Re: [Usability] mouse-over audio-icon-play feature

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 10 Sep 2007, at 20:26, Stefan Kost wrote:

> hi,
>
> not a bad idea as such, but technically really hard. The audio  
> player and the
> file-manager would need to synchronize, so that the player starts,  
> prepares the
> file and then signals the file-manager to stop, when its ready to  
> take over.
>
> The file-manager could provide a dbus-interface:
> * where the player could ask after starting, what the playback  
> position and
> * signal that it can take over
> But still I expect a short break inbetween. You could try to  
> propose this to the
> nautilus developers and then you would need to talk to media-player  
> projects so
> that they will use the dbus-service. Not easy :/

I don't need to think it needs to be that sophisticated... the file  
manager would just stop playing when it received a double click, and  
pass the time that it stopped playing to the media player.  The media  
players would then just need to agree on a common "start playing from  
time T" argument.

Of course there would be a gap of a couple of seconds while the media  
player started up, but I don't think the OP was suggesting the  
experience had to be seamless in that respect.

Cheeri,
Calum.

>

> Keith Daniel Swenson wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I am a senior undergrad CS major at the University of New Hampshire.
> > I had a thought about the feature where audio files are played  
> > when the
> > mouse is over them. I was thinking that if the icon is then
> > double-clicked, the current play-time parameters could be passed  
> > to the
> > player to play the song at the current time. This would enable you to
> > continue listening to longer files without starting the song over (if
> > you want to do something else while listening to the rest of the  
> > file.)
> >
> > Forgive me if this is already in the development works. I am new  
> > to the
> > community.
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Keith Swenson
--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems