[Rhythmbox-devel] interface changes

[William Jon McCann <mccannwj pha jhu edu>]

Hi,

I've made a few small UI changes in my archive.  The result looks like:
<http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/~mccannwj/rhythmbox/Screenshot-Rhythmbox-ui.png>

Some of these ideas are inspired by Muine.  It does a nice job of making 
the interface look less like a database interface and more like one that 
is designed for people.

A nice side effect of these changes is that there is more room in the 
shell-player in which to add album art and/or visualizations.


What problems do these changes solve?

 * The shell-player did not scale well to large font sizes

	The song title, arguably the most interesting thing on the screen, is 
almost always ellipsized.  This indicates that more horizontal space is 
required for this text.

 * The song position slider was essentially useless since the 
granularity was so large

	This is a serious problem for long songs, such as full CD DJ mixes or 
orchestral pieces.

 * The vertical position of the play/pause, previous, next, and volume 
buttons would vary depending on font size and whether the "From %s by 
%s" subtitle was shown

	Buttons should always be in the same positions because the user becomes 
habituated to them.

 * Removed use of broken GnomeUrl links

	The search url doesn't work in firefox.  The searching is broken by 
design since you don't want to search individually for artist and album 
you want to search with the terms combined.  The links colors were not 
themeable. The ellipsizing was broken.  etc.

 * Use GtkStatusBar with grippy

	This makes it substantially easier to resize the window.

 * Removed check box options from the status bar

	These options take up too much space on the status bar.  They limit the 
minimum possible width of the window.  They reduce the space available 
for status messages.  They clutter the interface.  It isn't clear that 
it is natural to look to the status bar for control elements.


These changes live in:
http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/~mccannwj/archive/

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Jon