From kde-devel  Mon Apr 10 06:21:15 2000
From: Chris Lee <nytehorse () inficad ! com>
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 06:21:15 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Image viewers
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=95534794713079

Oh, I use BeOS all the time when I'm not in Linux! I think it's absolutely great;
however, I'm all for making KDE even better, and by using BeOS as something of a
model to work after (they do employ some great UI experts there) I think we can
always make KDE better. This just seemed to me to be confusing; how could anyone here
explain to a non-technical user why it is that there are three image viewers? Any
sane person who isn't a computer expert will be confused.

Also, I didn't notice any response to this issue in an earlier post: Somebody ought
to take a look at the KFileOpen dialog. If you try looking in a directory where
there's a file with a really long name and hold the mouse pointer over the name, the
name fills out with a little popup label. Now, if you keep holding the mouse over
that file, but move it onto the icon for the file, it duplicates the popup label.
Somebody want to fix that?

-Chris

Talin wrote:

> Both BeOS and AmigaOS have a really nice, organized way of dealing with
> these issues: A general "media translation" library that can read many
> different image, sound, midi, text/hypertext and other formats, both
> reading and writing. Various plugins supply the knowledge of each file
> format. So, for example, your program can read a bitmap, and get a flat
> raster without knowing anything about the format of the image. On the
> BeOS this facility is called the Translation Kit; On Amiga it's called
> the Datatypes library.
>
> See
> http://www-classic.be.com/documentation/be_book/The%20Translation%20Kit/index.html
> for example.