This could be useful for SearchProviders providing results that can take a while to load, like downloading thumbnails from internet.

Created attachment 193659 [details] [review]
iconGrid: allow St.Bin as BaseIcon content

Created attachment 193660 [details] [review]
search: spinner animation in DummySearchProvider

Code sample showing how to display a spinner animation in the results
icon grid while loading of the item thumbnail is being deferred.

(In reply to comment #2)
> Created an attachment (id=193659) [details] [review]
> iconGrid: allow St.Bin as BaseIcon content

This patch is more of a proof-of-concept, I don't like much the use of instanceof. I'd like to get feedback on this though, any suggestion?

I'd be really happy to get some feedback on this issue/patch. Would you please have a look Jasper?

(In reply to comment #5)
> I'd be really happy to get some feedback on this issue/patch. Would you please
> have a look Jasper?

I really just don't understand why a lot of this is necessary.

One example use-case is to display in a grid spinning animations while items load in the background (involving thumbnail download/caching).

To implement this I'd like to use panel.AnimatedIcon:

icon = new IconGrid.BaseIcon(resultMeta['name']);
icon.spinner = new Panel.AnimatedIcon('process-working.svg', Panel.PANEL_ICON_SIZE);

icon.createIcon = function(size) {
    icon.spinner.actor.show();
    // this is a bin.
    return icon.spinner.actor;
};

So the grid item icon is actually a bin containing another bin but I can't see the actual icon. Now I wonder if this could actually be an issue related with the size allocation of the icon! I'll dig this a bit further.

(In reply to comment #7)
> One example use-case is to display in a grid spinning animations while items
> load in the background (involving thumbnail download/caching).

Why not add spinner support directly to BaseIcon? I'd feel a lot better with such a change than making Base*Icon* a generic container ...

 
> To implement this I'd like to use panel.AnimatedIcon:

When used elsewhere, AnimatedIcon should probably be moved elsewhere.

(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #7)
> > One example use-case is to display in a grid spinning animations while items
> > load in the background (involving thumbnail download/caching).
> 
> Why not add spinner support directly to BaseIcon? I'd feel a lot better with
> such a change than making Base*Icon* a generic container ...
> 

Good idea! I'll give this a try.

> 
> > To implement this I'd like to use panel.AnimatedIcon:
> 
> When used elsewhere, AnimatedIcon should probably be moved elsewhere.

Alright.

Comment on attachment 193659 [details] [review]
iconGrid: allow St.Bin as BaseIcon content

Marking rejected as per comments

Review of attachment 193659 [details] [review]:

Really marking rejected as per comments

Review of attachment 193660 [details] [review]:

Not a proposed patch, marking rejected to get off review list

No movement on this in over three years, doesn't seem useful to keep open ...