Elegance?!

[Myriam Schweingruber]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 06:40, Nikhil Marathe <nsm.nikhil at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Some of you have attended Aaron's keynote at Akademy in Tampere and
>> others have seen the video already. (Go watch it if you haven't yet.)
>> One of the key points was that we need to look at our work and see
>> where we can make what we do or how we do it more elegant. So the
>> question is: How does this apply to Amarok for you? Where/how can we
>> do things more elegantly and how can we make Amarok more elegant?
>>
>
> Along the similar lines as Ralf, I would also like the positions of
> the context view and playlist to be exchanged. That would be a major
> win.

You can already do this, what we need to do is make the layout change
possibilities more discoverable, and have a fall-back layout easy to
apply for those who successfully screw up their layout when playing
around.
I don't want the Context View on the right by default, that would
really look horrible (just tried that, a no-go for me, seriously, it
looks totally unbalanced). We give the users the possibility to change
the layout, but I am really not sure we should change the default one,
it looks well balanced with lists on the left and right and widgets in
the middle. Changing that would make it look asymmetric, and would go
against the design discussions we had in May 2009 in Berlin with Nuno.
If the users wants to change that for him/her, no problem, but I want
the default one.

> Another thing I would like is more visual feedback about the relations
> between the UI. Right now the three views are visually different and
> quite 'blocky'. Each applet is also pretty much its own thing.

Visually different because they display different things (widgets,
lines of different heights because of the playlist layout differences,
etc.) no easy way to change that. Did you play a bit with the layout?
Right click on the toolbar, unlock layout and then move the stuff.
>
> Instead when a song is playing, it could have a different background
> which matches the context view background, and its row would merge
> into the context view by extending to the left (right?). This would
> clearly mark that everything in here (the Context view) is related to
> this song. Of course this would require custom painting of widgets and
> might be a lot of work, but just my 2 cents.

I am not sure how custom painting of widgets would solve that when the
users have another theme than the default one, we already had enough
problems with dark themes because of that... sounds problematic to me.
And it wouldn't work on other OS either.


Regards, Myriam
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