playlist tooltips

[Leo Franchi]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 2:48 AM, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
<nhnfreespirit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...

There is a difference, though, between easy access and in-your-face
annoyance. If I stop my mouse over the playlist, this thing pops up.
It masks other tracks that I'm looking at, and shows me information I
can already see somewhere else. Sure, it potentially can be useful if
i'm not hovering near an album which I am playing, or I have a minimal
playlist layout. But that doesn't invalidate my point---you can't
assume a specific use case in order for a feature to be good. I'm
pointing out a use case where the feature obstructs the use of amarok
(by hiding information in the playlist and providing useless redundant
data).


>> * 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.

Making it a part of the playlist layout makes a lot of sense imho. It
is tied up to how much info is displayed in the playlist.

>> 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.

I'm not against the idea of a playlist tooltip in theory. I'm just
surprised and unhappy at what we have now in trunk, because I feel
like it degraded the experience of using amarok for me. So we can
definitely work on it and improve it. But I want to make sure that it
doesn't just hit trunk and get ignored and become another
feature-we-don't-want-but-no-one-cares-to-deal-with.

leo


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