On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 11:48:24AM -0400, William Jon McCann wrote: > Hi, > > I've made a few small UI changes in my archive. The result looks like: > <http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/~mccannwj/rhythmbox/Screenshot-Rhythmbox-ui.png>
Interesting ideas. I definitely like having a bigger song position slider, and I agree that the song title display should work with bigger fonts. I don't think the song time display is quite right where it is, though. Maybe it should be in the same row as the slider? I've just tried it out and I think it looks better there. These changes make small display mode a fair bit larger, though. I'm starting to think that small display mode should be replaced with a separate program, so it's not tied to the same UI as the main program. > Some of these ideas are inspired by Muine. It does a nice job of making > the interface look less like a database interface and more like one that > is designed for people. > > A nice side effect of these changes is that there is more room in the > shell-player in which to add album art and/or visualizations. > > > What problems do these changes solve? > > * The shell-player did not scale well to large font sizes > > The song title, arguably the most interesting thing on the screen, > is almost always ellipsized. This indicates that more horizontal space > is > required for this text. > > * The song position slider was essentially useless since the > granularity was so large > > This is a serious problem for long songs, such as full CD DJ mixes > or orchestral pieces. > > * The vertical position of the play/pause, previous, next, and volume > buttons would vary depending on font size and whether the "From %s by > %s" subtitle was shown > > Buttons should always be in the same positions because the user > becomes habituated to them. I think the vertical size of the song info display should also be fixed, so that the whole window doesn't jump around when its contents change. I haven't really looked into how to do this, though. > * Removed use of broken GnomeUrl links > > The search url doesn't work in firefox. The searching is broken by > design since you don't want to search individually for artist and album > you want to search with the terms combined. The links colors were not > themeable. The ellipsizing was broken. etc. .. and allmusic.com is so painful to use anyway. I don't think I've ever used the link buttons. > * Use GtkStatusBar with grippy > > This makes it substantially easier to resize the window. > > * Removed check box options from the status bar > > These options take up too much space on the status bar. They limit > the minimum possible width of the window. They reduce the space > available > for status messages. They clutter the interface. It isn't clear that > it is natural to look to the status bar for control elements. I can't find these changes in your archive. patch-29 seems to have some permission problems (I get 403s when trying to access it, and tla goes slightly crazy when I try to replay it) and patch-30 isn't in there. I agree that the checkbox options don't really belong in the status bar, but I think there should be some indication of the play order in effect in the main display, if not a way of controlling it. Maybe the shuffle/repeat checkboxes could go in the same row as the prev/play/next buttons? -jonathan _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
