Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Layout Ideas 2 (specific UI details, mockups, etc)

["Steven Brown" <steven w j brown gmail com>]

On Dec 10, 2007 1:54 AM, Karsten Schmiedecke <Karsten Schmiedecke gmx de> wrote:

How about having a simple arrow button next to the search field that, when
clicked, slides out the current-style filter buttons and remembers the state?
that way, the people that love the buttons will have them and those that
consider them UI clutter can get rid of them.

 

That sounds interesting, but I think it might be better to go with one way or the other.
 

I like the idea of having a readibly available history, but i do agree that
the UI for it seems unintuitive. the downpointing arrows are cluttery, and
click-and-hold (the way the history buttons work in opera) would conflict
with the combined skip/search functionality, which seems to make sense, too.

I agree about the down-pointing arrows.  I especially don't like that the popup menu on the "Prev" button is in between Prev and Play/Pause...  But that's convention.  I wanted to have it on the far left:

[Previously Played] [<<] [Play/Pause] [>>] [Coming Up/Queued]
[--------===------------------------------------]

With the History/Future buttons as simple dots or something, and relatively small.

OR, it could simply be bound to right-click of << and >> like in Firefox, but I'm not sure how discoverable that is.

I do have a 'recently played tracks' automatic playlist, which does the work
in most cases for going back

Is it sorted by the order in which they were played?  :)

and if you really want to skip ahead, the
probably easiest (and most thorough) way is to open the currently playing
source (jump to current song) and double-click where you want to go.

What about when playback is on Shuffle?

As for
graying out, how about setting a threshhold (defaulting to 12hrs or
something) for graying out (slightly) all tracks in all sources that have a
last-played time within that threshhold

I don't think this really works for RB (often viewing *many* tracks).

> In most players the controls button have moved to the center (WMP, iTunes,

> Amarok2), which is a great improvement. Maybe RB could do the same?
> And I dont really like separate buttons for Play/Pause. It could change to
> Pause when Playing to become clearer. But one of the best things in RB is
> the Play button.

Moving the buttons to the center would reduce the space available for track
info display, at least if you want to split up title, artist and album to a
multiline layout, which I like, by the way. I especially like the idea of
moving the album artwork into the 'now playing' area, maybe with a
hover-popup containing a larger version of the artwork. I find artwork
intuitive and like to display it, but it greatly reduces the number of
entries visible in the source list on my widescreen monitor.

I see in WMP: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/mediaplayer/design.mspx
but not Amarok: http://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png
nor iTunes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ITunes_7.5.png
 
It looks quite nice in WMP, I think.  But doing that in RB would require many more changes.  I think it's more suited to a "general" media player, with less focus on browsing and managing.

Hover popup sounds good.  Click to toggle a larger version might work too.  Both?  I dunno...

Anyway, I thought I'd add my two cents.

Thanks for doing that.  :)

Steve