Re: [Muine] A few suggestions

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On R, 2005-02-18 at 19:12 -0500, Matthew Good wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 01:04 +0200, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> > I don't think we should start playing when the user presses "queue".. i
> > mean, queue != play. 
> 
> I knew you were going to say that ;)
> 
> I agree that the terminology isn't quite right, but I think the behavior
> would be nice.  This is actually similar to what the Totem playlist
> does.  If your playlist is empty and you click "Add", it immediately
> starts playing the new item.  Subsequent "Add"s append the file to the
> playlist.  
> 
> I see two use cases based on my personal usage of Muine:
> 
> 1. User wants to hear one particular album/song now.
> This is like "Play" where they have one album or song that they want to
> hear.  They open the dialog, choose it and the dialog should immediately
> close.
> 
> 2. User wants to add several albums/songs to their playlist.
> This is like "Queue".  The user wants to be able to add multiple albums
> to their playlist, so they don't want the dialog to close immediately.
> However, I think that in this situation, they probably still want to
> actually be listening to music, so if their playlist is empty, or
> they've reached the end, the first album/song selected can start playing
> immediately and subsequent selections are added to the end.

Agreed. Using a real-life metaphor we can actually even justify this:
If you go the store to stand in a "queue", and there is nobody in front
of you, you are being helped immediately. 

;)

The question is of course, will new users go as far as to think that
pressing "queue" will start playing if nothing is playing already.

> I actually think that making Play not close the window is worse than how
> it was before, since there's no longer a way to quickly start playing
> one song/album.  If you leave it the way it's been, you can still Queue
> an album, click play in the player window or panel icon, then Queue more
> items.  Queuing a bunch of items is going to be a multi-step process
> anyways, so needing another click or two to start playing in the middle
> of Queuing isn't too big of a loss in my opinion.
> 
> However, I really like being able to just go up to the panel icon and
> Click-Drag to "Play Album" > Scroll a bit > double click > done

Agreed, agreed-- I work the same way.

I'm right now slightly more inclined towards "your" way, but I'll wait
what others have to say before changing this yet again.

> 
> Breaking this simple flow where users just want to play an album seems
> much worse to me.  
>