picture viewers & widgets

While writing stuff about KDE, you have to make screenshots. And often modify them basically (resizing, converting, stuff like that). So I get to play with some image viewers like Gwenview and showFoto and with image editors like KolourPaint & Krita. Kolourpaint and Krita are rather complementary. Kolourpaint, after all, is basic, quick and easy to use while Krita can do the heavy lifting. Gwenview and showFoto, do have more overlap, but Gwenview is faster, smaller and does the basics, showFoto is more featureful. Now I know there are more imageviewers in KDE (kview, kuickshow, and some third party things like squirelsomething) but I'm glad I don't have them installed - I'd rather see showfoto as fast as Gwenview, and I'd ditch Gwennie (or the other way around). Now Gwenview gets some love for KDE 4, and as far as I can tell, it's going to be the default imageviewer. Maybe. Why maybe? Well, I'm unsure - it seems Okular also wants to be an image viewer, right? On one hand - cool - annotation. But I'd rather then see the annotation stuff shared between KDE apps with Nepomuk or Strigi or something...

Now on to something more positive. Someone started a discussion on the kde usability mailinglist. It's rather long, but I became interested when the pretty pictures came. Someone pointed to this problem:







I found a solution which is already used in KOffice:




It looks pretty good, but there where some comments - discoverability isn't great. A right mouseclick is needed to be able to enter text, and it isn't obvious that it is possible at all. Plus, the guys wanted a drop-down. So Hans Chen made a mockup:



I'd say, with a editable combobox instead of a 'hidden' one on hovering (see top right mockup), it's great and should be the default zoom thing in KDE 4... ;-)