Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Yet another user interface proposal

[Jorn Baayen <jorn nl linux org>]

Hey,

The code in the old rb indeed causes a *lot* of code dup, and it is a
mess - and very hard to change and fix bugs. So starting with code base
reasons I'd not want to continue with it, and also I installed walters'
tarball today and.. I am quite shocked really how crappy the old UI is.
Buttons that change between pause/play and stop, same buttons behaves
very differently depending on the situations, playing view unclarity,
etc.

At least I will not work on that any longer, sorry.. I really feel it a
waste of time.

I had a new ui idea though, based on the glade file Luca sent.. I guess
I'm on crack, but I'm posting it anyway:
http://nl.linux.org/~jorn/Files/crackhack.png
The idea is that you have the main window with a playlist (playlist
loading/saving happens via the menus), and you can add whole albums to
it via the '+' button. I added an arrow next to it, so that you can also
chose an 'add song' button to add single songs. As you can see, it's
pretty much entirely different from what we have now. I haven't thought
to iradio yet, though...
I guess this design would work very well for me, since I mostly play
whole albums, and occasionally I want to listen to a single song. Now I
can just click '+', type the name of the album i want, hit return and
i'm playing it. But I'm not so sure this design will work very well for
single-song people..

This design is also, in a sense, similar to xmms: in xmms, at least that
is what i did, i have all of my music loaded. When i want to play
something i press 'j', gives me the jump to dialog, and i type the name
of the album or song I want. So very much like this one, except that
instead of jumping you add stuff to the playlist here: which gives us
the queuing we want.

Cheers
Jorn

On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 12:01, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-02-02 at 20:41, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On Sun, 2003-02-02 at 06:41, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> > 
> > First, thanks for working on this. 
> > 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > The toplevel information display will have to change too.  For example,
> > internet radio stations don't have artist/album information, and they do
> > have web links (which local files generally don't).
> > 
> > But in general I think I agree with you.
> > 
> > One other issue; not only will what filters are active have to change
> > when switching sources, but their layout will too.  For iradio there is
> > really only one filter which makes sense, in particular genre.  And
> > putting one enormous filter on the top takes up too much room.  I have
> > it laid out on the side:
> > 
> > http://web.verbum.org/~walters/files/shots/39.html
> 
> These was changes that was necessary also with the new design I think.
> 
> >From a user interface design perspective I'm trying to make the point
> that changes should be kept minimal, and that we should have a source
> switcher (the way how you get the songs changes but the way you interact
> with them is kept more similar is possible), instead of a view switcher
> (everything change, more like different applications embedded in one,
> see evolution).
> 
> Also, but I dont care that much about this, I was under the impression
> that the views separation was giving some problems of code duplication.
> But I'm sure jorn knows a lot more than me about this ;)
> 
> Jorn, what do you think finally ? ;) Can we start making incremental
> improvements over the old design or should we wait you find the perfect
> design ?
> Personally I respect any decision you take, and I hope everyone will do
> the same. It's silly to fork, since we have all the same targets.
> 
> Marco
> 
> 
> 
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