Future UI Discussion

[Jeff Mitchell]

Nikolaj Hald Nielsen wrote:
>> Ok, now the heresy part:
>> I don't think it would be a bad idea for Amarok to go the all-purpose
>> media player way, I see this as a natural and logical next
>> evolutionary step. After all, we already have a video plasmoid, why
>> limit it to basic video support for music videos?
>> So multiple collections (or a collection with multiple media type
>> labels, whatever) would be a must, as seen in the first picture of M2.
>> This concept could be integrated in Lee's mockup, I'm not sure to what
>> extent.
>> However, I find the layout with two tab bars in M2 a little confusing,
>> I would like to see a better solution, maybe with nested horizontal
>> tab bars or a hybrid tab bar+menus integrated in the tab-bar approach
>> (stinks of WMP though).
> 
> I _really_ do not want us to go down this path. Basically, I think
> video playback is a totally different domain that audio playback. For
> a video player, you want the video to take up as much space as
> possible and you want to have no distractions at all, while for an
> audio player it makes sense to show context information, analyses and
> so on.

Agreed.  Also, (this was before your time) we have promised our users
over, and over, and over again that this is not our goal in the
foreseeable future.  The fact that we focus on doing music right instead
of branching out too much is one thing that holds a lot of appeal among
our users.  You should have heard all the worried users when the video
applet debuted...  :-)

--Jeff