Re: [Muine] Info dialogs revisited

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Sun, 2004-04-11 at 10:07 +0100, Lee Willis wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-04-11 at 00:58 +0200, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I also did a proposal on information dialogs. It's here:
> > http://huizen.dds.nl/~jbaayen/infodialog-proposal.html
> > 
> > (Obviously heavily inspired by Lars' mockups :) )
> > 
> > Again, comments appreciated!
> 
> The first two images appear to be the same (song-info-1.png) - am I just
> missing something, or did you just accidentally include the image twice?

Oops- fixed!

> 
> song-info-1.png
> ---------------
> Rather than showing either Artist, or Artists depending on the current
> tags, I think (From a British convention point of view) that it would be
> better if it were just always "Artist(s)". I'm not sure how well this
> works in other languages though ...  Same would then go for the Genre
> field (See later point).

With (s), especially since the text is bold, it looks very .. stressed
or something. I have instead changes the labels to be plural.

> I also have a nagging feeling that the title
> should be presented as plain text with a change button next to it [This
> could then replace the text with an editable pre-populated text-box]. It
> just seems more consistent that way. 

Consistent, yea- but it would be silly I think. Why have the user use a
dialog with only a text entry, when we can just as well use a direct
text entry?

The reason we have dialogs for the others, is that they are too
complicated for direct manipulation ..

> I also disagree with "album entry
> will not be there when there is no album set". If it's not shown then
> how would you set an album tag for an incorrectly ripped song?

If you rip songs, you rip a whole album and their album tags will all be
the same. If they contain a typo, you go the album dialog, and correct
the typo- then all songs will have the album title fixed.

The goal of this tag editing is correcting typos and minor mistakes..
seen the structure of Muine I see changing the album altogether as a
fairly major operation- not mere typo correction. I agree though, that,
if this were possible in a clean way, it would be nice to have .. 

Also, even if we did this- how would it be achieved? The "Details"
button brings up the "album info" dialog- if no album is set, what
should we do then?

However, I'd be interested to hear others' opinion on this one .. 

> album-info-1.png
> ----------------
> Same comments as above about the title field. Also, rather than "Select
> album cover" and "Remove album cover" I think it'd be better to just
> have a "Change" button under the image which brings up a dialog. This
> dialog should let you:

I'm not sure we'd need this, because:

> - Drag an image in

This is already possible- I've added a mention to the html.

> - Browse your filesystem for an image

"Select Album Cover..."

> - Request an attempt to auto-fetch the image

Do we really need this? I think the need for this is so rare that it's
just as easy to let the user browse to amazon.com and dnd.

And, I think it's better to have cover manipulation directly on the
dialog rather than in a sub dialog, because I see this as a very basic
editing action that we should support through a easy UI.

Through the current UI we support everything- maybe not optimally, but
at least in an easy and transparant way. Perhaps the user initially
surfs to a site, downloads the cover, then clicks "select album cover",
etc- and eventually discovers dnd to the image itself. But I don't see a
problem there.. way better in my opinion than having a complicated UI to
accomplish the same tasks with perhaps a few clicks less.

> Long term, I'd also like a "browse the web for an image" which would
> open up epiphany at some sensible start point (Say the amazon search for
> the relevnat strings, or a google image search), and through epiphany
> extensions allow you to click on an image and choose to use it for the
> selected album cover , closing the browser when done. For bonus points
> you could also embed epiphany through bonobo in part of the muine stuff
> so it doesn't seem too confusing ;)

Hmm.. bloat ;)

>
> album-info-2.png:
> -----------------
> No comments ;)
> 
> album-info-3.png:
> ----------------
> Not sure why but I would have thought the buttons were more associative
> if they were down the right hand side of the box, not below it, e.g.
> 
> +----------------+  +-----+
> |                |  +-----+
> |                |
> |                |  +-----+
> |                |  +-----+
> |                |
> |                |  +-----+
> |                |  +-----+
> |                |
> |                |
> |                |
> +----------------+
> 
> Like in the Artist/performer dialog in fact ...

Agreed- changed!

> Also, can you drag a song into this window to add it to the album?

I would say no. See the earlier bit about handling songs without album
set ..

> choose-genre.png
> ----------------
> How come I can only choose one genre?  This should perhaps be presented
> more like epiphany's add bookmark dialog, a list with check-boxes. We
> can decide on a sensible default list, and allow people to add a new
> genre via a "New" button.
>
> Actually all you'd need to do would be to add tick-boxes in the list,
> and add an "Add" button to the right of the text-box you have in the
> mock-up and that would work for me!

I got a much better idea for all this of a sudden- instead of using
genres, we're gonna use groups here.


I did a bunch other changes too. This needs lots of polish ..
suggestions most welcome .. 


Thanks!

Jorn

> 
> Anyway, that's most of my thoughts in a big brain dump :)  Overall I
> think it looks good though ...
> 
> Lee