Enrico Ros proposing a SoC project for improving the GUI

[Enrico Ros]

On Tuesday 17 March 2009 20:33:43 Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> Hey Enrico,
>
> I assume that you have by now read our discussion about your ideas
> here on this list. Could you please comment on them, and decide if you
> would like to make an official SoC proposal?
>
> While there still is bit time left until the deadline, it would be
> better to discuss this earlier, so that we could reach a conclusion
> about this without hurrying.

Hello Mark, hello All,
  yes, I've read the discussion and I've been waiting for all the pieces to 
fall in place before committing to the Summer of code.

  About the "still unnamed" Summer of Code project: what I want is to make 
Amarok's interface look prettier and be faster essentially. Easy enough if you 
have a magic wand.
But instead of proposing my take on the job (top-level qgraphicsview container 
+ using OpenGL where available + fx (w/shaders) + qt kinetic - (minus) plasma, 
etc..) I'd like to know what do you guys think about a "let's make the gui 
rock" kind of project. So this is still an "evaluating if and how..." kind of 
mail.

We should decide:
 - which are the criteria for judging the gui? how the current is rated?
 - do we feel the need to have "the best gui" we can have?
 - who should decide how to make it? (coders, designers, usabs, etc..)

My personal opinions:
  When looking at today's Amarok (and I saw it made lots of progress in the 
last months) I see a big gray area with many different type of gray, different 
icon sizes, and the central area is corrupted [1]. What should itlook like? 
Like the mockups floating around [2], or better: the UI should be like a 
plugin; in this way the current gui could be kept as the default gui 
implementation and new guis could be developed in parallel (even switched at 
runtime).
  If the SOC happens for me I'd like to experiment with a new gui, like the 
[2]. In this case I'll do a call to anybody wanting to contribute to make such 
a thing, collect all the ideas, do the design in team and implement as much as 
I can to have nearly the same functionality as the default gui.

I'm open to all the kind of suggestions expecially criticism, since it helps 
to shape my SOC proposal better ;-)

Enrico


[1]  http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/9933/amaroklayouting1.png  - I know this 
may be a small window, but users make no discounts, this looks broken.

[2] http://www.kde-
look.org/content/show.php/A+Media+Player+for+KDE4?content=94472