Hej, I'd promised greafine I'd post a few mock designs I made before leaving on holiday (offline till Friday evening, then sporadically online from CH between Sat-Tue), and I thought I might as well share them here. Wanted to make a blog post but my "photo-scanners" are really too ugly, and I must sleep soon.
So. http://numbers.xmms.se/~theefer/calypso-bar.jpg We've been talking about it and greafine has been working on this already, but I had some more UI styling and features in mind. In particular, visually distinguishing the command/action (first word of the input) in a distinct field. The user could still just enter a pattern in the main field, in which case a default action (search?) would be selected; or type a command, which would automatically be shifted in the command slot. There could be a dropdown for the command field, to make them more discoverable. Also allows reusing current arguments for new commands (e.g. search and then browse some more and then enqueue). Running a command displays the result of the action in the main area below. Extra view-specific arguments (typically altered by clicks in the view, e.g. order by year, etc) could go in a minor list on the right, so that the bar exactly specifies what you see in the main view. Which could then be "bookmarked", etc. The dropdown for the whole bar would show history of past commands. A LOT can be done here, and the goal isn't to do everything, just to share some ideas. Most importantly for starters, we need to be able to load the results of an action in the main view, possibly distinguish the action visually in the bar. Bonus if the view can then update the bar, e.g. if you go from "search results" to "browse album", it would change the "address" of the view in the bar as well. http://numbers.xmms.se/~theefer/calypso-columnbrowse.jpg Two random musing about the column/collection browser, which is also implemented in the current prototype. The top one shows the collections (including the default "All Media") as the parent left-most column, as well as composite values in the album and track columns. Especially useful to prepend tracknr and get proper ordering, which I guess we will want. The last column on the right could be used to display more metadata about the selected track, e.g. cover, path, etc. In a later phase, we could let the user customize the sequence of columns, by changing the property used for each column, and possibly save such sequences as "Browse by" settings. Good hardcoded default would be enough for now though. The bottom mock shows an alternative, where the "Browse by" setting (i.e. sequence of column) is the left-most column, and more advanced columns are possible, e.g. Date Added with smart values by time, etc. On there, the collection displayed (or "All Media") in the columns is picked from a separate list above, similarly to how it is now in the prototype (below the columns). The list could have more or less verbose items. For now we can probably keep the second mock aside, as well as the extreme configurability. What would be nice, though, is to list All Media long the collections, to allow simple composite values (for proper tracknr and track order), and maybe avoid the right-most empty column. That's it for now. There is good infrastructural work in place in the current prototype, but I hope to see some work in the two components I described above, as well as the playlist styling (even as simple but clean rows for now). Before anything else (library browsing, coll bins), we might also want simple search results from a search module? This way, we could test the bar to replace the main view between playlist and search results. Maybe simple control buttons hooked up to the already present play/pause/stop actions (and next/prev) ? Well feel free to discuss here, I won't be replying before Friday, but greafine is committing stuff in the calypso repo so you may want to check it out! greafine, up to you to reuse what I suggested above, but it'd be cool to polish some of the components you already implemented into simple preliminary versions. Okay with that? Cheers, see you in a few days! -- Sébastien Cevey / inso.cc " Rest is for the weak and the dead. " -- _______________________________________________ Xmms2-devel mailing list Xmms2-devel@lists.xmms.se http://lists.xmms.se/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmms2-devel
