Would XFCE consider adopting AppData?

[Richard Hughes]

On 26 May 2014 23:57, Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net> wrote:
> The guidelines there are only best-practices, and are not forced
> somehow. If providing a 16:9 screenshot is not a good idea, don't do
> it - anything is better than force-scaling it to 16:9, making it look
> weird. However, you should try to get that aspect ratio if possible,
> because it looks much nicer in most software-center applications.

Right, we had to compromise here. I actually did a lot of research
about screenshot ratios, and the general take home message was that it
doesn't really matter, as long as all the applications have the same
aspect -- otherwise the UX is jarring when switching between
applications as the widgets all move around. The reason we went with
16:9 was that most laptops are now widescreen due to the content
industry taking away our nice 4:3 screens -- and that a lot of
applications assume wider-rather-than-taller now. Analysing *lots* of
existing screenshots, 16:9 worked more closely than any other aspect
ratio. Plus YouTube uses 16:9 by default, as we'll want to add videos
at some point too for some apps.

I'd use a 4:3 screen if I had the chance -- and my external "coding"
panel is 90 degrees upright as I only ever use 80 columns :)

You can do the screenshots in any aspect you like really; the repodata
extractor on Fedora just pads them with alpha to avoid making the UI
move around -- it just looks non-cohesive when playing with the UX;
hence the recommendation.

> Just pick a sane distribution default should work, IMHO. Richard, what
> is your opinion on this?

I think a GNOME app should use a stock GNOME install, and a stock XFCE
application should use a stock XFCE install -- we don't want to
"prefer" one desktop or distro over another, and it would be weird to
have to do KDE app screenshots in GNOME3 for instance. What I want to
avoid is seeing things like the Foresight background and the Ubuntu
font when sitting in SLED or RHEL -- that would be odd indeed :) Just
using the upstream defaults should get us mostly there.

> For now, just upload a resolution which works for you, the
> distribution and software-store will do all the scaling :-)

Right, we'll never resample the image with a different x and y scale,
that would look nasty. Sticking to the list of recommended 16:9
resolutions is a good idea if you want your app to look awesome, but
any screenshot is better than no screenshot.

Thanks,

Richard