Calum Benson wrote:

Cool! Sounds we're on the same track for how the system interacts. Here's the mockup I was working on... enlarged to show how powerful it is! Perhaps we can combine ideas were appropriate and come out with something.

http://www.gnome.org/~clarkbw/images/backgrounds-dialog.png

I kept the current list format of [thumb] /info/ [thumb] /info/ [thumb] /info/

I planned to use the right hand side for a "preview" mode, maybe showing the background on your desktop. The idea is to be more explicit about scaling images, hoping it would be helpful for showing the screen size vs. the image so you can easily fix stretching and other scaling aspects.

While I made my mockup dialog fairly large I don't actually think most of the browsing will be done in here. I'm making the assumption that the dialog is designed for choosing from a set of backgrounds or subscriptions you have already and that the web site will allow you to pick new individual backgrounds to download (which then appear in the dialog).

When trying to design this once before, people wanted to be able to choose an individual image from a subscription and just keep that one as their background. I made a button for keeping current image from the subscription, however in practice you find that people really want the image that was just replaced and not really the current one. I think there are a lot of ways to make that better, but one easy one was to assume the web site allowed people to dig into a subscription and click [get this background!].

Cheers, ~ Bryan