(Mis)Use of icons in Gtk+/GNOME

As seen on pgo: An interesting blog entry from tigert about the use of icons in Gnome today (be sure to scroll down to Waldo Bastian’s comment).

Content Manager Ideas

I’ve been reading through the Appeal Wiki lately, and stumbled about the Content Manager page today. While the idea is not new, it’s certainly one of the most interesting areas of Project Appeal.

New installer

Just checked the new installer for Xfce 4.4 yesterday. Really nice work so far, Jannis. The UI sure needs some work, but the fundamentals look good, and I think it’s on the right track.

Thumbnails

It took quite some time and it wasn’t very enjoyable, but now Thunar finally supports thumbnails (atleast loading):

It’s not yet committed tho. Fortunately most desktop applications already store thumbnails today, so the file manager seldomly needs to generate a thumbnail itself. For the generation, we’ll support whatever GdkPixbuf supports (we’ll probably also include a fast jpeglib based generator), and optionally support the GNOME thumbnail generators. The GNOME thumbnails generators are just tools that write the final thumbnail to a file specified on the command line, which is good. Unfortunately the GNOME guys decided to store the generator list in GConf, which means that the GNOME thumbnailer support will depend on GConf, and thereby comes at a certain price.

The thumbnail loading is quite fast, but nevertheless adds a little overhead (both memory and CPU time). Therefore we’ll most probably include an option to disable thumbnailing completely. The good news is that Thunar is still very light on memory. A quick and dirty measurement (on a FreeBSD/i386 5.4-STABLE box with Gtk+ 2.6) shows, that Thunar’s VmData size is at 2228 kb after startup (displaying the first 12 items from my home dir). For example, Nautilus’ VmData size is 4368 kB after startup displaying the same set of files (in browser mode and without the sidebar), while ROX is at 2988 kB and Xffm-iconview is at 2532 kB. Of course this is far from a serious benchmark, but it tells me that we’re on the right way.

What we really need with Thunar (or in a separate tool based on Thunar-VFS) is a way to cleanup dead thumbnails:

$ ls -1 ~/.thumbnails/normal|wc -l
   5867

Update

For the sake of completeness: Konqueror’s VmData size is 4364 kB (KDE 3.4).

Drag and Drop

I finally committed the drop-site support for the current views in Thunar (the icon and details view). I stumbled over a few oddities in the GtkDnD code that I have never noticed before, and the current code in Thunar is not yet perfect, as some things don’t work properly (or don’t work as expected) right now. For example, you can drag a file in nautilus and drop it on a Thunar view, but you cannot drag a file in Thunar and drop it in a nautilus view, odd.

In other news, we’re close to hitting the current thread-length-record on thunar-dev with another website discussion. In short: This is how the Thunar website will most probably look like.