About Amarok's interface design

[Seb Ruiz]

2008/11/19 Kevin Funk <krf at gmx.de>:
> Okay, some people already know my opionion on that (sorry markey, to bring it
> up again, forgive me)
> To those who dont: I'm a bit disappointed of Amarok's Interface in its current
> state.
>
> The main point is: The overall look of Amarok doesnt reflect KDE's appearance.
> To be more specific on special issues which (in my eyes) are just "wrong",
> here's a list with some of these.
> (Please keep in mind that i am referring to the normal Oxygen style/colors in
> this whole mail, that is gray window bg, white list bg, blue highlight and so
> on. You know how its supposed to look.)
>
> So here is the list (sorted by importance) and my very own (subjective)
> proposals to fix them:
> * Just too much gray everywhere (tm). All the tabs and the playlist use
> transparent (window bg) background which should be white (list bg). Please
> dont say it looks shit with white bg, have a look at other apps. You dont want
> to have KMail in overall gray, do you?
> * The seekbar content is gray, too and uses some very weird widget style. I'd
> prefer a normal QSlider. I am referring to Dragon Player's implementation e.g.
> - it looks _a lot_ better and saves vertical space if we put seekbar and
> volume bar in one line.
> * The current track applet uses oversized font and oversized icons. Normal
> font size and 16px icons would do it.
> * The tabs on the left ("Internet", "Playlists", "Files", ...) are also
> modded, I'd prefer the normal style what is used by Kate e.g. - i know they
> dont stretch vertically but I dont think thats an issue. Another point: The
> current ones dont have hover animation.
>
> Disclaimer:
> I don't wanna blame anyone. I know some people already invested a lot of work
> to tweak the Amarok UI but I think it could be done much better.
> Further, i cant implement this on my own (lacking coding skills) nor do I have
> the motivation to do so as long there are people who are against these changes
> and are comfortable with the current situation.
>
> If you dont like this, consider this mail as a motivation to improve the UI.
>
> Thanks for your time, these were just my 2 cents


Hi Kevin,
Whilst I disagree with a number of your proposed solutions (eg, using
the Kate sidebar, generic slider), I agree with all of your points
about the work needed on the UI. The UI is particularly gray and
everybody that I have shown the application to makes this remark
before anything else.

Cheers,
Seb

-- 
Seb Ruiz

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