Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Interface ideas

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin hn org>]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 05:34:18PM +0200, Oliver Lemke wrote:

> Although in this case it is a bug, it's maybe worth considering. I don't
> think having the queue visible in two places at the same time is a good
> idea. But maybe it can be become visible in the Source list when the
> user chooses hide queue from the menu.

I definitely agree that the queue should not be visible in two forms
simultaneously, but I can't see how to have both the sidebar and source
forms of the queue without having the UI do something weird and
unexpected to avoid showing both at once.

So I'm thinking the solution is to split it into two bits:

- Something like the existing queue sidebar that you can use to queue up
  just a few songs.

- A "queue" playlist type that just removes songs as they're played.
  This would be what you'd use to queue up more than just a few songs.
  It wouldn't preempt the playing source like the current queue does;
  you'd have to stop the playing source, select the queue playlist, and
  press play.

  My idea at the moment is that this would be an option in the playlist
  context menu, called "Removed played entries".  Setting this would
  change the icon next to the playlist, so you could easily see which
  playlists had the flag set.  The UI would never call this a 'queue',
  so it'd be less likely to get confused.

It may seem like duplication of features, but really all these two
things share is that they remove songs once they've been played.
They're there to support two fairly different use cases, and neither
alone really does a good job for both.  It's kind of the same as having
the queue in both sidebar and source form, but they don't refer to the
same set of songs.

This leaves a couple of problems:

- Adding songs to the queue sidebar is easy: either drag them
  there or right click -> "Add to queue".  Adding songs to a playlist
  is harder - you have to drag the songs to the source list, which is
  fairly obvious if you have the source list visible, but it's still a
  small target, and there's no item in the context menu.

- There's no way for a new user who discovers the queue sidebar to find
  out that if they're queueing up five hours of listening material, they'd 
  be better off using a playlist.  Perhaps a "convert queue to playlist"
  option somewhere obvious to lead the user into thinking "huh, what's a
  playlist?", then figuring it out.  I don't know where this would go,
  though.

-jonathan