[mdlug] Very early screenshots for my "first person filemanager"

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Michael Corral

> When it comes to writing a file manager, get used to people making
> lots of requests. :) No doubt somebody (ahem) will insist that you
> include ACL support, so that Linux will be "ready for the desktop"
> and "support reasonable security practices". ;)

 Yeah, I'm sure there will be plenty of requests. I'm hoping that people
with more 3D experience will start taking roles in the project, frankly.
I've tried to modularize the code so it's fairly easy to work with. (For
a counterexample, tdfsb is all one big source file...)

> > But now we've got 3D hardware in
> > every computer sold, and we're not really taking advantage of it.
> 
> The only thing holding us back are those pesky monitors. :)
> Until someone comes up with a device that can produce holograms for
> the objects the computer displays, then everything will continue to
> be just variations on the same theme (projections of 3-dimensional
> objects onto a 2-dimensional screen).

 Yeah, but people still go to movies. There's still room to grow before
we get to holograms.

> You could argue that many existing GUI file managers (like Nautilus or
> Konqueror) are already 3D: the icons in many cases are "3D", icons and
> windows can be placed "behind" others, etc.

 That's true, and this might be a misguided effort, but I still think there
ought to be a way to apply that power to other means than games and CAD
visualizations.

> How are you going to handle files of size 0 bytes, since you can't
> take the logarithm of 0 to determine the icon height? Even a 1 byte
> file would have a height of 0 = log_2 (1), by your sizing scheme.

  /* Can't take log of zero (empty file). */
  if (file_r_info->file_info->fsize > 1) {
    /* This scale allows the height value to be used for both
       vertex and texture coords. */
    height = log(file_r_info->file_info->fsize) / (10*log(2));
  } else {
    height=0.01; /* Don't have to use polygon offset or anything silly
                    like that. */
  }

> Also, will the display have a legend for the permission colors, so
> you don't have to remember what color corresponds to what permission?

 That'll be configurable, yes.

> And shouldn't you have colors for setgid and the sticky bit?

 I do, listed in the design doc.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                   (313) 227-2317

 "Economies don't like step functions." - Dr. Leonard Bieman
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