Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] User Interface proposals

[Ronan Jouchet <ronan jouchet fr>]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 2:43 AM, Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com> wrote:
> 2. Disable Statusbar by default
>
> *sigh* OK Gnome, I get it, you want to dumb down the UI. One more
> thing for me to go into options and enable every time I run Rhythmbox
> on a new system. This is enough to be slightly annoying, but not so
> radical as to make me directly oppose it. Now if you proposed to
> remove the status bar completely "because nobody ever uses that
> thing", I would basically have to start maintaining my own separate
> fork of RB that keeps the status bar; sorry but I use that information
> constantly.

That interests me. Could you detail the use cases involving looking at
the status bar? There might be ways to get rid of the status bar while
still preserving this information available.

> 4. Transform the Menubar into a "global menu
>
> Oh yes, I like this. Already used to this UI paradigm from Chrome.
> Please do it! You can go a little further to Chrome by putting the
> song title ONCE into the window deco and not repeat it immediately
> beneath the default window deco. In other words, override the WM's
> window decos like Chrome does. It's not a bad thing. :)

Good point about not repeating the song name between deco and seekbar,
I'll add it to the wiki.
Regarding overriding WM's decorations, that's something I personally
strongly dislike. It breaks consistency and looks like a heavy
maintenance burden. Chrome does it to save additional screen estate,
fine for them but I wouldn't go for it in the case of Rhythmbox.

> Overall, these changes seem like nice and easy, incremental changes
> that can be made without a massive rewrite, and without stepping on
> TOO many toes. I have to say that this is one of the better RB UI
> change proposals that I've seen, in that it maintains the general look
> and feel of what we already have, thus catering heavily to old timers;
> and it brings RB's UI into the 2010s by adopting UI memes from Chrome,
> which imho I think are fantastic for space saving without reducing
> useful functionality or information.

Couldn't rephrase it better :)
Thanks for the feedback.

Ronan