Blorb thumbnailer for GNOME

So, speaking of cover art, I wrote a kind of plugin for GNOME (the desktop environment in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) to enable thumbnail previews of Blorbs. The thousand-word screenshot is here:

lg.vblank.net/blorb/

along with the source code. Hopefully it’s portable enough that the sufficiently interested can compile it without any trouble – if not, let me know!

Brilliant!

Would be great to have it on the Unbuntu IF PPA: launchpad.net/~ubuntu-if Is that something you could do or should I do it?

I’ll leave it to you to upload to Launchpad, but I don’t mind doing the initial packaging work. Let me see if I can’t get you a usable source package.

Wow, must be something in the water. I put together a Babel thumbnailer for OS X 10.5+ last week:
dl.dropbox.com/u/2759298/Bruegel.qlgenerator.zip

Does your plugin also work for TADS games with embedded cover art? There aren’t too many but for example The Sleeping Princess has one.

I’d planned to do a Windows one and hadn’t even looked at the Gnome side yet. Maybe we should put together some sort of project page for these, if only just a set of links on ifwiki?

Babel indeed – Windows and KDE to thread!

My version only does blorbs. I had imagined a more general thumbnailer but, when it came to TADS, I couldn’t get Babel to actually extract anything. And there were few enough examples that I figured their covers were stored in a non-standard way, perhaps for in-game display. Looking now at Sleeping Princess and Shelter from the Storm, it’s clear those covers are intended as metadata, so I must have been doing something wrong – which means I could start supporting TADS, too.

Then again, it may be easier to add GNOME support on your end than TADS on mine. How are you doing the image processing?

I didn’t need any file or image processing to speak of; I just used the babel_handler.h functions to extract the cover art data and processed it using some Core Graphics classes. The full code is here.

Nice! I found one issue with it, though. It looks slightly weird in a small preview. (Viewing it in columns in Finder.) Then there’s a large white space to the right of the image. Guessing from how it looks in QuickLook, I suppose you draw tiny white text on a white background there.

Can you send me a screenshot? I’ve seen this happen with Closed Circles but nothing else, and I assumed it was an issue with the cover art in that one file.

Here you go: (image deleted)

Yep, that’s what happened with the other game. Maybe I ought to scale the image first, like QLThumbnailRequestSetImage told me to.