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[Leo Franchi]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Thomas Lübking <thomas.luebking at web.de> wrote:
> Am Monday 08 February 2010 schrieb Jakob Kummerow:
>> > The label text is the most urgent: change it to "%track %title -
>> > %artist".
>>
>> If by that you mean that the label text should be static (i.e. no
>> fading between different information), you have my full agreement.
>> Just show the track's title (maybe including the artist, but IMO
>> that's not even _that_ important), nothing else. Year, album etc. are
>> shown in the CV, after all.
> You assume a certain degree of entropy in the title tag that is not
> necessarily present.
> If you run a random list on some classical tunes a row of "Allegro"s
> "Andante"s and "Presto"s won't help you at all.
> (Yes: If there's "Radio Gaga", "Like a rolling stone" and "Baba O'Riley" every
> other information is entirely superflous)
> Because of this uncertainity in the tag information system you cannot show a
> fixed limited amount and as there isn't unlimited space the (ok: imho) best
> option is to stack them in time.
>
>> Fading labels may be a nice gimmick and look impressive at first
>> glance, but they don't enhance usability, IMHO.
>>
>> > The next label should be prefixed with "Next Track: " and
>> > "Previous Track: ".
>>
>> Nice idea!
> Bad idea...
>> At least as long as we haven't agreed on a design and
>> position for prev/next buttons...
> ... as ...
>> Maybe it's better to shorten the prefixes to "Next:" and "Previous:",
>> but that's a minor detail.
> .. addressed here.
>> Another idea to make it even shorter would be to just append/prepend
>> Unicode characters such as ≫, » or > (resp. ≪, «, or <) to the label
>> string.
> You just waste a signifincat part of the label to no information. :-(

Compact UI < Usable UI.

Enough said.

We don't like wasting space. We like making apps that are unintuitive
and unusable even more. Besides, the definition of wasted implies that
it is unneeded. Something that transmits useful information is not
unneeded. Once again, if they can read your mind, it is unnecessary.
BUT users can't read your mind. I know i've already had this
discussion with you---you can't assume that users will immediately
know what you meant when you coded a UI. That's not how it works. UIs
need to be simple and self-explanatory enough so users *understand*
what they do without having to click stuff to figure it out and try to
remember.

That is why the "clicking on next track name" thing is so weird. Who
expects it?!?! That concern has not been addressed.

leo


-- 
_____________________________________________________________________
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu         Tufts  University 2010
leo at kdab.com                                 KDAB (USA), LLC
lfranchi at kde.org                             The KDE Project