Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] GUI mockup... let's get this sorted once and for all

[William Jon McCann <mccann jhu edu>]

Hi Gareth,

Interesting ideas and good things to discuss  However, I think Jack has 
a pretty good point.  A few comments inline.

Gareth Murphy wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 17:49 +0000, Jack Miller wrote: 
>
> > All in all, I think it looks cool, but while the album art is cool,
> > pushing the queue down to three songs essentially makes it useless, in
> > my opinion. Also, any scaling down (i.e. not running RB full screen,
> > like I do in ion3) would cramp something *somewhere*, either cramp the
> > song list or the queue or the image, something gets pinched.
> >
> > Show me a way around this and I'd be totally down for this.
>
>   
> Yeah this has been on my mind too, although you should also remember
> that:
>
> (a) the qeued songs list will automatically get a scrollbar when the
> contents are greater than available space, so it's not that much of a
> problem when you also consider...

Scrollbars pretty much suck.  If you can't see about, say, 7 items at 
once then scrollbars really don't help you.

> (b) The sources list is usually smaller than that, I purposely included
> as many sources as possible to show the Tango icons off.

I don't think this is true at all.  Most people with iTunes that I know 
of have a huge source list full of playlists.  Let's do an informal survey:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/itunes/

> (c) The sidebars are all re sizable, so you could make the qeued songs
> box larger for the moments you wanted to browse the qeued songs...
> sounds suboptimal I know, but think about it, it really isn't a bad
> option.

Resizing issues become a real pain when you have three panes.  Look at 
evolution calendar as an example.  And not always showing the queue list 
makes it kind of pointless - you may as well use the Queue source 
instead of sidebar.

> (d) Very few people use screen resolutions of under 1024x768 or even
> 1280x1024 these days, and most of those run rhythmbox fullscreen when
> browsing etc. and simply minimise it to the notification area when
> listening... so potentially this is a non-issue for the majority of
> people anyways, and the others always have points (a) - (c) ;)

I don't think this is true.  One obvious counter-example is any portable 
device.  Making assumptions about screen size and font size is generally 
not so good.  Here's one of my personal metrics: the UI should be 
perfectly usable with a 28 pt font.  This ensures that people with 
vision impairment can use it and it also kinda makes sure it can be used 
on small devices.

Past versions of Rhythmbox have failed this test.  Really only recently 
has it passed.  It is interesting to note that iTunes totally fails in 
this regard as well.  Some parts of iTunes seem to use a fixed font size 
that can't be changed - or at least it isn't obvious.

So anyway, I think there are a few interesting problems if we want to 
add album art as a sidebar pane.

Jon