Foldable toolbar - questionable usability

[Thomas Pf.]

Basically a nice idea. I think the menu would have to be higher and the menu 
items less high so that more actions fit into it without scrolling. In your 
mockup one would need many clicks/keypresses to reach some actions, thus 
diminishing the advantage of buttons in the content area vs. items in the 
menu: Fast access to common features.
My suggestion, on the other hand, would be to first have a look at what's 
currently in the toolbar and try to find out how oftenm they are used. The 
"export playlist" button, for example, seems like a good candidate for moving 
to the menu to me. I don't think many users export their playlists very 
frequently. Even the save button might fit into the menu better, but I'm not 
sure about that one. Personally I have never ever saved a single playlist but 
I know there are many people who do so rather often. 
And: I know you still have negative memories of  KDE 3 apps cluttered with 
settings menus. The "configure toolbar" menu is still quite common in KDE 4 
though and I don't think it is such a bad one. And since this is Amarok's only 
toolbar which would benefit from customization, why not using that common 
feature? I for example would immediately remove save and export in favor of 
random and repeat modes because I never use the former but use the latter 
quite often.
I am definitely not a friend of adding a checkbox for every little element of 
the GUI, but configuring toolbars is quite useful for applications with 
varying use cases and types of users.

Thomas

> Attached is a mockup of an idea that I came up with to simplify the
> playlist toolbar. The user would click the "Manage Playlist" button, which
> would provide a menu of playlist functions. The user would scroll through
> the functions using the mouse or arrow keys. Comments, suggestions?
>
> - Lee