Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Newer Mockup

[James Kahn <james liet net>]

Hi, I was lurking the mailing list for a few months last year and
re-joined it once I read Mark's paper on rhythmbox's future.  A few
comments on UI...

On Sat, 2003-05-10 at 20:44, MArk Finlay wrote:
> * Added another button, not really very important

I think it is important.  What does this button do?  If it is a
miscellaneous button it should really be next to the other multipurpose
button, rather than being split by the shuffle/repeat buttons.

> >Yeah.  I think it looks good.  I would be pretty happy with either 
> > this or Luca's, although I think I still like Luca's "simple" the 
> > best, because it keeps the "From Album By Artist" thing which is a 
> > cool rb feature.
> 
> I donno. How often do you want to know the artist and album of the 
> playing song. IMHO this one is SOOO much cleaner looking that it
> is worth sacraficing this info. But then again, that's only my
> opinion.

How often?  All the time.  I don't want to see that I'm listening to
"Over" - I want to see I'm listening to "Over", off the album "Mer De
Noms", by "A Perfect Circle".  They're all components of the song and
help to identify it.  I used that as an example - it gets even worse
with classical music.  "Concerto No. 23 01 Allegretto"?  I want to know
it's by Mozart.

> Well it's only my opinion but i REALLY love this bevel. But I also
> think it serves a very important usability purpose. It divides up the
> toolbar area into three areas making it much easier to get "a feel"
> for how rhythmbox works. So yeah, I've left it in in my mockup.

I like the look of the bevel.  I think it's more important for a music
player to be sexy than to fit in with the rest of the environment's
applications like a word processor should.

A couple of other things:

- How about some kind of progress bar along the bottom to monitor the
progress of loading the library, buffering internet radio streams, etc?

- I think it is important to have an image labelling the function of the
volume control.  My first thought was "why are there two seek bars?",
before I realised that the one on the left must be a volume control.  I
doubt I would be the only person to think this, because seeking is
logically consistent with back/play/pause/forward.  I had a go at adding
one but I couldn't get it to line up nicely.

Later,
James.

-- 
James Kahn <james@liet.net>
http://liet.net