Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Elementary

[yank memo <yankmemo gmail com>]

Hello all,

I am the lead developer of nautilus-elementary and now rhythm-e. First i wanted to say that we've been covered by larges blogs such as omgubuntu and webupd8 while we just started working/hacking on it. The screenshots you saw are just a begining there's nothing achieved there, only a few hours hack. Anyway let's talk about this project, we want to redesign rhythmbox interface and give it a fresh air.

I don't know if u know elementary-project or nautilus-elementary. Our goal is simplicity, we like clean interfaces.

You can find the sources code of rhythm-e here (based on last git 0.13.1) : https://code.launchpad.net/~am-monkeyd/+junk/rhythm-e
It's just a little hack for the moment, basically 2 widgets moved in the toolbar, some removed buttons (the ones around the search field) and a menu with show/hide functionalities linked to the keyboard shortcut F8 (like in nautilus-elementary or like any other gtk elements toolbar, statusbar...). What it look like? https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4135996/scrot/0920_r1.png
It's missing the buttons shuffle and repeat i was thinking about putting them in the status bar. The entries for icon plugins actions are still there in the right of the toolbar and on the left of the search input (for the search related ones) .
My screenshot is a bit outdated like we use some ubuntu patchs for play/pause button for example, i don't understand why it's not merged yet by the way? do you find a combined button play/pause useless?

Our objectives: 

• cleaning up the interface:  there's many vertical pixels wasted actually in rhythmbox, the timescale occupy too much space. The search row dis-align completely the other widgets (sidebar, browse panel, extra right panel). The toolbar is used for only a few buttons there's many free space in it, let's take advantage of it, a timescale and the search can occupy this space easily. We don't need a time scale which occupy all the width of the window. The buttons arround the search field are pretty useless if you use the browser mode, let's keep things simple for the users with a simple search input if they want to filter more they can use the browse panel or we can make the search engine a little smarter too with some keyword. The browser panel (albums / genre) are not adapted to wide screens, we can save many wasted space by placing this panel vertically instead of the actual horizontal mode.
  
• a compact menu to replace the menubar when hidded
  
• an icon view for covert/album art: there's an excellent plugin which was released a few days ago, rhythmarty. It can be an excellent candidate to this UI revamp, i already contacted its developer and he's interested too to work on this project.
  
• a clutterview (like in nautilus-elementary) : an animated view like coverflow or cooliris. something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHSOdVG2t4 , 3 modes: film/grid/coverflow.
• give rhythmbox the ability to play video files, what about my video clips? they're videos but they're music too. Of course totem/mplayer does a better job playing a video but it can't search my videos by artists / genre etc and propose me new related tracks.

Of course all described here are only my opinions, i don't want to be rude. Rhythmbox is a great music player it does the job well, but i want more ;)
The design is far from achieved we're open to any suggestions and even collaborate if we share some common interest.

Best regards,

ammonkey