Foldable toolbar - questionable usability

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

>
> I went over it again and tested a bit around and I am even less
> convinced about the real usability of your addition today.


Which is fair, I am still trying to make up my own mind as well! :-)


> 1. It adds unnecessary complexion to the existing Amarok. Especially
> with the "symmetry" you added, we find ourselves with arrows that do
> precisely nothing on the left and which are not intuitive on the right
> neither.


Yes. That was the very last thing I added. Again just to try stuff out.


> 2. It is just plain ugly, sorry to be that blunt, but those green
> arrows have always been ugly, wherever they were.


Sorry, but I am not even going to argue against this. The green arrows was
just the only icons I could find at the time ( had no Internet access when I
created this stuff ) that sort of illustrated the point. I have no special
love of these and would happily replace them with something else, perhaps
something similar to the "more" icon used in the bracrumb...


> 3. Adding those arrows everywhere for the sake of symmetry means also
> we will have to add a function to all the existing arrows, and this
> adds again more unnecessary complexity and we will have to invent new
> items to add, just because there are folding arrows? Come on, this
> makes absolutely no sense.


No, the idea was that an arrow could be disabled (but still visible) when
there was no items. But when browsing through the categories this would
allow items to be there or not without changing the layout and hence the
symmetry. At least that was the though I wanted to try out.

I strongly vote against these folding arrows and suggest to remove
> those everywhere, including the context view. I am sure we can find an
> alternative way to add applets


In the context view? Oh, the scrolling list has them... I am not taking
responsibility for those! :-P

I am quite disappointed, Amarok started to look nice and now it begins
> to suck again, complexity everywhere just because we listen to every
> fart the users come up with, and no, I am not sorry about the wording.
> Already the playlist options are too many, and the realisation doesn't
> fit in the general aspect, as we have now non less than 5 different
> menus, dropdown selectors, option choosers and tool boxes for the
> playlist alone!
>
> Sorry, I think you are on a wrong path here, please, make it easier,
> not more complex. I think we need an extensive discussion about the
> playlist in Gran Canaria before you even add more stuff, consensus
> first!
>

Ok, now we are getting to the meat of the issue.

We are currently miles away from any kind of a release and this is exactly
the time to try out new stuff. I have no issue discussing and even removing
any of this stuff is that is the consensus, but I don't want to do this
discussions in a vacuum, without having an actual prototype to play with,
hence I committed it. I hate trying to figure out what will work and what
will not as a pure though experiment, hence I always prototype stuff and
accept the bruises if people tell me that it's pure crap. (contrary to
legend, I am not always right... :-)

In the course of developing 2.0.0 we tried out a lot of stuff that never
made it into the final 2.0.0, but we learned a lot about what worked and
what did not in the process. This is the only sane way to do development of
something as complex as amarok in my oppinion. Come feature freeze we should
have decided what works and what does not and the experimentation should be
over. As you yourself say, your oppinion changes as you play with it,
something that would not happen if we just discussed it as a theoretical
change on a blackboard.

As for the playlist complexity, yes, I agree and that was exactly the issue
I was _trying_ to adress as the many icons at the bottom to my eye is the
most ditracting part of it currently.

In any case, I think you are mistaking my intentions. I am not saying that
these popup widgets is somwthing I want, I am just proposing them as a
possible solution to the issue and if they dont work, then fine, if we can
use them to start a discussion to come up with a better idea, then even
better! :-)

- Nikolaj
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/attachments/20090629/6762c210/attachment.htm