[Wine] link Explorer Shell extensions to Gnome thumbnailer

[Martin Gregorie]

On Sun, 2012-04-01 at 12:43 -0500, Fred2 wrote:
> The OP finds it difficult to be understood and taken serious in this forum.
> 
> > The OP was asking about an extension thumbnailer for *Windows Explorer*,
> > not a proprietary application.
> 
> Proprietary applications provide a "shell extension handler thumbnail 
> extractor" for Windows Explorer so that Windows Explorer (and also the 
> whole Windows Desktop) displays thumbnails for special binary file formats 
> for which a default Windows installation does not already show thumbnails.
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc144118%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
> 
So, you're saying that Windows Exploder is a built-in part of the
Windows desktop, not a separate program as it is in *nixen?
 
> So this question is not about using Windows Explorer instead of for example 
> Nautilus (or Dolphin etc.), but about having thumbnails in the desktop 
> environment for files for which there exists no Linux compatible 
> thumbnailer (because only the software manufacturer knows how to get these 
> thumbnails and they don't provide linux software). 
> 
> On Linux, thumbnailers are usually handled on desktop environment level  
> (gnome-thumbnailer, KDE ThumbCreator), not as an extension of the file manager. 
> 
But, this sounds like thumbnails as desk-top icons rather than icons in
a Nautilus window. Is that correct?

If so, that means there are actually two extra problems to solve:
(1) some way of generating thumbnails for display on the desktop
    (and the possibility that this would be different for the various
     desktops)
(2) some way of generating icons for use by Nautilus (or Dolphin, etc. 
    which I've never used).
 
Unless this thumbnail generator can be run as a Wine app, implementing
it sounds to me like it would need a whole new runtime environment to be
built, i.e. it would either be a Wine sub-project as complex as the one
that may some day allow Windows USB drivers to be used, or a separate
project in its own right.

I'll be interested to see what the devs have to say about doing this.

> But if the Windows application already gives us a shell extension handler
> thumbnail extractor that knows how to extract the thumbnail from these 
> file formats, couldn't we better make use of that? Could we automatically 
> use all shell extension handler thumbnail extractors and use the extracted 
> thumbnails for a gnome-thumbnailer or KDE ThumbCreator?
> 
That would depend on how well defined and documented the Windows APIs
for these extensions are. 


Martin