Continuing my recent theme of small usability enhancements, I’d be interested in comments on enhancing the selector dialogs object list.
For example, the Select Media Object dialog could be enhanced by adding the media path and allow other “standard” operations for media (view, open folder). It might also be useful to add the standard make active, add, edit and delete commands as well. Perhaps a pop-up menu as shown below. Similar enhancements could be made to other selector dialogs too.
All thoughts and ideas welcome
Funny you should mention the Media selector, as I was just now looking at the stats in Mantis and noticed that one of the longest open issues is 0000683: Gallery - Select Multiple Files. Maybe you can fix that too?
This may be platform specific but clicking the mouse above or below the thumb control does not work as it does in other Mac applications. The standard Mac action is to move the window contents by one screen height. With Gramps on Mac, it appears that clicking moves the window content so that the thumb ends up positioned where I clicked. If I wanted such behaviour, I would drag the thumb to that position.
This is one of those little annoyances that Gramps keeps springing on me. Another is windows that pop up but first need a click to make them active and then another click to do what I want. Again, it is just one click but no other Mac app behaves that way.
Also, is it just me that does not see any kind of preview for pdf documents? Surely it can’t be that hard to render a thumbnail of the first page of a pdf? I see that tiff files get a preview.
Are PDF thumbnails that something a Thumbnailer plugin would be added to do?
If it is, being able to select the Page would be nice. Most of my PDFs have very nondescript page 1. The title page or frontispiece thumbnail would be more informative.
BTW, what support does Gramps have for video media? I browsed the documentation and video is mentioned a few times but I could not find any information about supported video formats, metadata, previews, viewing applications, etc.
Also, can the file selector dialogs in Gramps be enhanced to allow searches? Standard Mac file selectors have had this capability for many years. Just type a few characters into the search box and narrow down to the desired file. See below:
Also, is it just me that does not see any kind of preview for pdf documents? Surely it can’t be that hard to render a thumbnail of the first page of a pdf? I see that tiff files get a preview.
gramps already supports displaying thumbnails for any document type that your system has a thumbnail generator installed for. This is provided by GnomeThumb.
Now the practical reality: GnomeThumb only supports Linux. I don’t know if Gnome desktop includes a thumbnail generator for PDF files either, so it may not give a thumbnail for PDFs either.
gramps also supports thumbnailer plugins so it would be possible to create your own PDF thumbnail generator.
Gramps doesn’t really “support” media. It uses the OS helper applications that are defined to “open” or “edit” specific filetypes.
I suppose you could consider what is manipulated for each Media object to be more similar to metadata sidecars. (In that the metadata is not stored inside the reference media file. So, that includes pointers to the file, whether that is a relative path, target marquees, descriptions, pointers to thumbnails, sharing info.
The only place where Gramp actually does something with the media files is in the backup/restore
I suppose a thumbnailer addon plug-in could be created for various video formats. That type of plugin is new and only lightly documented. So we can only guess.
Funny you should mention the Media selector, as I was just now looking at the stats in Mantis and noticed that one of the longest open issues is 0000683: Gallery - Select Multiple Files. Maybe you can fix that too?
multiple selection looks to be possible without too much work (so fitting my definition of “small usability enhancements” )
multiple-selection will require changes to each place where the selection dialogs are invoked.
There are places where it does not make sense to permit multiple selection. e.g. choosing the Father of a Family.
The calling code needs modifying to handle more than one object being selected
What should be the user experience when multiple objects are selected?
For example the gallery invokes the Select Media Object dialog, and then invokes the Edit Media Ref dialog. If you choose 2 media objects, you get two Media Ref dialogs popup. At the moment, they both appear, one on top of the other.
for Media, which thumbnail(s) should be displayed for multiple selection?
whilst the above talks about multiple selection of media objects, multiple selection of other object types also makes sense in some situations. For example multiple selection of people when adding children to a Family could be useful. Adding multiple events to a person could also be useful.
Display one, let the user select Cancel or OK before abandoning or displaying the next one?
I think each should have its own thumbnail. Example: I want to attach two images which are the front and back of a photo or a postcard. I want each to have its own thumbnail. I just want the convenience of selecting both at once.
