Great to see a thumbnail option added in the 0.9 release.
Pitty it doesn't actually show thumbnails (I only want it the
way the OSX Finder shows previews), but it shows crops of
the centre of the images. Mentioned this in the bug tracker
as well.
The thumbnails should be 'built' for each file independently
instead of the all at once it seems to do now. My iBook stalls
for a while when I select a new folder containing images and
then shows all the 'thumbnails' at once, instead of building/
showing them image for image (as the Finder, iPhoto and
GraphicConverter do for instance).
The interface is still confusing to me. I'd really like to see a
clear separation between browsing and managing image
files. I'd like to see those tabs removed completely and
placed in the Toolbar. The Thumbnails and Image Viewer tab
should be combined to one, because you should be able to
switch between them by double clicking (or with the
keycommands [CMD]+[UP/DOWN]) either an image or a
thumbnail. This means when switching from an image to the
Thumbnail Viewer, the folder containing the image should be
displayed.
The image browsing mode could be called 'classic mode' and
behaves like iPhoto, GraphicConverter and ACDSee do. This
means an interface featuring a vertically split screen, of
which the left part shows a cascading tree (displaying
folders only relative to the users' Home folder) and the
Thumbnail/Image Viewer in the right part of the screen.
Displaying and moving files from the Thumbnail/Image
Viewer part of the screen to the target folder in the
cascading tree in the left part of the screen will be done by
drag-and-dropping the thumbnails or images. Copying files
instead of moving can be done by holding the ALT-key while
drag-and-dropping as in the Finder.
The Slideshow should show the images in from the
Thumbnail Viewer as it does now. The Slideshow has to
show the contents of the folder of the image currently
displayed in the Image Viewer.
When an image is displayed in the Image Viewer, the [LEFT]
and [RIGHT] keys should display/move to the next and
previous image respectively. Would be great if the
Slideshow supports this behaviour as well.
When the application starts, the classic mode should be
selected as default as the main screen with the 'Thumbnails
with all' option selected. It should either display the content
of the current users' Home folder or the last visited folder.
To me the optimal FileManager will have a (horizontally)
split screen with two of the 'classic' browser windows as
described above for both the source (=top) and target
(=bottom) part of the screen (similar to the basic
FileZilla(.sourceforge.net) interface). Both the parts of the
screen behave as the classic mode; switching between list,
thumbnails and full image display with the same mouse- and
keycommands.
I hope my suggestions will help with achieving a intuitive
interface and behaviour. That's currently still not the case
unfortunately, although it al seems very efficient.
