David Mosberger-Tang wrote:
> It is interesting how scanner vendors insist on writing their own
> frontends. Graphics cards vendors seem to be able to live with the
> fact that, on Windows, all they can do is add a couple of tabs to the
> "Display Properties" dialog. I think the Graphics card approach is
> MUCH better because it gives users a (mostly) consistent user
> interface, while still giving vendors a certain level of
> differentiation.
>
> I think if TWAIN were to become widespread on non-Windows/non-Mac
> platforms, vendors would sooner or later realize that it's just not
> practical to write a custom frontend for each case. What we can offer
> to them is to give up some (not all!) of the control over the look of
> the scanner dialog in return for not having to worry about the scanner
> dialog ever again. Given how scanner prices have dropped over the
> last couple of years, I'm quite sure there must be _some_ vendors that
> would go for this deal.
I think it is good enough that the vendors can write their own frontends
- if they really like an own interface. We should not support too much
that the frontends do look different for each backend. For the user it
is much better if we have a common interface.
>
> Different "skins" (themes) are also a way to make a dialog look more
> unique without even changing how the interface works. Anyhow, making
> the user-interface scriptable certainly would require some thought.
> It's of course a chicken-and-egg problem. It would help greatly if we
> had one or two scanner vendors that would be willing to work with us,
> so we can make sure that the work wouldn't be wasted.
We could add some "reserved", "vendor specific" or "style-info" fields to
the options to sane-standard 2.0. There is no need to specify it from the
beginning, it can be marked as "reserved for future use" and defined
when there is a need for it.
Bye
Oliver
-- Homepage: http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch sane-umax: http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch/sane/sane-umax.html xsane: http://www.wolfsburg.de/~rauch/sane/sane-xsane.html E-Mail: mailto:Oliver.Rauch@Wolfsburg.DE-- Source code, list archive, and docs: http://www.mostang.com/sane/ To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe sane-devel | mail majordomo@mostang.com
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