Preview 2.0 - Generic Thread

[admin]

Only videos that cannot be played by any preview handlers are played natively in the way you describe. This cannot be many, and they will become less once I support 64-bit preview handlers (which will be Preview 2.0, Step 4).

[TheQwerty]

No, no, no. I love it as simple as it is. KISS.

Sorry Don, but I don't think there's anything simple about the preview situation in XYplorer right now.


When I want to preview something I am now faced with the question of where/how:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, Floating Preview, Full Screen Preview, Quick File View, Thumbnails or MDBU?

Great so I just need 6 toolbar buttons for that!
Which, by the way, could use some work. Fun game I like to play is guess the icon:

2016-03-02 104141.png (2.28 KiB) Viewed 3434 times

A blue box within a lighter rectangle?
This looks like it is showing something horizontal, maybe a right-side preview.
Oh it opens a preview tab beneath the list. Hmm...
Well that's an easel with a blank canvas. Seems promising. Wow... full-screen's a bit much.
What about the easel falling over? Drunken preview maybe?
Maybe it's actually a censored image of a naked Eiffel Tower.
A brown rectangle? Do I use this to tell XY that I want my groceries in a paper bag?
Where's the icon for plastic bags?


Another fun game is to guess which Floating Preview you'll get for a file:

1. Select an image.
2. Open Floating Preview.
3. Without closing the preview select a text file.
4. Close preview.
5. Open Floating Preview.
6. SURPRISE - it's quick file view!

Monologue of a user searching for a bigger preview....
This thumbnail is kinda small, must see bigger! Bigger! Let's try that again.... Bigger! Bigger! BIGGER! WTF!?! I SAID BIGGER!

2016-03-02 105200.gif (1.58 MiB) Viewed 3434 times

And that isn't a user hoping to see Preview + Metadata at once.


Maybe I need to wait for Previews 3.0 for some cohesion?

[klownboy]

OK, I see what you mean. When I play videos associated with Windows Media Player or something related to Windows, I have the position bar and the stop and start controls. For mkv and mp4 videos that I have associated with Media Player Classic-Home Cinema the video plays, but with no controls shown.

[admin]

Funny post.

(TheQwerty's I mean)

[admin]

OK, I see what you mean. When I play videos associated with Windows Media Player or something related to Windows, I have the position bar and the stop and start controls. For mkv and mp4 videos that I have associated with Media Player Classic-Home Cinema the video plays, but with no controls shown.

In WE it probably does not play at all.

[TheQwerty]

Funny post.

(TheQwerty's I mean)

I just hope at some point you have the time/energy to improve things.

And seriously... Visual Studio style docking panels would be such a fantastic feature!

[Enternal]

Lol! Although... I was more immersed by ThQwerty's pretty pictures than what he/she said. Sorry I was distracted

By the way Don, don't you think that "Freeze Preview/Info" would also make sense to be a toggle in the preview context's menu itself? I was fumbling around a little bit trying to find it in the context menu of the preview since that's where you would expect to see it to "Freeze the Preview". Another thing, the docked preview at the moment does not preview *.lnk files to images. Shouldn't it as well? Wait. Actually, when did the floating preview started previewing *.lnk files to images? I remembered it didn't and that I requested it... wait is this it? I'm forgetting since it's been a while haha

And seriously... Visual Studio style docking panels would be such a fantastic feature!

*coughing loudly* *chokes on himself*
Anyway, I'm just assuming that would be really hard to do which is why Don hasn't done it haha.

[admin]

Lol! Although... I was more immersed by ThQwerty's pretty pictures than what he/she said. Sorry I was distracted

By the way Don, don't you think that "Freeze Preview/Info" would also make sense to be a toggle in the preview context's menu itself? I was fumbling around a little bit trying to find it in the context menu of the preview since that's where you would expect to see it to "Freeze the Preview". Another thing, the docked preview at the moment does not preview *.lnk files to images. Shouldn't it as well? Wait. Actually, when did the floating preview started previewing *.lnk files to images? I remembered it didn't and that I requested it... wait is this it? I'm forgetting since it's been a while haha

And seriously... Visual Studio style docking panels would be such a fantastic feature!

*coughing loudly* *chokes on himself*
Anyway, I'm just assuming that would be really hard to do which is why Don hasn't done it haha.

FP does LNKs since 20120915.

Two good points, thanks! (ctx menu + LNks no work).

[TheQwerty]

Lol! Although... I was more immersed by ThQwerty's pretty pictures than what he/she said. Sorry I was distracted

he
If you mean the previewed images, they are not mine but are all from https://www.desktoppr.co

And seriously... Visual Studio style docking panels would be such a fantastic feature!

*coughing loudly* *chokes on himself*
Anyway, I'm just assuming that would be really hard to do which is why Don hasn't done it haha.

Don't worry, I'm under no illusions that this would be easy. Given the scope of XYplorer, what is known about its design, and Don's opinion of third-party dependencies, I sadly believe this likely falls somewhere between very difficult and impossible.

[bdeshi]

Great so I just need 6 toolbar buttons for that!
Which, by the way, could use some work. [...]
A brown rectangle? Do I use this to tell XY that I want my groceries in a paper bag?

(hadn't activated the PP button so far; now that I see it...)
That icon can stand for anything but a preview element!
I think that for the preview pane, the ":preview" icon could be a better choice. But a little squarer, to look less like some kind of progress bar.

Like this:

icon_pp.png (962 Bytes) Viewed 3417 times

[TheQwerty]

Regarding the icon...

Sammay, I was also thinking it should be similar to or replaced by :preview, but I've since changed my opinion. (After your hard work creating a suitable icon - sorry!)

It should be consistent with the other Window layout icons even if 'Show Catalog' has already broken rank.

2016-03-02 133809.png (4.21 KiB) Viewed 3413 times

The argument could be made that the whole group needs updated to account for the various Arrangements available, but I'm not sure now is the time for that.

[binocular222]

Preview Pane, Preview Tab, Floating Preview, Full Screen Preview, Quick File View, Thumbnails or MDBU?

Some should die and some should be combined.

[Enternal]

When I want to preview something I am now faced with the question of where/how:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, Floating Preview, Full Screen Preview, Quick File View, Thumbnails or MDBU?

Thumbnails and MDBU can be ignored since they're different and separated enough from the other "Preview" functions. So we are now left with:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, Floating Preview, Full Screen Preview, Quick File View

Floating Preview and Full Screen Preview should be combined. Basically full screen preview should thought of as a subfunction of the Floating Preview and accessible through F12 or the Floating Preview's context menu instead as a entire separate feature with its own toolbar button. Quick File View... should probably either be integrated with floating preview (hex view or text view?) or just eliminated. It initially was useful for previewing zip files but the new Preview 2.0 seems to take care of that very well so it seems kind of useless now. With this, we now have only:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, and Floating Preview

I think this is now reasonable? Floating preview can be thought of more like an integrated picture viewer compared to the preview pane and tab. Preview pane and tab has their own usefulness depending on the screen. For example on document screens (screen rotated 90 degrees), you would relatively have a larger "free" space at the bottom of the screen. In normal landscape mode, you would have "free" space on the right/left. So it works for different purposes.

In terms of toolbar buttons, let's simplify down to only two. The Floating Preview and the Preview Pane. If I'm looking at it right, none of the other tabs has their own toolbar button to activate the tab so why does the Preview Tab gets one? In the past where we did not the Preview Pane, it would make sense since it's basically the only preview we have besides the integrated picture view that's called Floating Preview. It's now redundant?

So how's that reasoning?

What I'm more concerned about is the difference in capability of the Floating Preview, Preview Pane, and Preview Tab. Each have their own advantages and quirks. For example, Floating Preview cannot preview text files yet the other two preview methods does. Floating Preview and Floating Pane both preview videos or music files well but lack in features or power compared to Preview Tab, and more. It's... kind of confusing at the moment. Almost seems like three different code is used to power each of those preview methods with some overlap here and there.

[admin]

When I want to preview something I am now faced with the question of where/how:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, Floating Preview, Full Screen Preview, Quick File View, Thumbnails or MDBU?

Thumbnails and MDBU can be ignored since they're different and separated enough from the other "Preview" functions. So we are now left with:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, Floating Preview, Full Screen Preview, Quick File View

Floating Preview and Full Screen Preview should be combined. Basically full screen preview should thought of as a subfunction of the Floating Preview and accessible through F12 or the Floating Preview's context menu instead as a entire separate feature with its own toolbar button. Quick File View... should probably either be integrated with floating preview (hex view or text view?) or just eliminated. It initially was useful for previewing zip files but the new Preview 2.0 seems to take care of that very well so it seems kind of useless now. With this, we now have only:
Preview Pane, Preview Tab, and Floating Preview

I think this is now reasonable? Floating preview can be thought of more like an integrated picture viewer compared to the preview pane and tab. Preview pane and tab has their own usefulness depending on the screen. For example on document screens (screen rotated 90 degrees), you would relatively have a larger "free" space at the bottom of the screen. In normal landscape mode, you would have "free" space on the right/left. So it works for different purposes.

In terms of toolbar buttons, let's simplify down to only two. The Floating Preview and the Preview Pane. If I'm looking at it right, none of the other tabs has their own toolbar button to activate the tab so why does the Preview Tab gets one? In the past where we did not the Preview Pane, it would make sense since it's basically the only preview we have besides the integrated picture view that's called Floating Preview. It's now redundant?

So how's that reasoning?

What I'm more concerned about is the difference in capability of the Floating Preview, Preview Pane, and Preview Tab. Each have their own advantages and quirks. For example, Floating Preview cannot preview text files yet the other two preview methods does. Floating Preview and Floating Pane both preview videos or music files well but lack in features or power compared to Preview Tab, and more. It's... kind of confusing at the moment. Almost seems like three different code is used to power each of those preview methods with some overlap here and there.

No time to reply to all, sorry.

Preview Pane and Preview Tab share the same code.
Floating Preview share some of the code and has some own code.

I agree that the IP preview does not need a TB anymore. Will remove it.

The next version will have some moves towards consistency functionally and visually.

Thanks!

[TheQwerty]

I think some logic is missing during the determination of the responsible preview category.

I'm playing with creating my own PreviewHandler, and to get started I registered my extension to handle .md.
By default .md is included in the Text Files category, so I unchecked it there and then added it to Office files (since we cannot remove default extensions).

However, when I attempt to preview a file in the new pane it says: File type excluded from preview in configuration.
Clicking on the helpful Preview Now button above the message shows XY's text preview instead of my PreviewHandler.
The same behavior occurs if I uncheck the entire Text Files category.

It seems XY uses the first matching instance of the extension without regard to whether that extension or category is checked or unchecked.

EDIT: More weirdness...
The Preview tab shows both my handler and your error:

2016-03-10 102650.png (3.19 KiB) Viewed 3337 times

But Floating Preview works as expected:

2016-03-10 102733.png (12.93 KiB) Viewed 3337 times