Amarok mockup

Harry Bock hbock at providence.edu
Sun Jul 15 20:51:53 CEST 2007


I really like that idea.  It could be done in a few ways, where you
could select Amarok to always open in "fast-startup" mode, or it
could automatically be triggered if a file were specified at run-time
(i.e. "Open With" in Dolphin or Nautilus).

 So when you open it with a file, it starts the Engine subsystem, starts 
playing,
and continues opening the collection database and whatnot in a separate 
thread.
It would work seamlessly from the perspective of the user who just wants 
to open
one song in Amarok, right now.

Harry

Maximilian Kossick wrote:
> 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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>
>
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