrealistic because

- there's no silver bullet
- Kuickshow is so awfully old that it gives it pretty big advantages in some 
areas, e.g. there's no XMLGUI to slow its startup down
- Gwenview is not Kuickshow

 We'd almost never be allowed to get rid of old stuff if we always followed 
this rule. And it doesn't really matter anyway. What matters are things like 
what users actually use (Gwenview is the default in SUSE, Kuickshow is not 
even installed by default, and I don't think that's the only distro), how it 
is and will be maintained (Kuickshow has one commit 4 months ago, quite a 
couple of them last spring and looong period of nothing before that) or what 
is suitable as the default application (Kuickshow may be fine for a geek that 
got used to it 5 years ago, but IMHO its UI is horrible for Joe User).

 This is about the default image viewer and IMHO Gwenview fits the bill. If 
somebody knows a better candidate, speak up. I personally don't think 
Kuickshow would be one, although, indeed, that depends on the requirements. 
If the default image viewer should be just a frame around the image, then 
that's called KView I think.

> As Reinhold also noted, there is lots to do.
> Parts where IMO it still needs a lot of work are;
> * speed

 You actually have no idea how right you are about this. It'd need a real lot 
of work. Just like KDE3 is no match for KDE1. There could be some low-hanging 
fruit, like having a crippled-down variant looking like 'kuickshow image.jpg' 
if that's considered important, but other than that, a lot of work on it has 
been done already, so guess how easy it will be to do more.

> * better incremental loading (no background showing through)

 And you want to keep Kuickshow which has none at all?

> * less clutter (I find the 'toolbar' at the top of the image view widget
> very annoying and out of place)
> * Sane defaults that don't make me panic. Which basically means, much much
> less clutter.
> * Usability review.  The 'control for zoom tool' really should be fixed.

 Well, Aurelien got a bit ... creative recently :). But a toolbar with many 
icons is not a showstopper, is it?

> ps. I think that space for next image is a good thing. Many people expect
> that.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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