GNOME Scan

Hi,

Most of you read the latest news about picasa for Linux. Apart from beeing just a wine linked software, thanks to Google for providing regular repository for tons of distros. This is amazing to see such compagny taking FOSS in account, trying to understand the way it works instead of trying to use Windows® methods on Libre systems.

Anyway, the key point about picasa is that scan feature. You may have found it or not. I guess they use an internal SANE/TWAIN bridge. I have to admit the scanner support is really rought and buggy (or quick and dirty if you mind).

Devices option are dumped with one tab per option group. There is no preview area. The overall UI is messy, inconsistent and unfriendly. I’m not critizing this because it’s proprietary, i bet even Google people behind that think the same.

However, that’s quite obvious why they come to such result. After writing too SANE frontend (considering the entire gnome-scan rewrite for 0.6 release), i can say that SANE needs huge work for frontend developers, for various reasons :

• options are very primitive and not directly suitable for UI (see screenshot : for options for selecting scan area). However, these options are still declared with “high level” meta data such as title, description, etc. suitable for building UI. Options are even grouped.
• backends are very very inconsistent. See my various posts at sane-devel list. SANE 1.X lacked tons of recommendations. That’s normal that SANE 1.0 did not provide all the recommandations for today scanners. However, no update has been done since SANE standard 1.0 publication. That’s the lame. Since, all backends implements options with a lot of originality making frontend developer life a hell.

I would add another problem : misintegration in hosting OS. SANe pretend to be very portable and it actually is. However, portability does not mean integration anywhere with only generic code reduce to the least common denominator. This should mean use of each native OS specific models and structures, all of this abstracted using internals models and structures. That’s true for abstraction layer, device probe, network, etc.

I really like SANE. It’s leightweight. It’s extendable. It’s well designed. Yes, it’s well designed ! However, it’s implementation lakes consistency and real portability.

Étienne.