playlist tooltips

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 11:48 PM, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
> hi people but mostly nhn,
>
> 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:
>
> 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
>
> in the first screenshot, most of the information in the tooltip is
> within 1-2cm of the tooltip itself. since the tooltip pops up after 1
> or so seconds, i'm being assaulted with redundant information that
> blocks *other* more important information that is not shown anywhere
> else---that is, other tracks in my playlist. in the second screenshot,
> you can see the cover image *three times*, each in a different size
> (context view, playlist, tooltip). that just seems ridiculous to me.
>
> i understand it's an option. but that too seems to bring up a question:
>
> * 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.
>
> regarding the very-unattractive nature of the tooltip, we could
> perhaps do something like the systemsettings tooltip:
>
> http://imagebin.ca/view/r1yijxhn.html
>
> 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.

Fully agreed with everything that Leo wrote. On top of that, I had
already written a comment on that Merge Request page, pointing out
some issues with the patch. Apparently they were ignored.

To sum it up:

"You cannot turn a bad feature into a good feature by making it optional."

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Software Engineer at Collabora Ltd
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://www.fsfe.org - http://collabora.co.uk