actually, *if* you use the new vista style dialog then you can have such a favorite links thing.. Unfortunately, this is afaik only available on vista. (random googled example: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista/VGFileDialogs.aspx)
Yes I've had my eye on that article for a while now. The Vista dialogs are pretty nifty, and they have a lot of useful new features, so that you don't have to do all the convoluted tricks I've had to do to get all the features you want.
The main problem that stops me beginning work on this immediately is the SVG preview. To render a preview, the Vista dialog requires you to write an explorer COM thumbnail provider. On the plus side this sort of thing would give us SVG thumbnails throughout all of Windows. But the problem is that at the moment the renderer cannot be loaded as a library. So the only way to render thumbnails, and the preview pane would be to load up the whole of inkscape (- at 70Mb RAM!), and having that going on in the background while you're browsing round with explorer would be excruciating in Windows.
The only (rather yucky) alternative would be the RSVG library, but this depends on Croco for CSS support. Inkscape has Croco - but it's been modified to integrate with Inkscape's XML DOM.
So to recap: If you want Vista style dialogs with the mandatory preview pane, we either have to modularise inkscape (which sounds very hard), or add RSVG and a *second* version Croco-unmodified, which would bloat the whole package by about 750kb.
At this stage it doesn't really sound promising. Besides, as of 5 months ago, this old MS fanboy has finally given up faith is Microsoft, and moved over to Ubuntu - which I love. So in a sense it feels a bit odd adding features that encourage people on to Vista, because really I want MS to go away, and everybody to join me on Linux. I'm being silly - it doesn't really work that way - I'll add support for it if it becomes practical.
Joel
On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 20:27 +0200, Simon Dahlbacka wrote:
2008/2/28, Joel Holdsworth <joel@...1709...>: I think the answer is yes and no.
Firstly - if you want, you can globally customize the links shown in all file dialogs on your system by tweaking the registry in this sort of way: http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/system/article.php/c13407/.actually, *if* you use the new vista style dialog then you can have such a favorite links thing.. Unfortunately, this is afaik only available on vista. (random googled example: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista/VGFileDialogs.aspx)
and just for the record. +1 for the change to native dialogs from me.
/Simon