About Amarok's interface design

[Dan Meltzer]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 9:07 PM, Teo Mrnjavac <teo.mrnjavac at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:27 PM, Kevin Funk <krf at gmx.de> wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> PS: To those who are pissed off by this email (again). It's going to be the
>> very last time I even think about the UI if there's no positive feedback.

We've yet to find an interface that everyone likes.  Every time it
gets changed there are issues.  Every time it gets changed it turns
into a two month project of tweaking and polishing before it stagnates
and objections pop up.  I think that we need to address this, yet
again, but I don't think that we can do this in the time frame before
2.0.  We've played with so much fire by now that there would be a
large risk of getting burned.

I'm not, however, sure of how we will be able to address this.  We've
had a number of different artists work on the interface at different
times, and completely discarded their work more than once.  Artists
don't grow on tree's and I think we are running out of choices.
>>
>> --Kevin
>>
>>
> Hi
> I agree with most of what you said here.
> I think "The too much gray everywhere" issue is very serious and
> easily solvable by making the backgrounds white, as they were here
> http://davidpeitler.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/amarok2.png. Comparing
> to this ancient pre-alpha revision I can only see this as a major
> regression.
> The seekbar could also be shorter and in the same line as the volume
> bar as you said, as vertical space is becoming very precious on
> today's widescreen displays.
> The tabs could use a hover animation but I kinda like them better than
> the normal sidebar.
> Also pretty much everybody I've shown Amarok to hated the overlapping
> buttons, I think that this interface
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Amarok_2_alpha.png,
> plus a white background for the playlist, looks much nicer than what
> we currently have for RC1. It also has a "unique amarok feel" that's
> supposed to be the reason behind the overlapping buttons.
> Cheers
> Teo
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