Re: [Muine] Muine UI idea for the future

[Jorn Baayen <jorn nl linux org>]

Hi,

Thanks for your mockups! I'll now go and reply to every bit .. 


> The window has default dimensions that fit on a 800x600 screen (30% of the
> internet users still use that res). Possible Gnome-panel and window manager
> dimensions were also taken into account when designing this mockup's
> dimensions.

The current UI takes even less space :P

> 
> I have re-arranged a few things, so, in my suggestion we have the playlist
> and its buttons on the left hand side, which is the first thing a user would
> do (at least for left-2-right users). On the right hand side you can find
> the actual song playback area and below it the visualization.

Alright. When I first saw the mockups I had a few seconds of confusion..
eyes dancing around the mockup to "index" everything and get the UI
model into my mind. It took like 3 seconds.. which is quite a lot of
time for something as simple as a music player. Bad sign.
(Yea, I daresay the current UI is a lot easier to "index" :P )

Visualisation.. I think this is just some unnecessary gadgetry,
definitely not useful in the main UI which is meant to be clean and
simple. It takes a lot of pointless space, too, and is disturbing. In
fullscreen vis is cool (alhtough i personally couldnt care less), sure,
but not here..

Then.. the seek bar. I intentionally put this in a dialog, because, how
often do you seek anyway? It just again takes a lot of space, another
widget to "index", etc. I think seeking is more like something that
should be available when you need it, but definitely not something you
use every day.. so a bit out of a place in the main window.

Then.. the song information. The "field labels" again add a lot of
clutter, for things that are obvious anyway. Well, when there are 4 bits
of information displayed it gets useful.. but in the current UI these
labels would be unnecessary. Also, I think at least genre is something
irrelevant to display in the main UI. When you are listening to some
music, you know what kind of music it is anyway .. so what use is the
genre. Genre is just useful for choosing a kind of music to listen to,
IMHO.

The album label.. I agree that does carry some value. But I think
knowing the album is actually mostly relevant when choosing an album to
play, but when playing a song all that really matters is the artist and
the title. The album can currently be viewed in the album cover image
tooltip.. if the user wants to know it anyway. In the current UI it
would be a bit bloated to add an album label too, so.. it's kind of a
trade-off.

> 
> This design has many ways to view the application. You can leave visible
> only the song playback area, or the playlist and the playback, or the
> playback and the visualization, or all 3 as in the mockup. For example, if
> you leave visible only the playback area, it has the advantage to have a
> view that it is a "mini view" for those who just want their XMMS-like small
> app on their corner of their screens, not taking much space with unessasery
> information most of the time (most people just select a playlist and they
> leave it playing on the background, so there is a need to not show always
> the playlist view). The "Views" can be controlled either with the litle
> black arrows (I know that Windows, BeOS and OSX has such a widget, but I
> don't know about GTK+) or by using the new "View" menu in the menubar.

My goal with Muine was to design an interface that would Just Work, no
prefs, no checkboxes, no options, no zillion of complicated widgets, let
alone interface modes. So no, I'm not thrilled about this idea ;)

I personally love Muine's simplicity ATM, it just.. works for me. Just
like I intended it to.. 

What I just hate in applications like Photoshop (or gimp, for that
matter..), which can be configured in a zillion different ways, every
widget can be rearranged.. is that when you install it you first have to
spend days to configure everything to become SOMEWHAT comfortable. I
would much prefer the photoshop UI designers to spend a lot of time and
invent a nice, simple, non-rearrangable, usable interface than having
every damn user spend 2 days configuring everything.

> 
> Now, by resizing the visualization plugin's view with the handlers, it
> should resize the visualization on the fly. The Playlist is resizable as
> well to suit resolution restrictions (resizes up to the point that the
> buttons don't collide with the shuffle/repeat text). The progress bar on the
> playback area should also resize on the fly upon a window resize.
> 
> Another idea would be to allow the three views to be available attached on
> the same window as in the mockup, or as different windows each. There are a
> lot of people who like an SDI interface more than an MDI one. ;-)
> 
> I tried to keep the HIG's spacing into mind in this mockup, so the borders
> of the widgets in regards to the whole window are now a bit bigger than the
> current Muine.

Correct spacing is only 0.5% of the work ;)

> 
> The Playlist:
> 
> The Playlist view now places the "Add Song" and "Add Album" on the botton of
> the playlist view  because they are out of the way, letting users have
> direct access to the songs immediately after the initial song addition. I
> also added the Shuffle and Repeat options here (might be better to only have
> them in the menubar instead?).  I would also advocate to get rid of the
> "Playlist (XX minutes remaining)" text. It takes space, makes the interface
> more bloated and that information sounds more like a punishment than
> actually useful information ("you got 17 more minutes to sing and dance,
> after that, back to work!").

The playlist (xx minutes remaing) label I find very useful myself. When
I'm for example making a playlist to fall asleep with, I tend to use
approximately 2 hours of music.. when I can just see whats left to be
played in a glance of an eye it is very easy to do that. When I have to
go and calculate everything myself.. like with so many other players..
brr.

It also is useful when, for example, you're just working.. checking the
music player and seeing "oh! only 10 minutes remaining. gotta add a
couple more albums.."

> 
> Now, the most important change I did in the playlist though, is the way it
> handles selections. I used Muine all day today and I got more than 3 times
> confused as to which song was actually playing, because of this scenario:
> User starts playing a song ("Rasputin"), the little icon appears before the
> song name in the playlist and the list item gets this teal/blue color
> because it is selected. User single-clicks another song from the list
> ("Orinoco Flow"), but doesn't activate it. User goes elsewhere. User comes
> back and sees "Orinoco Flow" being selected, but "Rasputin" actually coming
> out of the speakers. User initially believes it is a bug! Paying closer
> attention user sees the little icon on teh left of the song name. Still, it
> is confusing without much paying attention and trust me, no one wants to pay
> attention to music players which are "background" applications, we got work
> to do. ;-)
>
> So, this is what happened a lot to me today, and I didn't like this UI
> behavior which leads to confusion. What needs to be done is to change the
> selection/color behavior to this:
> Always have the teal/blue color as in the mockup for the song that's
> playing, but when a user single-click selects another song, please use a
> lighter-color to represent the selection, cause otherwise it just gets
> confusing as to which song actually currently plays. An idea would also be
> to use that lighter color for mouse-overs as well, when the user mouse-overs
> over songs in the playlist.

Yes.. this is indeed a problem. I've considered your suggestion myself
but it seems to have lost my mind.. I'll try to implement that today!

No mouse-overs though, would be rather incosistent with all the other
treeviews out there.. :) If we want mouse overs, that should be
implemented in the gtk theme or wherever.

> 
> The Playback area:
> 
> The Playback area adds a progress bar (which as I mentioned above, resizes
> automatically when its view resizes). Underneath it you will find the album
> cover as you do today, but I changed the way information about the song is
> displayed and the text weight applied to them. Now you also get Album
> information (and the Year released in a parenthesis, no need for a new line)
> and also the Genre infromation. The text should (more or less) be aligned
> vertically with the height of the album cover so it won't look weird.

Discussed this one above ..

> 
> If no album cover can be found, please use Muine's icon image or another
> icon, but not the Gnome logo,  cause that would be more relevant, I think.

What I like about this icon is that it is very non-obtrusive. If we were
to use the muine icon, this would be a lot more .. intrusive or
something, I think. I have no hard arguments to back this, but I prefer
the icon. Of course, if someone comes up with a "mellow" muine icon that
would be even cooler :)

> 
> Clicking on the album cover in my mockup, it changes the rectangle's view
> and it displays the two simple visualizations as WinAMP does. This way, even
> when people using Muine in mini-mode, they can get some form of a simple
> visualization, and if they don't want it at all, they can return to the
> "album cover" mode. An idea here would be to also allow via the "View"
> menubar menu item to hide the album_cover/song_info sub-view and thus making
> the main Muine window even smaller and more simple.
> 
> The Visualization View:
> 
> The third view has two buttons and the actual openGL plugin.  The first
> button allows you to load another plugin from a list. The second widget, a
> text widget, shows the name of the visualization plugin currently used. The
> second button is the one that takes over the screen and makes the plugin
> Fullscreen (use the character "F" for keyboard shortcut). Then, you get the
> actual visualization widget (resizable on the fly).
> 
> A "Plugin Settings" and a "Start/Stop Plugin" should be available from the
> View menu in the menubar.

Discussed these... 

> 
> Conclusion:
> 
> I think that's all I had to say. :)
> Just an additional feature request, I would like to be able to listen to
> internet radio with Muine (Digitally Imported radio station rules! :-)

I think internet radio is something that should be done in a simple,
neat, but independent application. Why? Muine is based on the idea of
songs and albums, not of infinite radio stations. Mixing the concepts
like happens in Rhythmbox is messy.. IMHO, anyway. It's just a hack, I
think.


Cheers,

Jorn