Hi all, During FOSDEM, Lucas, Felix and I had a bit of time to sit together and talk about the things we would like to focus on for 2.28. I didn't really make notes but I still remember in general lines what we discussed, and thus I'm sending this email trying to summarise it before I completely forget it. As I probably already forgot some details, I expect my mates to complement this email. :)
Basically, we talked about: - Improving startup time. During startup time, eog first loads the list of images into the model and later starts loading the image to open. When opening a single image in a crowded directory, this gives a very bad user experience, since loading the image takes too long. Ideally, we would be able to start eog, load the image first, and then the collection items. The problem with this approach is that, if the collection widget is visible, the user would see it empty and later being filed with elements, which is not really nice. We need to find a balance on this. Something that came to my mind after this meeting is that we could add dummy elements to the model before loading the image and once the loading is done, file them with the real data (kinda überlazy loading). - merging the clutter backend Before the clutter patch starts to rot in bugzilla, it would be great to have a minimal version working that simply mimics the behaviour of the EogScrollView widget using clutter and merge it in trunk after branching for 2.26. Minimal effects can be added later: nice transitions for the slideshows, for instance. Other effects can be added later, otherwise the patch is most likely going to rot. - eog-plugins We have definitively sucked on maintaining eog-plugins in a decent shape and in promoting it. Although there are many plugins around, we have not keep a good track of these, and as a consequence we don't have much feedback on the usefulness of the plugin engine. An action plan for this is required. Some thoughts: Adding some of the plugins that we have in bugzilla (the python console comes to mi mind now), cleaning up a bit the plugins we have, and after 2.26, we release an initial eog-plugins development tarball. This could give some visibility to the existence of this module and hopefully attract some new plugin contributors (and why not, even a maintainer for it :-) - bindings It would be interesting to experiment using gobject-instrospection in an application like eog, to allow an easier extension of the bindings available for plugins. I suspect there are not such use cases of gobject-instrospection yet, thus this could be an interesting contribution to the whole community, since other applications could base work on this. - image cache One of the features that people miss the most from the pre eog-ng era is the cache of images. Right now, response time when switching images is not the best, since we only maintain the currently visible image data loaded. A image cache system, that maintains a limited of images surrounding the currently visible one in the collection, is more than desired. I was talking to KaL, from Evince, and they have a similar cache for the document pages. He explicitly told me not to look at it, since it is pretty hackish, but hey! at least it could give us some ideas :) - animations and svg rendering support This was not discussed in the meeting, but Felix and I were chatting about it. The inability of rendering animated images and a native svg rendering have been a longstanding limitation in eog. Maybe now it's the time to dig into this. A patch to render "moving pictures" is currently available in bugzilla. I have reviewed it briefly and it is a good starting point, but it would be a good idea to think further how can we take this opportunity to implement proper svg rendering. OK. I hope to have recollected well the main points of our discussion. Please feel free to comment further on any of these points. Claudio -- Claudio Saavedra <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Eog-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/eog-list
