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

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Wednesday 21 February 2007, Alexandre Oliveira wrote:
> 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.

I do also think having a quick way to remove it is nice, but it felt very 
inconsistent and there were hacks in the code to work around this mapping.  I 
think though that once people set a rating for a song they'll generally want 
to have a rating for it, they will just want to change it later, so I'm not 
sure how useful it really is to have a quick way to turn it off. (It's still 
pretty quick to edit the column through the right click menu and put a 0 in.)  
Another option might be to make the first star tri-state somehow, which would 
involve a little logic, like catching two mouse presses within a half second 
or so.

> 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.

For the record, I like it being its own color; it's not *that* much smaller 
than the normal size stars, so having it be its own color made it very clear 
that it was a half-star.  However, there was a bit of back and forth from 
people as to whether the small star should cause all the stars to have the 
color of the previous rating or the next one (or if it should have its own 
color).  Having it be the color of the previous one doesn't make sense if we 
do keep half-star ratings (i.e. 1/10) although it can work otherwise because 
the width would be different, but that makes you have ratings of different 
widths with the same colors.  Having it be the color of the next big star 
makes it even harder to see whether something is, say, 4.5 or 5, because then 
they're not only the same color, they're the same width.  So for now the 
approach I took was to make them all one separate color, and depending on 
what people think in a majority sense it can be changed to match one or the 
other.  

> 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.

Agreed, this might be a good thing.  I put it in the general tab mainly 
because of aping the Mood stuff; the color schemes for the moodbar are right 
under and enabled by turning on moods.  So I figured that, likewise, the 
color schemes for the rating stars should go right under and be enabled by 
turning on ratings.

> 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 :-)

When the option is off, they restore to the behavior of all yellow stars.  
Easy-peasy.  (Carnival?)

> > 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.

I don't know how feasible it is to rip some of this stuff out -- or rather, 
maybe have the code for it in there, but keep the gui config stuff hidden 
unless the user installs an amarok-themes type package, and things could 
fairly easily be made so that themes can define their own preferred (default) 
star colors so that's a definite possibility for the future.  But I do agree 
that I think it's a bit late for 1.4.  This feature was being put in for 1.4 
because of it having been in SVN and users wanting it back (plus me having a 
lot of the initial code for it in QT3 terms) but I think a major reorg of the 
config dialogs is a 2.0 goal, not 1.4.  Besides, there's little else in the 
way of new things (I think I heard about one other thing) going into the 1.4 
series so the dialogs can't get much more crowded...  :-)

--Jeff