Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Interface ideas

[Thomas Lunde <tlunde gmail com>]

On Apr 18, 2005, at 4:56 PM, Gisli Ottarsson wrote:
> The only variation on this might be to keep the one or two most
> recently played songs, grayed out, before they drop off the queue, to
> answer the question:  What was that song I heard before?

I don't think that rhythmbox should unnecessarly (and blindly) copy 
iTunes, but it seems likely that non-trivial amounts of use testing 
went into its design.

So, FWIW, iTunes' Party Shuffle keeps 5 recently played songs (greyed 
out) so that a user can answer this question.   I think this is a good 
number.  With 1-2, it's not so easy to answer the question during a 
party of "Was ______ played before?".  And, on >1024x768 screens, 5 is 
a small fraction of the "upcoming" list.

Interestingly, the Party Shuffle mode provides visible pop-up menus so 
that a user can easily change the number of past songs & future songs.  
I can't decide if this was because their UI engineers punted, or if it 
is because they thought that users would often change the ratios as 
they used the queuing system:

Small screen shot here: http://www.apple.com/itunes/playlists.html

I dislike the screen space wasted by the iTunes' pop-ups.  I also think 
that the "future" number choice is unnecessary (unless an auto-add from 
the Library is added to rhythmbox's queue).

Perhaps a better UI is to make the divider between previously-played 
and to-be-played "grabbable"  and the user can move it up and down the 
screen to his/her personal preference for how many songs shown in the 
past.  This also neatly solves the debate about how many to show as a 
hard coded number by making it changeable in the GUI. ;-)

thomas