Amarok mockup

[Maximilian Kossick]

Regarding the mini-player idea: Unlike the old XMMS/Winamp-style player 
windows, the new mini-player would not be an extra window, but instead it 
would be possible to collapse the full window to the mini-window, and expand 
it again, using an easily accessible button. iirc the idea was copied from 
something that WMP does.

One problem with Amarok is the *very* long startup time. Loading all the 
necessary data to populate the playlist/collection view/context view simply 
takes some time, and makes it impossible to quickly listen to a single music 
file with Amarok if Amarok isn't running ( yes, i know, many people, 
including me, simply have Amarok open all the time).

My idea would be to add a "fast-startup" mode to Amarok, which doesn't need to 
initialize all sub-systems before it's usable. It could work like this:
-Amarok is not running, and the user starts it and passes a file to play on 
the commandline
-"fast-startup" of Amarok: only the Engine sub-system( and maybe the 
Collection/CollectionManager sub-system to load metadata for the track) are 
initialized during startup. the gui only shows the mini-player.
-"fast-startup" complete: amarok is ready to play the song. continue to 
initialize the other sub-systems in the background.

This would allow all users to use Amarok as their *only* music player. As 
mentioned above, users who don't have amarok running all the time can't 
quickly start it to listen to a single or a few files. I'm pretty sure that 
users like this exist (although they probably don't use Amarok at the 
moment). An important point is that the mini-player would allow us to 
implement this new use-case without negative consequences for the rest of our 
user-base: Amarok would still be as powerful as they expect it to be.

Cheers, Max


On Sunday 15 July 2007, Ian Monroe wrote:
> Eugene emailed me an ODT with his mockup and ideas. I think it raises
> some important questions, mainly about what we want to do with all
> that space in the "web 2.0" toolbar. He also has an idea for a 'mini'
> player that the playlist would collapse into that he plans to spell
> out later.
>
> I uploaded it to:
> http://pwsp.net/~eean/up/Amarok2ControlsProposal.odt
>
> Ian Monroe
>
> On 7/13/07, Maximilian Kossick <mkossick at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > somebody created a mockup for Amarok 2 at akademy, which includes a few
> > interesting proposals. We asked him to blog about it irrc, but i haven't
> > seen it one the planet yet. Does anybody actually have that mockup? If
> > not, does anybody remember the name of that artist so that we can get
> > hold of the image?
> >
> > Cheers, Max
>
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