[openbeos] Re: Tracker icons
- From: "Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 14:34:36 +0200 CEST
André Braga <meianoite@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What's wrong with creating another attribute for "new generation"
> icons, and just leave the "legacy" attribute as a fallback in both
> cases it's needed (too small a scale to gracefully downsample vector
> graphics, and applications which don't support the "new generation"
> icons)?
Many things are wrong with this approach:
1) you need two lookups for every file you come across
2) new and old icon might easily get out of sync, say Net+ as an
example - which one should Tracker show? The one Net+ is updating or
the new style icon of that file?
3) as François said, the more data you pack into the attributes, the
more likely it is to fall out of the small_data section, and thus it
all gets even slower
> In my humble opinion, "new generation" icons should be an attribute
> containing arbitrary image data in *any* format, which for instance
> would be handled by data translators.
>
> Why shouldn't image thumbnails be scaled-down, albeit full-blown,
> PNGs or JPEGs?
> Why not tap into the power of BeOS' data translators?
Why should we do this? Why should people who haven't installed the
brand new XYZ image translator see any icons on their desktop anymore?
> Speed? Well, that's what caches were made for. Just add a third
> attribute for icons decoded into OpenTracker's internal format for an
> icon of dimensions N by N and color depth X.
Oh great, just another lookup, just some more space wasted in the
small_data section of the file. A cache can hardly speed up opening
directories with lots of files in it, can it? A cache only makes sure
that those icons in the MIME database are available translated on
demand, and usually after the first lookup only, because icons use
memory, too.
> I really believe this is not bloat, but simply the proverbial
> "another
> layer of indirection", and a justified one.
Sorry, I can't agree.
Bye,
Axel.
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