Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] another queue UI layout



On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 02:16 +1000, Jonathan Matthew wrote:
> This turns out to be surprisingly easy.. of course, the only other GUI
> programming I've done recently was with Swing, so I was expecting
> some pain.

I'm in the same situation with only having used swing recently. One
thing that might help was if we could partially "glade-ify" the main
shell-UI. Whether this is a good idea, or would just make things more
complicated I don't know, but if it didn't it would help anyone who
wanted to try moving things around. Trying to understand the
not-really-commented UI setup code is fairly scary the first time you
look through it.

> 	http://j.kaolin.hn.org/rhythmbox-queue-with-details.png
> 
> I decided not to change the colour of the text, since it's probably
> impossible to pick a colour that'll actually be readable for everyone.
> The text size for the artist and album is relative to the normal text
> size, so if your normal text is at comfortable reading size, the smaller
> text should still be readable.  I'm not entirely sure this is a good
> idea, though.

After playing around with it, I think I like this setup more. When I've
got the queue open, it doesn't really matter about having less space for
the sources list. As someone (I can't remember who, off the top of my
head) mentioned one thing that you want when editing the queue is to
have as much space as possible for the list of songs to choose from
(library/playlist) and this variant give you more there. I don't think
that not having the information from any other columns (rating, time,
whetver you have displayed, etc) is really that important, but having
the artist and album are good.

As to the style of the artist/album text, what you have at the moment (a
bit smaller and in italics) is fine for me.

On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 08:50 -0600, Thomas Lunde wrote:
> Hm.  Mostly unrelated, but I just thought of this:  Months ago, there
> was talk of displaying album art within the UI.  The location you have
> selected for the queue is used in iTunes for this art.  iTunes can
> switch between displaying art for the the "Now Playing" track and the
> "Currently Selected" track by clicking on the title of this area
> (where you have put "Queued Songs").
<and some other bits about cover-art and visualisation>

I think one of the biggest problems with the below-source-list area is that
people are wary of making a "we don't know where to put it, so here will do"
part of the UI. I think that some of the other suggestions were 1) next to
the album in the browser and 2) next to the title at the top of the window.

The former doesn't give you the art for the current song, and I can't remember
the reason for not doing the second was. If we do want to make it a
multi-purpose area probably the best thing to do would be have a submenu with
the options of what to put there (nothing, queue, cover-art, visualisation, etc).

I think one of the other arguments that came up was where to store the cover art,
a number of places being suggested.

1) in the file itself
This has several problems, notably that you can't do this with anything downloaded
from Amazon (I think it was 3 months you could keep it for). Other ones included the
fact that quite a few people don't want to have multiple copies of the image (one
per track) and that some formats don't support this. On the good side it is how iTunes
does it (so I've been told).

2) in a file in the same directory as the track (e.g. folder.png or whatever)
This is perfect for anyone who (like me) stores their music in a /Artist/Album/Track
hierarchy. This would not work *at all* for anyone who has their music in a flat
directory.

3) in a special folder (e.g. ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/covers)
This would work under any situation, but has the problem that it is incompatible
with every other program that deal with cover art.

I don't know if did ever (or will ever) actually get sorted out properly.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston 
-- 
If USENET is anarchy, IRC is a paranoid schizophrenic after 6 days on
speed. 
-- Chris "Saundo" Saunderson in asr.

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