On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 10:53 +0100, Luca Ferretti wrote: > Il giorno mar, 06/12/2005 alle 12.58 +1100, James Livingston ha scritto: > First let me quote HIG (Toolbars->Appearance and Content -> Media Player > Toolbars) > > Many applications are able to play sound or video clips. For > consistency, always present the buttons that control playback in > the same order and with the same stock icons. > > Guidelines > * Show separate Stop and Pause buttons. Do not change Play > to Pause while the clip is playing > > Well, it's not so much :-( But I suppose that toggle-play-button is a > bad idea. Once of the earlier iteration of the toolbar patch had separate Play, Pause and Stop buttons - but people said they like having the one location on the screen that would turn the music on and off (as well as taking up more space). I understand the reason for not swapping buttons is that it is a big accessibility issue; which is why I tried the toggle button, as a compromise. > So, the well fitted button orders for media applications (totem and > rhythmbox at least) could are: > > 1. Previous Play Pause Next > 2. Previous Rewind Play Pause Forward Next > 3. Play Pause | Rewind Forward | Previous Next > > #3 is really ugly. #1 and #2 are similar, the only difference is the > availability of Rwd/Fwd actions. My suggestion for RB is use layout #1 > in toolbar, but place Rwd/Fwd controls in menus. At least for me is > useful jump 10 sec forward or backward while listening some long > podcasts. As with all GTK sliders, you can adjust them with the scroll wheel or page up/down, doing either of those will seek by 10 seconds. I'm not sure how useful a menu item is, because it's awkward to seem by other amounts. > Oh, IMHO Previous button should simple go to previous song. If you want > to restart a song, use Control->Restart action. Personally, I think so too. > Toolbar should receive shuffle. repeat and volume controls. Of course > shuffle and repeat are toggle buttons. Volume, instead, could be a > MenuToolButton (as in goobox): click on button to mute/unmute, click on > arrow to show the volume slider [1]. I guess it's a question of whether people mute RB or change it's volume more often. The reason RB has it's own volume control is so that you can have your music quieter than other program's sound. Currently we're using Totem's volume control, but if people think muting is more important, we could switch to using Goobox's > So, the toolbar should be something like > > Prev Play Pause Next (GtkToolItem) [Shuffle] [Repeat] Volume[v] > > The GtkToolItem, expanded, keep playback controls related to current > song (prev, play, pause next) and controls related to all songs > (shuffle, repeat, volume) separated. That sounds okay, but there are two things we also need to think about: play orders in the toolbar and source-specific tool items. Using buttons for Shuffle and Repeat give us four possible play-orders, and it isn't obvious what the difference between Shuffle+Repeat and Shuffle is. There was a patch proposed a few weeks ago that replaced the buttons with a menu Control->Play Order; which would give you access to all seven orders RB has, one more the patch added, and any that we think up in the future (album-shuffle, last.fm suggestions, etc). We need to think about whether we want to do that, and if we want a play order widget in the toolbar. Currently there is a "Burn Audio CD" button in the toolbar, which is disabled for non-playlist sources. The plan is to replace that with source-specific toolbar items, so playlists would show that, audio cd would show "Eject" and "Rip CD" (once it's implemented). If we had both the shuffle and repeat buttons still there, and added source-specific items, I'm not too sure how best to order the toolbar items. > Under the toolbar should be placed the info area. Info, as usual, are > current song title, current song author, current song album and time > slider. The layout I think could be useful is > > <xx-large>Title</span> from CurrentAlbum by CurrentArtist > mm:ss --------------[==]---------------------------------- > -mm:ss > > CurrentAlbum and CurrentAstist are links, right aligned. The time slider > has on left the elapsed time, on right the missing time. Although it can't display both at once at the moment, RB can display the remaining time if you toggle a gconf key - I have no idea why this isn't in the UI. That layout look fine, although it would probably actually be: mm:ss of mm:ss mm:ss remaining > Attached here is a glade file showing this stuff as well as a new menu > layout and a mini-window I've in mind to propose. But I'll describe > those stuff in another thread, maybe tomorrow. The layout looks really nice, especially the small-mode one. A few of up had a chat about small-mode the other day on irc, we can probably discuss that once we've sorted out the issues with the main layout. There is a bug filed with some suggestions about a menu re-organisation, and I've had a half-written email for about a week. I'll finish that up and post it. Cheers, James "Doc" Livingston -- For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken
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