The Adventures of Joshua Judson Rosen
(action man)

[ sections: VisualIDs | art | movies | everything ]


Wed, 18 Jun 2008
[@]

02:07: It's Alive!

It looks like I've actually got it working, automatically generating and caching VisualIDs wherever thumbnails aren't possible.

Here are a few random directories on my computer:





One bit of behaviour that's different now, and that's bothering me, is that the VisualIDs aren't showing up as WM-icons for Nautilus-windows anymore. I was really getting to like seeing VisualIDs when switching between windows--it's so helpful that I'm tempted to go ahead and hack my window-manager so that I can have VisualIDs to help distinguish between windows of any application (e.g.: the bazillion Epiphany or Emacs windows that I have open).

Hm. I had to change the way that I 'reported' VisualIDs in Nautilus in order to get icons to automatically update upon completion of 'thumbnail'-generation (where I was initially hooking into ~/.icons and reporting icon-names that GNOME would resolve to file-paths, now I'm directly reporting file-paths); I wonder if that's what caused this....

Items in Nautilus' "Scripts" menu are still getting VisualIDs, which was (is) another nice side-effect of this.

Of course, I still have to add the gconf toggles and similar-IDs-for-related-files (the latter is going to be interesting...), do some general code-cleanup (now that I understand what I'm doing), and maybe see about adding some more generators.

I did try implementing 'relaxed inside' and 'scribble', but they had... problems...: 'relaxed inside' just doesn't look right, and 'scribble' is ridiculously inefficient (a pen orbiting a set of gravity-wells? seriously?).

I'm pretty sure that I could implement 'scribble' more efficiently by just telling Cairo to run curves between the attractors--should I bother?

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