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

[Hans Löffler <hloeffler3 gmx de>]

Am 08.03.2010 17:44, schrieb Alex Launi:
> 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 <http://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 <http://last.fm> info isn't interesting,
>       but imdb might be. With this new method we could have source
>       specific context info. Show last.fm <http://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?


Please make it an optional view as it is now. I rarely use the context 
pane but frequently use banshee on a netbook as an audio center, so 
there is not too much screen space to display anyway. I have not yet 
watched videos, so I cannot comment on this.

Hans