Audio File Preview
I am probably the last guy who discovered the preview feature for audio files in GNOME. Nevertheless I have a strong opinion about it, perhaps because of the way I made my first contact with it.
I have auto-login enabled for my GNOME session, which means the mouse pointer starts in the center of the screen. Now I also have a cluttered desktop and some of the files were actually audio files. Totally by random, one of them made to the center of the desktop. Wow - what a nasty surprise next time I started up the machine: My box autoplays music!?
Of course it doesn't, I only triggered the audio file preview by hovering the mouse pointer over the file's icon for a few seconds. There are several things I dislike about that:
- Audio file preview behaves differently than any other preview (granted, how would you make a thumbnail out of an audio file?)
- It will play the whole file if you don't move the mouse. How is that different from opening the file now?
- It is only activated if you use the mouse. Just selecting it with the keyboard won't do it.
- (It doesn't check whether I really moved the mouse pointer over the icon, it just checks whether the mouse pointer has been there for a definite amount of time.)
As it is, this feature isn't easily discovered. If you discover it, chances are good it will confuse you. Solutions? Or is it only annoying to me?
Comments
Post a Comment
This site's webmaster failed misserably in upgrading the underlaying web framework.
The comment system is entirely broken right now. Sorry!
I really like the audio preview feature, although admittedly I don't make use of it that often. I think that it would be useful to extend the preview functionality to other file types. For example, when the mouse pointer hovers over a video file, the video should play/preview, either in the thumbnail or maybe in a popup window or sidebar. Maybe the same preview/zoom functionality could be added for images, with a mouse hover giving a larger popup preview that disappears if the mouse is moved.
However, I agree on your last two points. The preview should have some way of being implemented with the keyboard, maybe pressing the spacebar on a selected file? There should also be some logic to check for the mouse pointer entering the icon area, rather than the icon appearing underneath the mouse pointer. Any ideas on how this could be implemented?
If audio preview causes music to play after login just because you have a music file in the middle of your desktop then that's just a bug. You should file it.