Previews in open dialogues

amayze · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:48 am Post subject: Previews in open dialogues

Now that we have lovely native file dialogues, is it possible to make them even nicer?

This document describes how to add a preview to an open dialogue, and the Open Document format already includes a preview (Thumbnails/thumbnail.png). My coding knowledge is about 10 years out of date, but it seems that it shouldn't be too difficult to add the drawing code to the example given.

Unfortunately there seems to be no way to make this thumbnail available to the Finder, short of adding a resource fork to the file, which doesn't aid cross platform issues.

Feel free to shoot me down in flames if this is an unnecessary distraction.

Andy.

OPENSTEP · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:33 am Post subject:

Unfortunately Cocoa doesn't really have that much control over it from what I can gather, but there may very well be some type of plugin architecture I'm missing. The biggest problem with doing a preview is to engineer a way to get a quick shot of a page without having to actually load up OOo/Neo and render the first page. The little preview plugins are used throughout the system (I'm thinking of the way that PDF will display first page) so they need to be fast.

It's something I'm looking into for other reasons so I'll be sure to keep this in mind.

ed

ovvldc · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 9:46 am Post subject:

Is the file actually being decoded on the fly, or does the app include a thumbnail in the picture? I know in Photoshop you have to specify to get one. But in the preview bit, all pictures with a plugin are rendered on the fly...

If there is an included thumbnail, is it in the actual file or in the .file that Mac OSX seems to add everywhere? If (much bigger if) that is the case, one could add a rendering there (PDF of the text on the first page only or sth.) on save.

Just a thought,
Oscar

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

i thought the question was about the 'open' dialog that is in Neo, not the finder...

-j, who is confused

ovvldc · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 11:29 am Post subject:

amayze · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 12:25 pm Post subject:

Neo creates a preview in all files when you save them. To see it, pick a file, change the extension to .zip, double click it and have a look in the thumbnails folder.

From my quick reading of the Apple documentation it seems to be fairly trivial to write a piece of code that will display this preview in the Open dialogue within NeoOffice.

What is less clear is how to get this preview to display in the Finder in Column View, though the clues may lie in this document.

As I said in my first post, my programming skills are woefully out of date, so I'm really just floating the idea and doing a little bit of research in case someone else (ie Patrick or Ed) feels like this would be a useful thing to do.

Andy

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

jakeOSX · Ninja Joined: Aug 12, 2003 Posts: 1373

OPENSTEP · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 7:43 pm Post subject:

Wow that really is a good find on the thumbnail image. I hadn't had time to look into that myself yet since I've been occupied with various other stuff as of late. Thanks for the tip! That'll really make the feasibility of the preview stuff a lot easier (along with other operations that will require thumbnail previews). Now all I have to do is find where that is generated and increase the resolution Smile

ed

valterb · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 1:47 am Post subject:

That would be good, if only I had that thumbnail folder Confused

I check this both with Neo on my iBook and in OOo on my ubuntu-linux computer: all files I have, converted as zip files and extracted, don't show that folder.
According to OOo documentation this could be related to files that are encrypted: if you want to encrypt a file people that grab that file hasn't to have the possibility to "read" the first page just looking at thumbnail.png!!! That files should have another "encrypted" thimbnail.
But anyway, I think I have not encrypted my files!!! Unless that FileVault does the job (but I don't understand how this could affect the odt file) Confused

.

Anyway, the problem is with my configuration, since I saw for example that people of gnome project use that thumbnail to do this in nautilus (gnome file manager). Infact I have no problem with files created with OOo on my linux PC, the thumbnails folder is in!

Do you have any idea of what's going wrong here?

Valter

LemonAid · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 3:03 am Post subject:

Valter,
I changed an .ODT file from OOo 2.0.3 / Windows 2000 and I saw just ONE thumbnail file - NOT a folder. It was a very rough bit image of the first page. It was not at all readable - just colored bits that gave a general visual impression of the fist page.

Look for file and/or folders for the thumbnail

Philip ( impressed that the thumbnail was there at all! Wink

)

valterb · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 3:15 am Post subject:

It's not there, nor the file neither the folder!!!

One of the files I wrote with Neooffice is here.
I have the same problem using OOo 2.0.3 X11 version.

Probably I was not clear enough before, but when I create my files with OOo 2.0.3 on linux everything is OK!!!

Valter

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

The thumbnail is created when you save it with changes. I opened your file, added space, saved it, and now, if I do an "unzip -l" command on the file, I get:

Archive: /Users/pluby/Desktop/prova.odt
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
39 08-30-06 14:04 mimetype
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/statusbar/
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/floater/
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/popupmenu/
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/progressbar/
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/menubar/
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/toolbar/
0 08-30-06 14:04 Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/
2923 08-30-06 14:04 content.xml
8204 08-30-06 14:04 styles.xml
1119 08-30-06 14:04 meta.xml
2636 08-30-06 14:04 Thumbnails/thumbnail.png
7372 08-30-06 14:04 settings.xml
1866 08-30-06 14:04 META-INF/manifest.xml
-------- -------
24159 15 files

Patrick

valterb · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 7:46 am Post subject:

I did what you suggest, so I reopen the file and make some changes. Than I unzipped the file and:

ibook:~ valter$ unzip -l prova.odt
Archive: prova.odt
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
39 08-30-06 14:42 mimetype
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/statusbar/
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/floater/
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/popupmenu/
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/progressbar/
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/menubar/
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/toolbar/
0 08-30-06 14:42 Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/
3002 08-30-06 14:42 content.xml
8496 08-30-06 14:42 styles.xml
1209 08-30-06 14:42 meta.xml
7704 08-30-06 14:42 settings.xml
1693 08-30-06 14:42 META-INF/manifest.xml
-------- -------
22143 14 files

Still no thumbnail Sad

So I guess there is something with my configuration...

Valter

ovvldc · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 1:37 pm Post subject:

I looked through all of the preference panes, but it wasn't there. Have you tried moving your NeoOffice2.x preference files out the way? Maybe something in there is causing your files to be without thumbnails.

You also have an official download, I presume, not something you compiled yourself?

best wishes,
Oscar