Re: [Banshee-List] Minor Alpha Comments

["Aaron Bockover" <abockover novell com>]

Hi Allan, 

Thanks for your feedback! I'll reply inline.

> *The notification pop-up*
> 
> I initially found the new countdown timer on the notification pop-up 
> quite confusing. I totally misunderstood what it is supposed to signify!

We have no control over this, unfortunately. This timer is a part of the
notification bubble theme provided by your distribution (which I'm going
to guess is Ubuntu, since they're the only distro I know shipping this
timer theme).

It's a horrendous idea to provide something like this at the
distribution level, and your feedback underlines why. You'll have to
raise this issue with your distribution as those bubbles show up based
on messages we send over DBus - we don't actually control the UI. We
have a nicer theme in openSUSE, without confusing timers :)

> One thing that could be helpful would be to place the timer next to the 
> close X in the top right hand corner - that would suggest that the timer 
> relates to the closing of the notification, rather than 'Play next item'.

Again, we don't control the UI of the bubbles - just the content in
them.

> I also wonder whether it would be better to rename the 'Play next item' 
> button to 'Skip this item'. In the context of a pop-up notification, 
> 'Play next item' isn't particularly supported by relevant information - 
> it doesn't tell you what the next item is. In comparison, it would be 
> clear what 'Skip this item' refers to, since the details of 'this item' 
> will be displayed in the pop-up itself.

We do control this. I'm in favor of changing the text for this action in
the bubble now. I never was fond of "Play next item" but I wanted to get
this feature in at time when we were in a string freeze, and that string
was already translated and made the most sense. We can change it now.

> At the moment, the format of the window title is: '<Title> (<Artist>)'. 
> For example: 'Rock You (The Roots)'
> 
> To me, brackets doesn't say 'this is the artist'. Hence, to me, they 
> aren't particularly meaningful.
> 
> One solution would be to go for the format of: '<Title> by <Artist>'. 
> For example: 'Rock You by The Roots'. This would have the advantage of 
> conforming to the format of the current item information in the main 
> window (which goes: <Title> by <Artist> from <Album>). Continuity is good!

Good suggestion.

> 
> *Box borders*
> 
> The boxes (I'm sure there's a better word for these, but I don't know 
> it!) which make up the main part of Banshee's UI extend right up to the 
> left and right edges of the application window. For my tastes, there 
> would be a small gap between the window edge and these boxes. That would 
> look much nicer (and would be more consistent with the rest of the UI, 
> maybe?)!

It's not a good idea to introduce padding around a UI like Banshee's for
usability reasons. For instance, in maximized mode, the window manager
can remove its border to allow the contents of the window to exactly
line up with the edge of the screen. This makes hitting the scroll bar a
lot easier with the mouse - the user can just shove the cursor all the
way to the right of the window and know that they can star dragging the
bar. If there were padding in our UI, the user would have to carefully
observe the exact location of the cursor before dragging the bar.

If you don't like the lack of padding, try another window manager theme
that introduces a border in un-maximized mode.

> When an item is playing, its details are displayed at the top of the 
> window in the format <Title> by <Artist> from <Album>. It would be 
> really nice if clicking <Title>, <Artist>, or <Album> selected the 
> corresponding items. They would become links, more or less.

This is planned, but probably not until after 1.0.

> It would be really good to have an easy way to navigate to the current 
> item in the browser (in addition to the one outlined above). Clicking on 
> the first column in the item browser would be one way to do this.

This is also planned, and should be in before the final 1.0.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Best,
Aaron

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