Amarok mockup

[Seb Ruiz]

On 15/07/07, Maximilian Kossick <mkossick at gmx.de> 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

Keep in mind that some things always need to be polished, such as the
podcast system for automatic downloads, and even the collection if the
user is in dynamic mode. Might be trickier than you think (or maybe
not...).

Seb


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