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:
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?
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.