GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 151099
Folders should use emblems as water marked backgrounds
Last modified: 2011-08-11 19:19:44 UTC
I couldn't find a bug filed on this one so I figured it would be time to do that. Emblems provide a nice way of improving scanability of folders by adding a small icon which makes them more distinctive since the folder names are harder to scan quickly. The same principle can apply to the background of a folder. If you have several folders open at the same time it's possible to scan them quickly seeing the background water mark as a quick visual indicator of the folders identity. When the emblem is used a the background it needs to be a light faded color so that it has minimal interfere with the contrast of folders against the background. If there are multiple emblems they should be displayed using the same arrangement algorithm as they are as emblems on the folder. This one is just a cool feature request, so I'm marking it low priority and enhancement, but I'd like to have this bug be a place for any patches that have been made towards this to accumulate. ;-)
Created attachment 30952 [details] Screenshot of this in action This taken from campd's page on primates: http://primates.ximian.com/~dave/screenshots/Screenshot-EmblemWatermarks2.png
I also had something on this from a while back: http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/stuff/emblems/nautilus.emblem.html
I was going to create a new bug, but since this is quite related, I'll add it here: The emblems watermarked to the background should be aggregated from the parents, so you could get visual hints about the folders attributes (to what project it is related to, where the folder is situated (remote/local), etc.). This would be most wanted considering that currently there is no obvious way to identify folders with the same name with just looking at it.
What about creation of background emblem from contents mime type. For example, if folder is full of mp3, assign it music emblems.
Wouldn't this clash with custom-set backgrounds? Nautilus provides me with a comfortable light grey pinstripe which I love.
*** Bug 325245 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 325245 references http://www.josealberto.org/blog/?p=57 which has some beautiful mockups. I think we have to port eel-background to cairo before being able to do really cool positioning, it inter alia relies on XSetWindowBackgroundPixmap which isn't flexible enough.
'Backgrounds and Emblems' have been removed from nautilus 2.32: http://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=915e5523947fe049e06f9bd8574760f6765e8ad7 See https://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2010-July/msg00023.html for reasons. Closing as OBSOLETE.