art with code

2008-11-14

Filezoo, end of day 5: Context-sensitive zoom, recursive drawing prototype



Day five of the Filezoo project turns towards the night. Wrote the traversal server, but it was a lot slower than spawning a bunch of ThreadPool work units. So I scrapped that idea. Made clicking on an unreadably small item zoom it to a readable size. Also wrote a prototype of the recursive directory drawing. It's awesome, but crappy. So I'm going to spend a while making it just awesome.

The user interface still lacks a couple of features that would increase the usability of the thing. For starters, there is no overview indicator to show the current scroll position. And zooming out is a bit of a bother (I did make it faster though), clicking outside to zoom out would be handy. The breadcrumb bar also manages to hide the most pertinent parts of the path, which, coupled with the lack of a "Go to parent dir"-button makes navigation impossible once deep enough. Zooming to change directories would be great.

Then on the file management features side - of which there currently are none - a good start would be to add selection and then build a small operation library on top of that. For executing operations on the selection, a context menu would be the tool of choice. Yeah.

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