From: Bharat M. <bh...@me...> - 2004-06-21 00:09:40
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Tom Lennon wrote: > I have never quite understood why, from the UI perspective, a root album > would be different from any other album. I assume there is a feature or user > scenario that depends on this. Does anyone know the reason the root is > considered a different kind of container than albums? The primary reason is that the root actually *isn't* an album, for historical reasons. Basically, when I started writing Gallery, I started with a very simple model: a collection of albums that could contain only photos. Later on, John Kirkland added the capability for albums to contain other albums, but we never made a root album to put all the sub albums inside. So the root of your gallery is actually in a completely different data structure than all of the sub albums. This structural difference makes it very difficult to offer the same functionality at the root as we do in all the other albums, since we have to add the features in both places and there are many differences between the two structures. In order to properly resolve this, we really need to create a new root album and put everything into it which is not a trivial change. Once we do that, then things get a lot easier but it's not an easy hump to get over. Now the good news is that I took all of this into account when building G2 and it has a root album that is the same as all other albums, giving us a uniform feature set from top to bottom. Check it out. -Bharat |