[Off-Topic] Re: [Breezy] new "Services" capplet

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 10:26 +0200, Vincent Trouilliez wrote:
> Don't be sorry Ziyad, I have noticed it as well, and it does annoy me no
> end as well ! :-/ 
> At first I thought that it was a bug in Gnome's screenshot utility, that
> would cause such extreme variations in file size. Full screen shot would
> sometimes be small/acceptable (about 100KB or less), and sometimes they
> would be huge, between 500KB and 1MB !
> It is extremely annoying. 100KB for a full screen image is okay for
> dial-up, but 1MB is not acceptable !
> So an hour ago, I was about to file a bug about this. Then I realized
> what you just said... the problem is that PNG format, unlike JPG, hates
> "photo" like pictures, it can't compress them well apparently. However
> when the pic is just a shot of GUI window (large areas of uniform
> colors) it does wonders, and the text is crystal clear/sharp, whereas
> with JPEG, the text would be blurry, for the same file size.
> 
> I think the screenshot utility should be reworked, to take this into
> account. For example, once the shot is taken, it could compute the
> estimated size of resulting the PNG file, and display it. Then you could
> have a radio button to select either PNG or JPEG format. JPEG for
> "photo" like pics, and PNG for everything else.
> Or we could make it simpler still. Gnome could figure it out by itself.
> For example, if the the user is doing a full screen shot, and if the PNG
> is going to be over, say, 200KB in size, then it probably means that it
> should be better compressed as JPEG.
> 
> What do you think ? I think I will file a "bug" report about this, it's
> really very *annoying* (euphemism...)
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Vince
> 
(Search first to make sure that allowing the user to choose between
multiple formats is not discussed before!)

I don't think that's a good idea.  For starter, allowing the user to
choose between two (or more) formats when taking screen-shots will go
against the philosophy behind GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (i.e.
Make It Simple and Straightforward "KISS".)  Simply, it'll confuse
non-expert users.  PNG is good enough in most cases (yes, off course,
there's always exceptions just like this one!).

Second, the problem here is not "gnome-screenshot" is not doing a good
job, it's, to the contrary, doing it very excellent (by including the
background of the Desktop)!  What is wrong here is that the user (you in
this particular case) taking the screen-shot for the whole Desktop
instead of the things you really want!  A better solution would be to
take *two* separate screen-shots of the two windows appearing in your
original screen-shot!  (By the way, I'm really getting tired and
irritated of the repeated "screen-shot" in my post!)

I'm sorry for this long post (and as you might guessed it already,
English is not my native language which make me choose a long, boring,
off-the-point sentences instead of short, direct, and to-the-point
ones!).
Again, sorry for this long message and remember:  I might be right or
wrong!  This is just my opinion!
Ziyad.