Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] interface changes

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin hn org>]

On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 11:48:24AM -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> 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>

Interesting ideas.  I definitely like having a bigger song position
slider, and I agree that the song title display should work with bigger
fonts.

I don't think the song time display is quite right where it is, though.
Maybe it should be in the same row as the slider?  I've just tried it
out and I think it looks better there.

These changes make small display mode a fair bit larger, though.
I'm starting to think that small display mode should be replaced with a
separate program, so it's not tied to the same UI as the main program.

> 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.

I think the vertical size of the song info display should also be fixed, so
that the whole window doesn't jump around when its contents change.  I
haven't really looked into how to do this, though.

>  * 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.

.. and allmusic.com is so painful to use anyway.  I don't think I've
ever used the link buttons.


>  * 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.

I can't find these changes in your archive.  patch-29 seems to have some
permission problems (I get 403s when trying to access it, and tla goes
slightly crazy when I try to replay it) and patch-30 isn't in there.

I agree that the checkbox options don't really belong in the status
bar, but I think there should be some indication of the play order in
effect in the main display, if not a way of controlling it.
Maybe the shuffle/repeat checkboxes could go in the same row as the
prev/play/next buttons?

-jonathan