RE: GWorkspace.app Feature Request-- Tabbed Shelf

[Vaisburd, Haim]

Hello Fred, Nicolas, Enrico and Charles,

I'm sorry to break into your conversation, I'm a beginner gnustepper,
and, moreover, I do not have an experience with file manager programming
(yet?) so, please, just ignore if the following is obvious or doesn't make
sense, but...

> I thought the plan was to try to implement freedesktop.org's thumbnail
> specs, if possible.
> Charles

I've read the spec.
I though, that, instead, the best thing to standartize
is the protocol of the service that provides the thumbnail images.

Instead of going to ~/.thumbnails, the application that wants a thumbnail
would ask it from this service. Storage place, hashing scheme, update
policy,
deletion algorithm would then become and implementation details of that
service (and yes, they are outlined nicely in this article).

E.g.
@protocol GSThumbnailRepository

(NSImage *) -thumbnailForURI: (NSString*) uri Size: (NSSize) size;

// (NSEnumerator *) ??
(NSArray *) -thumbnailsForDir: (NSString*) dir Size: (NSSize) size;

@end

From: Nicolas Roard [nicolas@roard.com]
> I don't see much other applications using it

I though every application that has "Open File" dialog might
use it...

From: Enrico Sersale [enrico@dtedu.net]
> It simply creates an image from a file:
> -initWithContentsOfFile:

Can this work if the file is not an image?
That spec tells about thumbnails for spreadsheets,
text documents, etc. I got an impression that only
the program that understands the file format can create
a thumbnail. That's the reason I liked the service idea
in the first place: the service could launch a process
that creates a thumbnail image if it's not there.

For this we'd need another method in the protocol:
(void) -registerViewersForFileTypes: (NSEnumerator *)
type_application_pairs; //??

If -initWithContentsOfFile: works for any file, though, please
disregard this mail completely.

Thank you,
Tima.