Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-11 Thread Martyn Russell

On 05/11/2012 11:30 AM, Michael Biebl wrote:

2012/5/11 Martyn Russell:

On 05/10/2012 08:24 PM, John Stowers wrote:


Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought GNOME only depended on
tracker-store and not the indexer?



The two are in the same tarball release, so it would be up to packagers to
separate them and AFAIK, that's not been the case at all (at least on Fedora
and Ubuntu).


Hey Michael,


This is not quite true. Ubuntu is using the Debian package, and in
Debian I've split the miners into separate packages.
I.e., you can use tracker-store without having the filesystem miner installed.


Interesting, I didn't know. Thanks for the clarification.

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-11 Thread Michael Biebl
2012/5/11 Martyn Russell :
> On 05/10/2012 08:24 PM, John Stowers wrote:
>>
>> Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought GNOME only depended on
>> tracker-store and not the indexer?
>
>
> The two are in the same tarball release, so it would be up to packagers to
> separate them and AFAIK, that's not been the case at all (at least on Fedora
> and Ubuntu).

This is not quite true. Ubuntu is using the Debian package, and in
Debian I've split the miners into separate packages.
I.e., you can use tracker-store without having the filesystem miner installed.

Cheers,
Michael


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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Martyn Russell

On 05/10/2012 08:24 PM, John Stowers wrote:


The point is that we already use Tracker in GNOME (Documents and Boxes
depend on it) and I don't see any reason for existing apps to stop
using it and while we could compromise on some code-duplication, its
certainly a big issue if there is two entities harvesting metadata
from tons of photos on every GNOME installation.




Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought GNOME only depended on
tracker-store and not the indexer?


The two are in the same tarball release, so it would be up to packagers 
to separate them and AFAIK, that's not been the case at all (at least on 
Fedora and Ubuntu).



If GNOME now depends on the indexer, that is incredibly good news.
Perhaps this cycle we might get useful search in GNOME; in nautilus
and the shell at least


We've been pushing integration in various ways for a while. I recently 
helped the tracker-search GNOME shell extension maintainer improve his 
work to offer much better sorting of results... see:


  https://github.com/cewee/tracker-search

Really nice to be able to find a document out of thousands in a seconds 
from the shell.


We only really have tagging support in Nautilus, I would like to have 
replaced search by now, but it's just not happened yet.



I have been using tracker happily for years to manage large
collections of papers and documents and could not live without it.


Great to hear :)

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread John Stowers
>
> The point is that we already use Tracker in GNOME (Documents and Boxes
> depend on it) and I don't see any reason for existing apps to stop
> using it and while we could compromise on some code-duplication, its
> certainly a big issue if there is two entities harvesting metadata
> from tons of photos on every GNOME installation.



Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought GNOME only depended on
tracker-store and not the indexer?

If GNOME now depends on the indexer, that is incredibly good news.
Perhaps this cycle we might get useful search in GNOME; in nautilus
and the shell at least

I have been using tracker happily for years to manage large
collections of papers and documents and could not live without it.

John


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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Bastien Nocera
On Thu, 2012-05-10 at 19:10 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:

> We would gladly ONLY index data that's of interest to the user/desktop 
> applications if you could come up with heuristics for that. I touched on 
> that somewhat in my response earlier. Also, having superfluous coverage 
> is better than wondering why a file is not indexed; we get more reports 
> of the former generally.
> 
> Perhaps we do approach this the wrong way (detecting files 
> created/updated instead of asking apps to report files they're 
> interested in), but one had to come before the other and you don't get 
> community support/adoption without a working solution first.

We're going off on a tangent, and I'm not sure I have a good answer for
this. Applications telling you which types of file they want to have the
metadata indexed for might be one way.

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak

It is my understanding that Jon had discussions with the developers of these
applications, and for various reasons it was decided that writing something
from scratch is better. For EoG and GThumb the reason given was that their
maintainers did not have time to work on a major redesign, and for Shotwell it
was an architectural issue with the program.

Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenting something. :-)



Debarshi,

Can you repurpose gThumb to meet your goals? It meets many (most?) of 
your goals already, and lives in the gnome ecosystem (bugzilla, git, 
etc). It has a plugin system for experimenting with new features 
(including new metadata sources). It already has 
Flickr/Facebook/whatever uploading. The sidebar already groups things 
into a tree of real filesystems and devices, plus artificial groupings 
("Catalogs", "Selections"). It already has editing and printing. It has 
no sqlite dependency.


Mostly, the effort would be to add the shell integration bits, and a 
slicker gnome-shell-ish UI. The basic image-handling framework is there 
already.


The primary maintainer, Paolo, indicated that he didn't have time to do 
the work himself [1], but if you're keen on doing the work, I doubt he'd 
be opposed to a "next generation" unstable branch...


This is meant as a helpful suggestion, rather than as stop-energy or 
bike-shedding :-)


- Mike


[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gthumb-list/2011-December/msg0.html
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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Martyn Russell

On 05/10/2012 06:32 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:

On Thu, 2012-05-10 at 20:14 +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Alberto Ruiz  wrote:

Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it,
and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most
important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data
store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only
accepted data store in the desktop.


The point is that we already use Tracker in GNOME (Documents and Boxes
depend on it) and I don't see any reason for existing apps to stop
using it and while we could compromise on some code-duplication, its
certainly a big issue if there is two entities harvesting metadata
from tons of photos on every GNOME installation.


That's not a good enough reason. Sure it would be nicer if all the apps
used the same technology, but it shouldn't get in the way of producing
great apps with a great experience.

As for the "two entities harvesting metadata", does it make sense for
Tracker to index things that nothing is interested in? I'll let you
discuss this amongst yourselves ;)


We would gladly ONLY index data that's of interest to the user/desktop 
applications if you could come up with heuristics for that. I touched on 
that somewhat in my response earlier. Also, having superfluous coverage 
is better than wondering why a file is not indexed; we get more reports 
of the former generally.


Perhaps we do approach this the wrong way (detecting files 
created/updated instead of asking apps to report files they're 
interested in), but one had to come before the other and you don't get 
community support/adoption without a working solution first.


--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.
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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread William Jon McCann
Hi,

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Alberto Ruiz  wrote:
...
> That's not a reason at all, Yorba seems open to work on making Shotwell more
> GNOME 3 friendly... so those widgets can be shared anyway
>
>>
>> Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it
>> is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application.
>>
>> So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
>> existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
>> scratch?
>
>
> No.
>
> That makes as much sense as saying that Epiphany should have been written
> from scratch when the "Web" designs were proposed. We had a browser, a new
> design, and developers happy to follow those deisgns.

Sorry, that is totally irrelevant. The real story is that we had folks
show up, say they were excited about the design, have the chops to
pull it off, and want to work closely with us in the open to make it
real. How they went about coding it was entirely up to them. They
chose the most effective way for themselves. That happened to be
reusing code - as it often does.

> Writing software from scratch is almost always a bad idea:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog69.html

Which is why it was pointed out that Photos has/can/will reuse a lot
of existing code (from Documents, eog, etc). This is particularly
important for allowing us to experiment with our design patterns.
Despite what you may have heard from some folks not involved in GNOME
design, we have been working very hard on this for quite some time
now. The patterns emerge as we explore solving new design problems.
This is why it is important to explore a variety of different
application types. And to have a high bandwidth, trusting, fluid, and
reactive relationship with the developers. See
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/ for more examples of these apps we
want to experiment with.

> Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it,
> and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most
> important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data
> store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only
> accepted data store in the desktop.

Sure, Shotwell is great. No denying that. I recommend you use it.

What we should not be doing, however, is discouraging new work by
highly motivated and talented community members like Debarshi just
because there is another app out there in the world. He's excited
about the designs, wants to work in the open, understands the GNOME
way, and is really excellent to work with. No one else has stepped up
to make Photos yet.

Regarding the data formats and such. In some cases it doesn't make a
bit of difference. But there are design implications. For example, we
need the core apps in the finding and reminding set to work very
closely together.

  * The Web view must be able to save photos in the Photos
storage/library
(https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Web#Tentative_Design).
  * Content selection must be able to access the Photos
storage/library
(https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/ContentSelection#Tentative_Design)

> If Yorba is open to follow the designs from the GNOME design team, I can't
> see any reason why we shouldn't go that way. IMHO is the quickest and more
> sustainable path to have a great photo browsing experience for GNOME 3.

I have been talking to the Yorba folks for a few years now. In fact,
Matthias and I were very early adopters of Shotwell and provided some
of the earliest patches and shipped it (in Fedora) before anyone else.
I think it is an open question whether the Shotwell team is even
interested in making Shotwell into Photos, making a core GNOME app,
doing design in the open, allowing our translation and bug teams to do
their thing. I would love to see that happen. However, I can certainly
see why it would be very challenging to try to change the direction,
design, and architecture of a stable and widely deployed app. I have
been involved in way too many of those kind of direction changes to
recommend it to anyone. It is much better in my opinion to reuse the
code where it makes sense and start off on a new direction without the
fetters of past expectations. And most importantly be free to fail.
With Photos we can be free to fail, faster.

That said, I love the work the Yorba team has been doing and I applaud
them for targeting the GNOME user experience. That's good for
everyone. I would love to work more closely with them. But, obviously,
that is really up to them. Regardless of what decisions they make
regarding Shotwell I hope to work more closely with this awesome team.
In the open :) But either way I'm happy to just have them making great
apps for GNOME.

Jon
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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Bastien Nocera
On Thu, 2012-05-10 at 20:14 +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Alberto Ruiz  wrote:
> > Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it,
> > and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most
> > important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data
> > store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only
> > accepted data store in the desktop.
> 
> The point is that we already use Tracker in GNOME (Documents and Boxes
> depend on it) and I don't see any reason for existing apps to stop
> using it and while we could compromise on some code-duplication, its
> certainly a big issue if there is two entities harvesting metadata
> from tons of photos on every GNOME installation.

That's not a good enough reason. Sure it would be nicer if all the apps
used the same technology, but it shouldn't get in the way of producing
great apps with a great experience.

As for the "two entities harvesting metadata", does it make sense for
Tracker to index things that nothing is interested in? I'll let you
discuss this amongst yourselves ;)

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Alberto Ruiz  wrote:
> Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it,
> and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most
> important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data
> store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only
> accepted data store in the desktop.

The point is that we already use Tracker in GNOME (Documents and Boxes
depend on it) and I don't see any reason for existing apps to stop
using it and while we could compromise on some code-duplication, its
certainly a big issue if there is two entities harvesting metadata
from tons of photos on every GNOME installation.

> If Yorba is open to follow the designs from the GNOME design team, I can't
> see any reason why we shouldn't go that way. IMHO is the quickest and more
> sustainable path to have a great photo browsing experience for GNOME 3.

+1 and its really nice to see that Yorba is very serious about GNOME
integration. Having said that I do feel that they need to do a bit
more on this front. For starters they really should use our infra
(bugzilla, git, mailing-list etc).

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124
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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Alberto Ruiz
2012/5/9 Debarshi Ray 

> > hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.
>
> Hi, Adam! We met in Berlin at the Collabora party during the Desktop
> Summit.
> You probably remember me as one of the authors of Solang.
>
> For those who don't know Solang (http://git.gnome.org/browse/solang)
> was a photo manager that I wrote during the dying days of GNOME
> 2.x. It used Tracker >= 0.7.x as its meta-data store and GEGL (a bit
> too ahead of its time, maybe) for editing. The viewing, tagging,
> searching was functional, but the editing part was quite rudimentary
> when I stopped working on it for various reasons.
>
> > Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below:
> > to be a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting
> > basic manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on.
> > ??If the GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those
> goals,
> > we're highly interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or
> > improved to get there.
>
> Well, one thing, I guess we all agree, is that reinventing the wheel
> is bad.  Especially so for a project like ours.
>
> Having said that, one thing which I have always complained about
> Shotwell was the fact that it asks me to import my photos into what
> looks like a private SQLite database. A quick "git grep sqlite" does
> reveal some dependency on it.  You would remember that I discussed
> with you and Jim Nelson in Berlin about the possibility of using
> Tracker instead. At that point you had reservations about Tracker and
> were reluctant to use it. Tracker is a complex beast and there are
> consequences in having a hard dependency on it.
>



> But today, the Documents application has a hard dependency on
> Tracker. It uses it for querying documents, marking them as favourite,
> and so on. And in many ways, the Photos application is very closely
> related to Documents. So, while one can find ways to implement the
> same using a different technology, does it really make sense to
> diverge so much in the underlying implementation for these core
> applications?  Or should we try to stay as close to each other
> possible and consolidate on the underlying foundations?
>
> Secondly, Boxes, Documents and Photos (can potentially) share a lot of
> widgets.
>

That's not a reason at all, Yorba seems open to work on making Shotwell
more GNOME 3 friendly... so those widgets can be shared anyway


> Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it
> is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application.
>
> So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
> existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
> scratch?
>

No.

That makes as much sense as saying that Epiphany should have been written
from scratch when the "Web" designs were proposed. We had a browser, a new
design, and developers happy to follow those deisgns.

Writing software from scratch is almost always a bad idea:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog69.html

Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on
it, and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the
most important things to take into account, you worry too much about the
data store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only
accepted data store in the desktop.

If Yorba is open to follow the designs from the GNOME design team, I can't
see any reason why we shouldn't go that way. IMHO is the quickest and more
sustainable path to have a great photo browsing experience for GNOME 3.


-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz
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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Federico Mena Quintero
On Thu, 2012-05-10 at 02:47 +, Debarshi Ray wrote:
> So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
> existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
> scratch?

Shotwell's database is presumably optimized for what Shotwell needs to
do.  Tracker, as a generic metadata storage, could index that via an
appropriate plugin and mirror Shotwell's metadata in the Tracker DB.

As for the user interface, Shotwell's *works* right now and has its own
assumptions and reasons.  The design page for Photos doesn't say much
about the intended behavior of the program, yet.  As far as I can tell,
that page has mockups for the toplevel views - the first view in the
"one window drilldown" pattern [1].   However, there is no description
of the levels below that one.  What happens when you select an Album
(kind of like an Event in Shotwell's parlance)?  Do you get shown the
same as for Places or People?  Could those be implemented just with
Shotwell's concept of tags, some face recognition, and some geographic
info?  (What happens when your photos don't have GPS data and you select
Places?)  Is the Photos view a timeline of everything?  Why are the
connected devices like phones and cameras shown in the Albums, and what
happens when you select them?

If the design just hasn't contemplated those things yet, it's perfectly
fine, of course - it's pending work.  But you'd probably get something
working much faster by refactoring Shotwell's code and exploring a new
toplevel UI for it, than by writing everything from scratch.

(By the way, also check out the comparisons and sub-patterns in Jenifer
Tidwell's "Picture Manager" pattern [2].)

[1] http://designinginterfaces.com/patterns/one-window-drilldown/
[2] http://designinginterfaces.com/patterns/picture-manager/

  Federico

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-10 Thread Martyn Russell

On 05/10/2012 03:47 AM, Debarshi Ray wrote:

hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.


Hi, Adam! We met in Berlin at the Collabora party during the Desktop Summit.
You probably remember me as one of the authors of Solang.

For those who don't know Solang (http://git.gnome.org/browse/solang)
was a photo manager that I wrote during the dying days of GNOME
2.x. It used Tracker>= 0.7.x as its meta-data store and GEGL (a bit
too ahead of its time, maybe) for editing. The viewing, tagging,
searching was functional, but the editing part was quite rudimentary
when I stopped working on it for various reasons.


Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below:
to be a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting
basic manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on.
??If the GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those goals,
we're highly interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or
improved to get there.


Well, one thing, I guess we all agree, is that reinventing the wheel
is bad.  Especially so for a project like ours.


I think the photo applications around GNOME are one of the most 
re-invented of all :)



Having said that, one thing which I have always complained about
Shotwell was the fact that it asks me to import my photos into what
looks like a private SQLite database. A quick "git grep sqlite" does
reveal some dependency on it.  You would remember that I discussed
with you and Jim Nelson in Berlin about the possibility of using
Tracker instead. At that point you had reservations about Tracker and
were reluctant to use it. Tracker is a complex beast and there are
consequences in having a hard dependency on it.


I will admit, I was a little disappointed with the SQLite dependency 
recently too. Mostly because I moved my photos to a server (from a USB 
external SSD). Of course, I likely could have fixed up the db myself, 
but then I realised that storing photos by date seems quite rudimentary. 
In a lot of cases, events occur over > 1 day and I found myself wishing 
Shotwell had created $year/$event/ directory structures (or something 
like that) so I could easily navigate the file system there AND when 
using tools like Rygel or other UPNP servers, the folder structure would 
make complete sense to navigate there too. As it is right now, finding 
images on the disk is easy enough in Shotwell, but not otherwise.



But today, the Documents application has a hard dependency on
Tracker. It uses it for querying documents, marking them as favourite,
and so on. And in many ways, the Photos application is very closely
related to Documents. So, while one can find ways to implement the
same using a different technology, does it really make sense to
diverge so much in the underlying implementation for these core
applications?  Or should we try to stay as close to each other
possible and consolidate on the underlying foundations?


With Tracker, I think it is a useful tool but what makes life harder for 
us as a community, is that we're not selling a complete sealed solution 
like Apple are. With Apple, you have iTunes and a way of handling ALL 
media. This is useful because then your devices keep media in the *right 
places*. With Tracker, we have to guess (to some extent) and it can be 
hit-and-miss. For example, recently we had a case where someone was 
downloading a lot of kernel tarballs to the XDG Downloads area and we 
(of course) index that recursively by default. That's not a usual user 
case, but it is noticed. Apple doesn't have this problem.


(it has been suggested that we avoid indexing source code by default)

I've also seen other issues recently on Fedora (more so) and Ubuntu 
where Tracker extractors or extensions (like GStreamer or the GNOME 
Shell extension 'tracker-search') don't work because distros aren't 
providing all the packages (GStreamer backends or GIR) by default to 
help Tracker operate to its potential. This looks bad for Tracker and I 
think what we're still doing (even now) is improving the defaults to 
help distros avoid complaints from users (the SCHED_IDLE situation is a 
classic case).


There is also a divide between some community members as to how Tracker 
should operate, either:


a) It's told what to index and when (there are some APIs for this)
b) It's monitoring and automated (as is currently done)


Secondly, Boxes, Documents and Photos (can potentially) share a lot of
widgets.

Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it
is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application.

So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
scratch?


On the UI side, I like both Shotwell and the new mockups for 
gnome-photos. I think the later has more of the Apple look/feel, but I 
wonder how far shotwell is from replicating that.



However, one thing that I really like about Shotwell

Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-09 Thread Debarshi Ray
> hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.

Hi, Adam! We met in Berlin at the Collabora party during the Desktop Summit.
You probably remember me as one of the authors of Solang.

For those who don't know Solang (http://git.gnome.org/browse/solang)
was a photo manager that I wrote during the dying days of GNOME
2.x. It used Tracker >= 0.7.x as its meta-data store and GEGL (a bit
too ahead of its time, maybe) for editing. The viewing, tagging,
searching was functional, but the editing part was quite rudimentary
when I stopped working on it for various reasons.

> Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below:
> to be a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting
> basic manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on.
> ??If the GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those goals,
> we're highly interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or
> improved to get there.

Well, one thing, I guess we all agree, is that reinventing the wheel
is bad.  Especially so for a project like ours.

Having said that, one thing which I have always complained about
Shotwell was the fact that it asks me to import my photos into what
looks like a private SQLite database. A quick "git grep sqlite" does
reveal some dependency on it.  You would remember that I discussed
with you and Jim Nelson in Berlin about the possibility of using
Tracker instead. At that point you had reservations about Tracker and
were reluctant to use it. Tracker is a complex beast and there are
consequences in having a hard dependency on it.

But today, the Documents application has a hard dependency on
Tracker. It uses it for querying documents, marking them as favourite,
and so on. And in many ways, the Photos application is very closely
related to Documents. So, while one can find ways to implement the
same using a different technology, does it really make sense to
diverge so much in the underlying implementation for these core
applications?  Or should we try to stay as close to each other
possible and consolidate on the underlying foundations?

Secondly, Boxes, Documents and Photos (can potentially) share a lot of
widgets.

Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it
is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application.

So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
scratch?

However, one thing that I really like about Shotwell is its editing
controls.  This is why I got the idea that Shotwell aims to fill the
gap between GIMP/Darktable/Rawstudio on one side and a very elementary
photo application on the other. In fact, the designs for Photos has a
"Open with $PHOTOLAB" option.

So now, that there seems to have been some kind of misunderstanding,
all this is up for discussion.

> Integration with GNOME has always been a top priority for us and we're open
> to prioritizing development tasks that core GNOME developers feel are
> important.

I am curious about the way you embed Flickr's API_SECRET in
FlickrPublishing.vala. Ofcourse, what else can you do? Even in a
proprietary application the key has to be in a form that is readable
by the binary. But is Flickr happy about this?

The reason I am asking is that various people have requested adding
support for Flickr in GNOME Online Accounts. However, unless we have a
clear answer about this issue, GNOME, as a project, can not really
recommend its downstreams to just slip in a key somewhere in the
binary package.

> I'd love to see us
> work together rather than embarking on separate efforts.

True.

So, is Geary (http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/geary/wiki) going to
be the new Mail (https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Mail) application
for GNOME? :-)


Happy hacking,
Debarshi

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-09 Thread Adam Dingle
A quick followup: in my last post I didn't mean to accuse the GNOME design team 
of being uncooperative.  In fact, we have had some past discussions about this 
in which we've realized that there are differences between Shotwell today and 
the vision in the GNOME Photos design document, both in the underlying data 
model and in the user interface.  I've just now been in touch with Jon McCann, 
who explained that he thought we had concluded together that Shotwell was too 
different and that GNOME Photos should be a separate app.  This might have been 
a misunderstanding, since I think it's not yet clear whether these programs 
should be separate.  We'll discuss this more soon.  Debarshi, you're certainly 
welcome to be part of that discussion.

adam

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 2:11 AM, Adam Dingle  wrote:
Debarshi,

hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.

Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below: to be 
a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting basic 
manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on.  If the 
GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those goals, we're highly 
interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or improved to get 
there.  Integration with GNOME has always been a top priority for us and we're 
open to prioritizing development tasks that core GNOME developers feel are 
important.  If it's felt that some features in Shotwell are unnecessary for a 
basic photo program, we're also open to factoring those out of the base program 
into plugins.  We have an active development team and an enthusiastic user 
community.  I'd love to see us work together rather than embarking on separate 
efforts.

adam

On Fri, 4 May 2012 15:24:38, Debarshi Ray  wrote:

Hello everybody!

Around 10 days ago I started implementing Photos as laid out in these designs:
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Photos

The Git tree is at: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-photos

Currently the application does not do much other than showing a blank window,
but most of the underlying plumbing is in place and from here on I expect the
program to start becoming useful.

A guiding principle of mine has been to share as much of the UI code and the
basic structure of the application with Documents. Documents and Photos have
a lot in common, and even though one is not going to be a clone of the other,
it makes sense not to reinvent the wheel.

Why u no like Javascript?!
--

I toyed with the idea of writing Photos in Javascript. However, after spending
an evening fighting with a Python 3 / gobject-introspection based application
and failing to get anywhere, and the fact that I am not familiar with all the
ins and outs of GJS, I decided to stick with something that I know inside out.

Having said that, the custom widgets written for Documents are written in C,
so we just copy them over into the Photos tree. Also, the relevant widgets
from Eye of GNOME, if required.

This brings us to ...

Eye of GNOME, GThumb or Shotwell


It is my understanding that Jon had discussions with the developers of these
applications, and for various reasons it was decided that writing something
from scratch is better. For EoG and GThumb the reason given was that their
maintainers did not have time to work on a major redesign, and for Shotwell it
was an architectural issue with the program.

Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenting something. :-)

Future plans


At the moment I am not going to push Photos as a widely publicized feature for
GNOME 3.6, but I do expect it to be functional in a "preview release" sort of
way.

Will keep you informed as things unfold.


Happy hacking,
Debarshi

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Re: Introducing Photos

2012-05-09 Thread Adam Dingle
Debarshi,

hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.

Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below: to be 
a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting basic 
manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on.  If the 
GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those goals, we're highly 
interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or improved to get 
there.  Integration with GNOME has always been a top priority for us and we're 
open to prioritizing development tasks that core GNOME developers feel are 
important.  If it's felt that some features in Shotwell are unnecessary for a 
basic photo program, we're also open to factoring those out of the base program 
into plugins.  We have an active development team and an enthusiastic user 
community.  I'd love to see us work together rather than embarking on separate 
efforts.

adam

On Fri, 4 May 2012 15:24:38, Debarshi Ray  wrote:

Hello everybody!

Around 10 days ago I started implementing Photos as laid out in these designs:
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Photos

The Git tree is at: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-photos

Currently the application does not do much other than showing a blank window,
but most of the underlying plumbing is in place and from here on I expect the
program to start becoming useful.

A guiding principle of mine has been to share as much of the UI code and the
basic structure of the application with Documents. Documents and Photos have
a lot in common, and even though one is not going to be a clone of the other,
it makes sense not to reinvent the wheel.

Why u no like Javascript?!
--

I toyed with the idea of writing Photos in Javascript. However, after spending
an evening fighting with a Python 3 / gobject-introspection based application
and failing to get anywhere, and the fact that I am not familiar with all the
ins and outs of GJS, I decided to stick with something that I know inside out.

Having said that, the custom widgets written for Documents are written in C,
so we just copy them over into the Photos tree. Also, the relevant widgets
from Eye of GNOME, if required.

This brings us to ...

Eye of GNOME, GThumb or Shotwell


It is my understanding that Jon had discussions with the developers of these
applications, and for various reasons it was decided that writing something
from scratch is better. For EoG and GThumb the reason given was that their
maintainers did not have time to work on a major redesign, and for Shotwell it
was an architectural issue with the program.

Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenting something. :-)

Future plans


At the moment I am not going to push Photos as a widely publicized feature for
GNOME 3.6, but I do expect it to be functional in a "preview release" sort of
way.

Will keep you informed as things unfold.


Happy hacking,
Debarshi
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Introducing Photos

2012-05-04 Thread Debarshi Ray
Hello everybody!

Around 10 days ago I started implementing Photos as laid out in these designs:
https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Photos

The Git tree is at: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-photos

Currently the application does not do much other than showing a blank window,
but most of the underlying plumbing is in place and from here on I expect the
program to start becoming useful.

A guiding principle of mine has been to share as much of the UI code and the
basic structure of the application with Documents. Documents and Photos have
a lot in common, and even though one is not going to be a clone of the other,
it makes sense not to reinvent the wheel.

Why u no like Javascript?!
--

I toyed with the idea of writing Photos in Javascript. However, after spending
an evening fighting with a Python 3 / gobject-introspection based application
and failing to get anywhere, and the fact that I am not familiar with all the
ins and outs of GJS, I decided to stick with something that I know inside out.

Having said that, the custom widgets written for Documents are written in C,
so we just copy them over into the Photos tree. Also, the relevant widgets
from Eye of GNOME, if required.

This brings us to ...

Eye of GNOME, GThumb or Shotwell


It is my understanding that Jon had discussions with the developers of these
applications, and for various reasons it was decided that writing something
from scratch is better. For EoG and GThumb the reason given was that their
maintainers did not have time to work on a major redesign, and for Shotwell it
was an architectural issue with the program.

Please feel free to correct me if I am misrepresenting something. :-)

Future plans


At the moment I am not going to push Photos as a widely publicized feature for
GNOME 3.6, but I do expect it to be functional in a "preview release" sort of
way.

Will keep you informed as things unfold.


Happy hacking,
Debarshi


-- 
Give a man ssh access, he'll still need a computer. Give him a computer, he'll
give ssh access to you.  -- Ashish Shukla


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