Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Re: [Usability]Music player UI

[Jens Knutson <jensknutson yahoo com>]

On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 14:11, MArk Finlay wrote:

> > One thought I had was to create a Nautilus view for RB, so that browsing
> > your music would be in the same nice browsing interface as your file
> > manager.  This *seems* natural to me, but maybe I'm hittin' the crack
> > pipe here, too.  Otherwise, the 'crackhack' browse dialogs were pretty
> > good, too.
> 
> GOOOODDD No ;)
> 
> Nautilus is a navigation-centric film manager. Rhythmbox as it stands is
> a meta-data organised, library based music player. These are two totally
> different metaphors and if mixed will IMHO create a horrible ui.

gawd... thanks for the smack upside the head.  not sure where that came
from. <:)

> I totally agree. The tray is a great convenience, but should not be too
> strongly relied upon IMHO.

Completely agreed - I expand on this a bit in a reply to Sri.

> Radio: 'Applications->Sound & Video->Internet Radio' brings you to the
> stand along app (net-rhythmbox's radio view). Internet radio makes total
> sense as a stand alone app because there is very little interaction with
> other multimedia on the system. That is until srtream ripping
> functionality is added. At that stage the approperiate links are made to
> other parts of the proposed "Gnome Multimedia System" for lack of a
> better name. eg. Ripped streams would be added to the library....
> 
> CD: Enhance and clean up the current gnome cd player. Give it ripping
> functionality while retaining the ability to use it as a really simple
> cd player.

Yeah, I think you're right on this, too.   I really like your idea on
the CD player - I use grip right now, and I like it, but it's kinda
nasty from a newbie standpoint.  Maybe all apps that can add rip files
into one's media library should have a standard "rip" button of some
kind?  (Probably not using the word "rip" though.  Gotta love the crazy 
imagery, esp on Unix/Linux systems... kill, zombie, burn, rip, etc... ;)

> The really great thing about a UI like that is that we don't need to
> have it all designed right now. We can add bits of it, and change little
> bits of it and redesign little bits of it, without all the drama we've
> seen recently ;) With that said, we should have a general idea of what
> the we are doing before the coders start coding, and the moany people
> with too many ideas and not enough coding skills start designing.

Absolutely.  It's also nice and simple - the main interface in crackhack
is cool in that it doesn't suffer from widget overload, but it includes
all the basic functions necessary for normal use.  That and yeah,
there's much need, it seems, to just *pick* something acceptable and run
with it.  As Marco said earlier this month, "find an acceptable
compromise for 1.0. We have some really nice pieces of code, it's a pity
weare unable to put them together in an acceptable interface. Yeah,
acceptable, we can make it rock for 2.0."  Basically, we won't *really*
know if what's being attempted is any good until it gets into the hands
of users, testers, etc.

Of course, this is all total pontificating, as I am utterly unable to
contribute any code to this. ;)  What do the actual coders think of
these ideas?  Jorn, et al?

 - jck

-- 
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all
progress depends on the unreasonable man."

 - George Bernard Shaw