[Rhythmbox-devel] Yet another user interface proposal

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti oltrelinux com>]

This user interface fork is really worrying me. So let's try to restart
the discussion with some brainstorming.

It think Jorn redesign has some serious issues (read Luca mail if you
wonder which). Still I think he did some nice improvements. My proposal
is just a try to merge these back in the old ui, to find an acceptable
compromise for 1.0. We have some really nice pieces of code, it's a pity
we are unable to put them together in an acceptable interface.
Yeah, acceptable, we can make it rock for 2.0.

So these are the changes I would propose to the old design:

SIDEBAR

The sidebar acts like a source selector and no more like a view
switcher. No more menu merging, the only piece of ui that could change a
bit when changing source are filters.
This is mostly a code change, since the views was pretty consistent (or
was planned to be), but I think it will have positive effects in the
future, forcing us to not evolve in one of these terrible all in one,
viewed applications.

SOURCES

Sources are Radio, Cd, Library and a single Playlist item.

Playlists are loaded/saved like in the new design or ihmo better we
could use the filemanager to deal with it. The first thing that come to
my mind is two menuitems "New playlist" and "Playlists...". The first
one would ask for a name and would automatically save it when necessary.
The second would just open a nautilus playlist folder. (Ok Ok, I can
very well be on crack here, but I bet Daveb likes it ;))

We have a "Add to playlist" menuitem, and dnd on the sidebar icon will
add them. First added item could be automatically playing (if something
other is not already playing), next added items will be queued.

We probably need some sort of feedback about which source is playing.

PLAYER

We may replace the toolbar with the new player control. I think I have
not seen negative comments about that. The list would have to be removed
though, to avoid the complexity everyone is pointing out.

We could even have a songs queue list showed by a disclosure triangle or
something. It's nice to run rb with just the player showed, if you can
see the songs queue.

Anyway just brain storming. Well, this is being a real pain, once we
find a solution I hope we will have the best media player user interface
out there :)

Marco