playlist tooltips

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

Ah. I was going to write a mail about this tooltip, so we could have a
discussion about it, but I see you beat me to it.

> i noticed that the playlist-tooltip branch was merged. a few comments:
>
> 1) the tooltip itself is pretty ugly.  there's a lot of wasted space,
> and a lot of blue emptiness. check it out:

I agree that the looks can be improved.

> http://imagebin.ca/view/mNS1pL8.html
>
> 2) the information is incredibly redundant. check out the screenshot
> above, and look at this:
>
> http://imagebin.ca/view/4ZC9dYAe.html

I disagree with this point in general. The reason you have much
redundant information is because you are looking at the tooltip of a
track that just happens to be in the same album as the currently
playing track (and thus share much of the info that is already shown
in the current track applet). The basic idea of the tooltip is to give
easy access to information that might not be shown anywhere else. One
idea to improve this further could be to only show information that is
not already visible in the currently active playlist layout, but that
might remove some interesting future possibilities. More on that
below...

> * we generally don't like micro-options unless they bring value to
> amarok, rather than needlessly cluttering the config page. why is this
> so important that it gets an option? why does this need to be able to
> be toggled? i think new options in the config file need an absolutely
> good reason to be there, and i don't think this has one. or of it
> does, no one has made it and i don't think that's enough.

I have been thinking about this option to turn it on and off. It seems
that whether the tooltip makes any sense depends on how verbose a
playlist layout you are using. The less info your playlist layout
shows, the more sense the tooltip makes IMO. One idea would be to have
the option to use the tooltip as a per playlist layout setting. This
would keep the option out of the main config pages.

> regarding the very-unattractive nature of the tooltip, we could
> perhaps do something like the systemsettings tooltip:
>
> http://imagebin.ca/view/r1yijxhn.html
>

I actually like this idea, using icons for the "categories" instead of text.

> but even being as pretty as that one, we need a good reason for
> including it, a good reason for making it on by default, and an even
> better reason for making it an option in our config page.
>
> so without those, I think we should revert.

I would be very sad if we reverted this. First of all I really like
the functionality as it is already, but more than that, I have plans
to turn it into a "better inline playlist editor". the current editor
to edit track metadata on the fly has several issues. It gets
triggered way too easily for some people, space for editing can be
very constrained and it does not give you access to edit metdata not
shown in the playlist layout. Using the tooltip we could do an editor
that works in the same way as the track bookmark tooltips in the
progress slider where you can change the name of a bookmark by
clicking on it.

- Nikolaj