Author Topic: Info panel suggestions  (Read 4373 times)

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WarnerYoung

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Info panel suggestions
« on: 2011-06-17 14:37:38 »
The new Info panel in V8 is fairly nice, in that it's more flexible than the old V7 version.  However, I do find some problems with it.

1. It's designed to be vertical.  If I make the Info panel very wide, it doesn't take advantage of the extra horizontal space at all.

2. It uses more space than is strictly necessary.  It's nice that you can expand and collapse whole categories of info like Metadata and User fields, but these things become indented and take extra room.  If I want the regular info (e.g. File name, File size) and some camera EXIF info, I end up devoting 3 rows of space just to show "Info", and then "Metadata" and "Camera" under that.  In addition, the actual data shown is indented.  The regular Info is indented by 1 "space", and EXIF data is indented by 2 "spaces".


I can think of 2 ways to handle this.  One is to make the Info panel smarter, so it can show multiple columns of info when it's wide enough.  The other way is to split the Info panel up into a "regular" Info panel, a Metadata Info panel, and a User Fields panel.  This would (sort of) let me put the info across the bottom of the V8 main window, in a horizontal configuration.

hfremuth

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Info panel suggestions
« Reply #1 on: 2011-06-20 09:21:51 »
The Info panel is new in v8, and it is currently reworked quite a bit. Not sure about the multi-column presentation at this point in time (pretty complex), but there are a number of improvements in the pipeline...

WarnerYoung

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Info panel suggestions
« Reply #2 on: 2011-06-20 18:05:16 »
Improvements are good :)  Whether multi-column support is added, I just want to suggest that Philip think about adding better support for a wide display.  So many laptops and screens are widescreen now that it's often easier to make UI elements wide instead of tall, to really take advantage of screen space, so I hope some kind of widescreen-friendly improvements can be added.

hfremuth

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« Reply #3 on: 2011-06-21 09:02:08 »
> ...so I hope some kind of widescreen-friendly improvements can be added.

This is one of the bigger changes between v7 and v8 already:

In v7, the left 25% had an area filled with folders, preview, info and task panel; the 75% on the right were filled with the Thumbnail panel:


In v8, there is now also an area to the right of the Thumbnail panel, which is best filled with the metadata and / or the preview:


Nevertheless, all the panels have potential to be improved and there are a number of ideas for a revised folders panel, an enhanced info panel and possibly even a new keyword panel. Stay tuned for that  ;-)