Amarok Toolbar live-mockup - links inside

[Bart Cerneels]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 20:57, Enrico Ros <eros.kde at email.it> wrote:
> Hello,
>  I got so inspired by reading Thomas Lübking's UI proposal, that I had to
> fire up the editor! Since I'm a kind of {QGraphics*, Q*Animation, OpenGL}
> freak, I worked on a "live mockup" of the toolbar.
>
>  http://www.enricoros.com/mirror/coolar-animated-1.ogv
>
> Code *Qt 4.6 Only*:
>
>  git clone git://gitorious.org/qt4-gadgets/coolar.git
>
>
> Here are some points about this kind of design:
>
>  * this is a quick (4 hours) and incomplete experiment, made in a rush. I just
> want You to get Inspired by this, by no means I propose to get this into
> Amarok ;-)
>
>  * here we present a Toolbar that can fit desktop-sized players as well as
> iphone-sized ones
>
>  * Qt 4.6 is needed; it can be made to work with 4.5, but I'm just not
> interested into that right now
>
>  * CPU load @ 50fps @ 800Mhz: 20% with raster, 5% with OpenGL Acceleration.
> and there is room for improvement (I leave OpenGL acceleration as an exercise
> to the reader (it's a +2 lines patch))
>
>  * the code structure 'frees' designers: they can make roto-zomming analyzers,
> Thomas's 4D layout, good looking and informative track struts that slide-in
> and out when you press prev/next
>
>
> That's all for now. I hope to get you thinking about this kind of approach,
> that I think is better than widget-constrained ones. I'm really fascinated by
> Thomas ideas, and I think Amarok deserves some gui improvements.
>
> I'll go back working on Fotowall unless you're interested into this kind of
> user interface, or request some changes, or infect me with crazy and colorful
> ideas ;-)
>
> Enrico
>
>

I have suggested an animated toolbar before, but didn't think it could
look this awesome.
Enrico: I want to take you up on the offer to create an animated
toolbar for Amarok :)

Even have a wishlist, it should:
- have branded buttons with a style similar to the amarok logo (those
in the vid look cool, but don't fit-in ATM)
- integrate visualizations. The way you did it is perfect already. I'm
wondering if the viz can be implemented separately so we can have a
few different ones. You have that little animations when clicking the
buttons, would work as a horizontal analyzer as well?
- Integrate current track info if enough space is available.
- Be vertical resizeable, limited by apect ratio if needed.

- In the future this should all be in one, dynamically loadable QML
file. Kind of like theming, but animated. When is QML supposed to be
shipped in Qt again 4.7?