Buttons, was: About Amarok's interface design (follow up)

[Jakob Kummerow]

Yay - these are great! That's hands down the best button mockup I've
seen so far :-)

I don't mind the plainness. The buttons look both elegant and
functional, IMHO, which is perfect for a default theme. Just one minor
detail: how about always showing the border between the "stop" and
"next" buttons (that becomes apparent when hovering), making it look
like two separate buttons that are neatly placed next to each other?
I'm not sure that that would be better, but I think it could look
quite nice.

I don't mind the asymmetry at all - in fact, I rather like it. A tiny
bit of asymmetry makes the whole thing look more interesting, I think.

/Personally/, I generally don't think that symmetry is important
enough to sacrifice other aspects (such as a good utilisation of
screen real estate, or reasonable usability) for it. In consequence, I
prefer 2.2.0's toolbar layout to the one of the current git master;
the latter just leads to too much wasted space on either side of the
playback control buttons. That's solved nicely in Lee's mockups,
though. So, if we only have four buttons (and we don't need more than
that), and one of them ("play") is the most important one and
therefore bigger than the others, I really have no problem whatsoever
with the asymmetry that's induced by this. On the contrary.

Considering that the buttons Amarok currently uses are the default
Oxygen icons (at least, JuK and Dragon player use them as well), one
thing I especially like about these latest mockups is that even though
the buttons introduce their very own style, they still retain "visual
compatibility" with the KDE default theme, so that they let Amarok
stand out as the graphically most advanced application, without
looking out of place. Seriously, Lee, I'm impressed!

Cheers
Jakob