File dialog: preview widget

[David Faure]

On Friday 07 September 2007, Peter Penz wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> during the port of the file-dialog to KDE 4 and reading some discussions about 
> the "cluttered file dialog" (http://dot.kde.org/1188928003/1188936931, 
> http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=18563) I was wondering about the 
> preview widget: http://enzosworld.gmxhome.de/temp/file-dialog.png
> 
> I personally never used the option to turn off the automatic preview by 
> unchecking the "Automatic preview" checkbox and hence I also never needed 
> the "Preview" button. If I don't want to have a preview, I just turn off the 
> preview widget completely...
> 
> It is not my intention to remove any functionality that is needed, but in this 
> case I could not think of a usecase where using the checkbox/button has any 
> benefit against just turning off the preview.
> 
> Is there something I'm missing here? If not, I'd like to remove the checkbox 
> and the preview button, as it adds quite a lot visual clutter.

I think it can be useful in case of very large images where the previews would take
a long time to show up, so the user could have more control over when exactly to
make a preview. But well, I can't decide about usefulness vs visual clutter for others.
I just want to point out that the users of the file dialog are all KDE apps so you probably
want to ask on kde-core-devel rather than on kfm-devel (which is limited to konqueror and dolphin people).

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).