14:39: A Mere Matter of Programming

I'm working my way through the more technical parts of the VisualIDs essay, and learning the Cairo API. The essay's really kinda clumsy, when it gets down into the technical bits, but I think I get what it's saying :\

I've got some of the basic VisualID-generation framework in place, now, so the current focus is on learning Cairo.

[2008-05-05_00: meta-source]

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22:04: VisualIDs in Nautilus

I started hacking on Nautilus a couple of days ago with the intent of adding support for VisualIDs, and I've already been successful in implementing the Nautilus-side requirements. At this point, I'm using a store of pregenerated VisualID icons, and a not-very-good hashing-algorithm that maps files to VisualIDs. Now I just need to: - develop a VisualID-generation library using the algorithms outlined in the essay - make Nautilus use the library instead of my static icon-store - add some GConf toggles so that Nautilus VisualID subsystem can be enabled/disabled during runtime

Here's a screenshot of a directory-view in Nautilus using VisualIDs: files are all uniquely identified by VisualIDs; the file's type is indicated by an auxiliary `emblem' attached to periphery of the main icon, because file-type is still valuable information--it's just not quite /as/ valuable as a quick/easy/obvious `wether this is the file that you want' indicator (i.e.: the VisualID). If a file is actually a symbolic link, that's also indicated by an `elsewhere-pointing arrow' emblem. You'll notice a few different file-types and 1 symbolic link, here:

Now, here's another screenshot: this one mixes in a few more more file-types, including some that /don't/ use VisualIDs because they're thumbnailable: I have it setup so that, by default, `graphical' files (image-files and video-files, for example) use a thumbnail version of their action content for their icons, and any files that can't be thumbnailed (including types like directories, text-files, audio-files, etc.) use VisualIDs. You'll notice that there are several image-files and 1 video-file (all of which use thumbnail-views for their icons), a few audio-files, a couple of HTML-files, and a shell script, with all of the files which would traditionally all have the exact same icon now having unique VisualIDs:

This screenshot may be a little confusing, because I'm also using some auxiliary `visual tagging' facilities that Nautilus provides:

While either VisualIDs or thumbnails are used as /default/ icons, and a file-type emblem is also added by default, individual files can also have custom emblems added by the user, and they can also have custom icons set by the user, and setting a custom icon does away with the default (type-indicating) eblem; this is why `collections' and `contacts' don't have any emblems (as the user who set the custom icons, I know that they're directories and don't need any auxiliary `what is it' info--I just need to be able to find them quickly); `photovideo', `graphics', and `html' are also directories with custom icons, but I (as a user) have also added custom emblems to them. I've also added custom emblems to `contracting', `finances', `cvs', `dp2', and a few other directories, but not set custom icons--this is especially useful in combination with Nautilus' `sort by emblems' feature, which allows me to (for example) group all of the money-related objects together.

[2008-04-23_00: meta-source]

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