Re: GWorkspace.app Feature Request-- Tabbed Shelf

[Andreas Heppel]

On 2003-06-27 13:05:09 +0200 Jeff Teunissen <deek@d2dc.net> wrote:

<snip>
> In my opinion, this should be provided inside GWorkspace. NSWorkspace
> should check with the workspace application (if one is running) for a
> file's icon, falling back to the standard behavior if the workspace
> application returns nil or if there is no workspace application.
>
> In addition, this should be switchable within GWorkspace -- I don't want
> to see a thumbnail for a file, I want to see an icon to tell me whether or
> not an application can open it...which is, some may recall, the purpose of
> icons in the first place. :)
This is a good point. The probably quickest solution, imho, seems to be to 
display the 'unknown file type' icon if there is no app to handle the file, 
instead of having GWorkspace/thumbnailer create a thumbnail.
The (also imho) better (and probably slower) solution is to have the 
respective (default) app provide the thumbnail. Finally, it is this app and 
not {G,NS}Workspace, that knows how to handle files of this type and thus 
should also know how to create a thumbnail icon for a certain file. This 
brings up certain problems, though. First, it will, as already said, probably 
be slow, if the app must first be asked (via a service?) to provide those 
icons. Second, this is worse I think, you have the problem that there may be 
more than one app being able to handle those files. Which of them were 
supposed to provide the thumbnail, then?

Cheers,

--
Andreas Heppel

Mail: aheppel at web dot de
Home: http://www.andreasheppel.de

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