Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Toolbars

[Joel Dimbernat <joel dimbernat gmail com>]

2005/12/6, James Livingston <jrl ids org au>:

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 11:57 +0100, Joel Dimbernat wrote:
> My main concern in using toolbars, is that text is shown under the
> toolbar buttons. I know this behaviour can be disabled, but it's a
> "general" setting ( e.g. if you disable it, it will be disabled for
> Gedit too).

I'm not really sure how we can deal with this, because not following the
gnome-wide setting would be considered a bug.


> But the default setting is to show text under icon, so new users will
> have this kind of design, which is imho TOO BIG, and for a media
> player, totally useless (everyone know these icons and what the do).

While most people will know what the icons for Previous, Play and Next
mean, some of the other icons will be less obvious. For example the
"burn cd" toolbar item has a CD as it's icon, and it isn't obvious what
that would mean.

This will probably become more obvious when we add source-specific
icons; e.g. audio cds would have an "eject" and "rip cd" toolbar items.


> That lead me to my second problem: the use of two toolbars? toolbars
> are already big without the use of two of them.
>
> I know that toolbars are HIG compliant, but i think their use leads to
> much problems of use of space and design in a media player, and should
> be as limited as possible.

Space usage is a big tradeoff, in terms of horizontal vs vertical space.
Packing everything into one toolbar work fine if you have a lot of
horizontal screen space. It doesn't work too well if you a) have a small
screen, b) don't have RB's window maximised, or c) use big fonts - in
those cases the song info will get ellipsised, and be fairly useless.


There are some things we can do without dropping the toolbar, which will
help minimise the vertical space usage. The first is get rid of the
GnomeHrefs, which for me add about 16px to the height. We could do this
by 1) not having links to things on last.fm, 2) use the UrlLabel from
libsexy, or 3) make our own dodgy link widget. Moving the slider back
into the info line would also save a fair bit of vertical space.

For me, without text with the toolbar icon, and with the slider hidden
or moved back, the toolbar + info section takes up slightly less
vertical space than the old layout did.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
--
Yeah, because you never know when the value of 2^15 will change and you
have to go through all your code fixing it. -- Paul Tomblin


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Thanks for all the explanations James.

Maybe getting the slider back into the info line would be better. Putting it tight under the info line would get back some space and the slider would resize and get more precise as you extend/maximize the window.

At least that would get rid of one toolbar. Hiding it from the view menu looks kinda like "cheating" to me.


Thanks for reading,

Joel Dimbernat