Colored Stars work, findings, comments, discussion, etc.

[Alexandre Oliveira]

On 2/21/07, Gábor Lehel <illissius at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/21/07, Jeff Mitchell <kde-dev at emailgoeshere.com> wrote:
> For the record, when I originally coded this it was 1 to 5 in steps of
> 0.5, with 0.5 itself intentionally omitted. I can't remember if there
> was a reason for this other than personal taste... well, actually, I
> can. When you click in the ratings area to set a rating, if you click
> again (on the last star), it toggles it between a half and a full
> star. If there's only one star, it toggles it between one star and no
> stars instead, so you have a quick way to unset ratings without having
> to resort to the tags dialog or the keyboard.

Yeah, I have to say I liked that way of removing the rating. But maybe
in the future we should just remove the "unrated" idea, and let all
songs have, well, 2.5 as default rating.


Another thing I don't like currently is the small star. It shouldn't
have a different collor, IMO it should just have the same color as the
others.
I mean, for 4.5, either all stars have the 4 star color, or the 5 star
color maybe, but including the small one.
Currently, we have the four stars with a color, followed by the small
star with a different color, and it looks quite odd IMO.

> > The next major issues were both addressed the same way (this part is not
> > complete yet in the source code).  Adding two sub-options to the Use Ratings
> > checkbox allows users to either turn off the colors and use the defaults, or

> I don't have a problem with having these options -- I don't like the
> colored stars myself, but if others do, I see no reason not to have it
> both ways. I just don't really like the placement of it: these are all
> fairly micromanaging options, not the sort of thing the front page of
> the configuration dialog is meant for. One solution could be splitting
> it out into a separate dialog, opened by a button next to [x] Use
> ratings. (This could also be employed for Moods).

Yeah, maybe a dialog would be a solution. Right now the general panel
is the tallest dialog, and it's a problem. Even in 1.4.5, IIRC, for
some people the config dialog was too tall, not fitting the screen.
Anyway, it feels to me Appearance would be the right tab, not general.


> >  I think
> > that having the varied stars is a good idea; many of you expressed the same;
> > many users did too (I don't actually remember hearing any opinions that the
> > idea itself was bad, only that the previous implementation had issues).  So
> > it makes sense to me that it would require a way to define the colors, the
> > same as for new playlist items.  When you look at it this way, the only
> > real "option" being added is the ability to turn the colored stars on and
> > off.

I agree it should be back as an option, some users liked it very much.
Buit maybe when the option is off, it should restore the old behaviour
of all yellow stars?
Besides, now that carnival is gone, we should think about better
default colors :-)

> One idea I've been having on and off, is with all these styling
> options available in amarok now (context browser, icon set, colors,
> potentially pixmaps for stars & volume slider, et al), we could
> package all of these together in "amarok themes", via knewstuff. Maybe
> split all of it out into a separate page in the config dialog.

Yeah, themes should be able to define all appearance related settings, I agree.
But I think it's too late for 1.4. let's keep the idea for 2.0.