Organise Collection/Filename Layout Dialog changes

Seb Ruiz ruiz at kde.org
Tue Dec 2 23:26:29 CET 2008


I've voiced my concern with the organise collection and filename
layout dialogs for quite some time now, expressing my dissatifaction
with the UI design and the immense amount of size used by the dialogs.
I've put in the effort to do some reorganising of these dialogs to try
and improve these dialogues whilst taking into account the work that
Teo and Leinir have put into these features over the last few months.

Dialogs as seen in trunk:
 - http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/3024/organise5ty4.png
 - http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/9332/organise6rd5.png

You can see that the dialog without the custom token widget showing
wastes lots of vertical space, and seems all over the place. Worse,
the dialogs are actually taller than Amarok, and the dialogs insist on
fixed widget sizes and size policies - this is bad.

General use case for these dialogs should be something akin to
"configure once, run many times". Essentially, all these micro options
which are shown get in the way when you actually need to use the
feature. For this reason I've reshuffled the UI to have tabs and
demote the character replacement options to it's own tab. This
dramatically reduces the height of the dialog.
 - http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/3711/organise1pe0.png
 - http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/1977/organise2te0.png

I've also tweaked the custom token dialog. The "collection root" and
the "collection slash" widgets which precede the token list have been
removed as they waste horizontal space and provide no new information
which isn't available in the preview widget.
 - http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/5035/organise3kz8.png

NB: I have not removed nor added any feature from the refactoring.
There have also been no string changes. It is simply a UI redesign.

I'd like to commit this before 2.0 final as I see it as an improvement
on usability and design. Feedback please?

-- 
Seb Ruiz

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org/


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