VisualID SigGraph2004 paper

[Roger Larsson]

On Saturday 10 July 2004 11.53, Holger Waechtler wrote:
> Roger Larsson wrote:
>  > Using "Huge" icon size together with "folder icons reflects content"
>  > gives a nice visual aid for many files.
>
> yes, but for backup copies and derived projects with very similiar
> content the "similiar content versus similiar filename" issue from the
> paper discussion arises again. Maybe a combined icon made from
> thumbnail, visualID and the folder logo would be best.

I think you should select thumbnail or visualID with mime icon blended in.
(probably minimal)

Why?
  Images, video, web pages (html and war), pdf, works well as thumbnail.
  Documents (.doc) works somewhat (rendering of a full page helps)
  Source code, text does not work at all, maybe because it is not
  rendered a full page... (but what is a full page? pipe through a ps
  formatter?)

>  > > Maybe it's an interesting approach that might get incorporated into
>  > > konqueror/kfm/nautilus/thegnomefilemanager, maybe some of you are
>  > > interested in their research results,
>  > > have a good weekend,
>  >
>  > Generating icons from filename only and not contens is an interesting
>  > approach! (I think I would like it)
>
> Given the code snippets in the paper it seems not too hard to implement
> (maybe to enable it as a user-configurable display option for those of
> us who don't want to spend all their memory on icon navigantion - ;).
>

But all this code might actually be faster than reading content from
disk - disk is slow compared to CPU...

But there might be simpler approaches... lets see
take two and two characters and them with 31 use one as x the other as y
in a 32 by 32 icon, first pair uses first VGA16 color then the second...
Scale to icon size...
Or use two pairs to draw lines in a bigger matrix...

> Since thumbnail previews are still useful for a wide range of file types
> the best icon display style might be a combination of the classic
> mime-type icon (or "brand logo" like they call it in the paper in the
> example picture on page 6), the content thumbnail and the visualID
> generated from the file name.

I can not imagine that all three combined could work...

>
> Maybe the content thumbnail size inside the icon might get increased on
> mouse-over in a smooth animation and scaled to full kfm window size on
> shift (or any other hotkey) key press...
>
> Holger

-- 
Roger Larsson
Skellefteå
Sweden