[Banshee-List] Making the now playing source more playful

[Alex Launi <alex launi gmail com>]

Last night before I went to bed I was thinking a little bit about the context pane and the now playing source in Banshee. The location of the context pane is awkward, it's content is related to the currently playing track, but it's located inside of the library. This is a little bit counter intuitive, I think.

The now playing source however is a massive region which is under used. For music it's beautiful, but basically useless. Unless you're having a party and just want to display the current track, there's not much content there.

Let's merge the two. I think that moving content from the context pane to the Now Playing source has a lot of advantages, here are some of the ones that I've thought of while considering this change.

1. More room for context info! Currently the context pane is small, and really you need to expand it to make it useful. But this covers up the library, so you can really only use one at a time anyway, and the two interfere. Getting the context pane out of the library makes them both more useful.
2. More room for the library! This is really just part two of #1..
3. A more useful Now Playing source! Sure for videos the now playing source is useful; it's playing video, but for music it's not really that interesting. You get a better view of the album art when you mouseover in the Now Playing area near the controls. Having real content here like last.fm info, or wikipedia article about the artist/album you're listening to makes the Now Playing source more interesting.
4. Per source context info! Right now the context pane is kind of weird for videos. I'm watching a video about Burzum, and it's giving me recommendations for other black metal bands, but when I switch to a screencast of Do it's still giving me Burzum info. For a lot of videos last.fm info isn't interesting, but imdb might be. With this new method we could have source specific context info. Show last.fm for music videos, songs, imdb for movies/tv shows.

I'm interested to try my hand at implementing this, but it seems like a rather large change and I wanted to discuss it with the group before I spent a bunch of hours working on it, only to have it be rejected.. So tell me your thoughts, do you like it? Things you'd like to see it do? Problems with the current context pane you'd like to address?

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--Alex Launi