Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Layout ideas (mockups)

[Peter <rhythmbox-devel maubp freeserve co uk>]

Hi Steve,

You asked for some comments, so here are my personal opinions:

> Currently, I haven't figured out a really good way to deal with the large
> space to the right of the song info box.  Of course, extensions could
> go here, like "Love Song" in Last.fm or other plugins.

Well, in the mock-ups shown you haven't used a track with a long same,
long artist or a long album name - the whole block should be a lot wider
to cope with most situations, and perhaps use a "..." when truncating.

In order to create all that empty space, you have made the playing time bar
(not sure what RB calls it) very narrow.  This would almost impossible to use
when trying to drag the current playing point on a very long track
(e.g. an audio
book or some classical music).

On balance I'm not keen on these changes.  I've seen some similar mock-ups
in the past but I haven't gone and searched the mailing list archive for them.

> Brief overview of the imaginary main controls:
>  - The play button toggles to a Pause button, if the track can be
> paused.  Otherwise (for streaming) it toggles to a Stop button.

Sounds good to me.

>  - Clicking the Forward and Rewind buttons, will skip, as usual.
> Clicking and holding them, however, will scan at a SANE speed.  This
> is how iTunes works, I'm told.  Will have alternative designs later.

Sounds good to me.

>  - Albums in the Album browser should have album art displayed next to
> them (not in mockups, see here:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=77413&action=view)

Looks good to me.  We can find the relevant cover as in general the album art
search plugin doesn't care about the specific track (embedded art in
the meta data
being a special case).  Again, I'm sure I've seem similar mock-ups before.

>  - Search is more like Banshee's.

Could you explain? I don't know how Banshee's search works, and I'm fairly
happy with RB's search.

Peter