Main toolbar for 2.2

[Bart Cerneels]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 08:41, Nikolaj Hald
Nielsen<nhnfreespirit at gmail.com> wrote:
> As you have likely noticed, we currently have 2 available main
> toolbars, the old one with the big overlapping buttons and a new
> slimmer one. We also have a new style of progress slider which is
> currently being used in both toolbars.
>
> My intention was never to have 2 toolbars in the final release, but
> allowing us to choose between them was just a convenient way of
> testing and implementing the new one without rendering Amarok useless
> in the process. With this in mind I think it is time we choose how the
> toolbar should look for 2.2.0.
>
> First though, I'll just write a few lines about my motivations for
> creating a new one. First of all, I think the old toolbar is _huge_.
> It is very tall and especially on smaller screens, it takes up a very
> large portion of the available vertical space. Also, it has large
> empty areas that really makes it look unfinished in my opinion. And
> then there are the big overlapping buttons. While I initially thought
> these were cool and a nice way to differentiate ourselves, they have
> since grown to annoy me. While I would really like to have some unique
> and cool looking buttons, I just don't think the overlapping ones look
> nice at all. (I did much of the implementation work on these buttons,
> based on mockups by Nuno, but even that does not make me like them any
> more at this time).
>
> The new slider style is a way of making the progress slider a bit less
> "heavy" as the old one is, in my opinion, very massive and draws a lot
> of focus. Granted, a progress slider should be easily readable, and
> some people have expressed concerns about the new one. I have tried to
> make it more easily readable, but I don't know if that is enough to
> alleviate those concerns. Also, there have been concerns about how
> well it fits with the rest of style of Amarok. Personally I think it
> fits quite well and that the old style actually stics out more, but
> this is jsut my highly subjective opinion.
>
> In any case, these are the options I see for choosing hat to ship with 2.2.0:
>
>
> 1) Ship the old toolbar with the old slider style. All is as it were,
> except for a few features that I added to the progress slider that are
> independent of rendering mode.
>
> 2) Ship the old toolbar with the new slider style. If we choose this
> one, I think we should paint the volume slider in this style as well
> (perhaps with a different color for the part left of the knob) as it
> looks pretty disjoint currently.
>
> 3) New slim toolbar with new slider.
>
> 4) New slim toolbar with the old slider style.
>
> 5) Allow users to choose (like currently), and figure out some
> combination of which toolbar uses which slider (example, old toolbar
> uses old slider, new toolbar uses new slider). The main issue with
> this approach is that we would really need to rename the new toolbar
> from Main "Toolbar NG" to something like "Main Toolbar - Slim", but we
> are currently in string freeze...
>
> One general issue that I still need to look at with the new slider
> style is how bookmarks are painted, as the current svg's used for
> making bookmarks in the current track does not look good with the new
> slider.
>
> Personally, I prefer option 3), with option 4) as my second choices.
> Let me hear what you guys think!
>

option 5 is a possibility because the translators will be able to
change that string to whatever we want. We will just need to give them
instructions. Outside of stringfreeze we do this via i18nc. The only
people who would see the untranslated string are people who use no
translation at all, which is not default on most distros.

My personal opinion is that that the old toolbar should stay the
default and the NG as option. My laptops is also vertical resolution
challenged and I don't have a problem with the hight of the toolbar.
I've also gotten used to the style and can live with the open spaces
because I expect the visualization to be there one day.

If we ever make a netbook remix it can be the default there. I can't
tell if the volume button is difficult to use with a touchpad since I
have the one on my thinkpad disabled. It works fine with both mouse
and trackpoint and changing the application volume is not something I
do often.

Bart