Simple Scan

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 17:55 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> 
> Thanks Matthias Clasen for the review.  If folks here are interested in
> testing it, it has now been built for Rawhide and Fedora 13
> (updates-testing repo).   Let me know what's the next step in having it
> by default in Fedora 13.

So, I took some time today to actually play with simple-scan some today,
with some of the scanners we have here in the office. While this tool
shows some promise, it still has some way to go before it can claim to
be _the_ simple scanning UI. I think it is good enough to include it in
the desktop spin anyway, since we don't have any scanning solution right
now...

Here are some of the things I've noticed:

- First impression: The initial screen with which it comes up is bad,
just an empty paper outline. It should probably say something like
'Searching for connected scanners...' in an infobar with a little
spinner. And the 'no scanners found' message would also be much nicer in
an infobar embedded in the main window instead of a separate dialog.

- The toolbar: duplicating every single action that is available in the
menus is not the best toolbar design. The 'Stop' button is sensitive
even if no scan is in progress. Worse, if a scan _is_ in progress, the
'Stop' button does not stop it. The scan button is sensitive even if no
scanner is connected or if the scanner is connected, but no original has
been inserted. If we can detect the 'no originals' condition, that would
be good to present somehow in the UI. The scanner itself certainly
notices it, since it says so in its display.

- The default for the scan action should probably be 'scan all pages',
not 'scan a single page'. 

- The document area: The sizing of the paper outline is odd, there is no
way to make it wider, but it grows higher and higher as I resize the
window. When scanning multiple pages, the document view places the pages
horizontally. It would be much better to strive for a document view that
closely resembles evince's. We are scanning documents, after all, and
evince is the document viewer. IMO, the duplication should even include
the thumbnail sidebar, that would be a very nice way to navigate a
multi-page scan. The outline that indicates the selected page would be
better if it took the selection color from the theme instead of
hardcoding red.

- The tools: The cropping tool interaction is somewhat wierd. I would
recommend taking a look at shotwells crop tool, which is nice. A clone
of it can readily be stolen from my accountsdialog. There seems to be no
way to get out of the crop mode again, after clicking the scissors icon.
The crop area should probably have a reasonable minimum size, since it
is impossible to click it after shrinking it to 1x1 by accident...
One missing tool is rearranging the sequence.

- On saving: 'New' and 'Quit' both dump my unsaved scans without
warning, which is not nice. The tool should probably save its internal
state anyway, so I don't loose all the scans when it crashes. That would
also help with the memory consumption, since you then don't have to keep
all scans in memory at full resolution.


Matthias