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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Drop shadow for window-screenshots
From:       "Richard Moore" <richmoore44 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2008-01-31 22:50:45
Message-ID: 5491a5150801311450t49b5ca37nd35116cf314d06de () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi All,

This is an attempt to explain where I'm coming from in my view on what
KSnapshot should be about.

Since KDE 1.x KSnapshot has offered a dialog-style UI for taking
screenshots, with the emphasis being on keeping the interface as
simple as possible. However, KSnapshot gets a lot of feature requests:
in general these can be classified into a few groups:

1. Send to 'XX'

This could be an application (e.g. Krita) or a contact via email or
instant messaging.

2. Ability to annotate screen shots

i.e. "I'd like to put a label on the bit I'm talking about". Closely
related to this is the request that people be able to turn the image
into an image map for a web page.

3. The ability to record a movie of their desktop.

This includes both recording a movie for demo purposes and those who
want to spy on their users for good reasons or bad.

4. The ability to do more stuff from the command line.

This was addressed by Laurent's addition of kbackgroundsnapshot for
just this purpose.

In order to support 1 and 2 without compromising the simplicity of the
interface, in KDE 4.x we (Aaron to be specific) replaced the print
button with a more generic option of 'Open With' which allows you to
send the screenshot results directly to your chosen application for
further processing. This hopefully strikes a decent balance whilst
supporting the use-cases of 1 and 2 (which I agree are sensible).
Supporting the 3rd request is not really practical as the interface
and technical requirements of a screenshot application are very
different from a desktop video application (and KDE already has
KRecordMyDesktop for this purpose).

If my aim was to implement drop shadows for KSnapshot then what I'd be
doing is writing a 'make a picture nice for presentation' wizard which
registered itself as willing to support KSnapshots. This would allow a
nice workflow from KSnapshot using the 'Open With' button but would
avoid destroying the simplicity of the existing interface. It would
have the added advantage of being usable for images from other
sources. This would then have features like drop-shadows, rotating
images to fit in a page etc.

From the existing requests in bugzilla, the single request that stands
out most for me as being something that should be addressed within the
existing KSnapshot UI is the request to be able to grab a single
screen in a Xinerama desktop. This is definitely something that is
within KSnapshot's scope and is almost strong enough to regard as a
bug.

I've said before that I'm perfectly willing for there to be another
front-end to the ksnapshot backend for people who want 'a button for
every possibility' that still stands. Hopefully though, I've explained
why I don't think this should be the default.

Cheers

Rich.
 
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