Is Amarok currently open for design input?

Fri Aug 8 15:46:11 UTC 2014

Hi Thomas,

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer <colomar at autistici.org>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> there are currently quite a few ideas for Amarok's UI design being
> brainstormed in the VDG forum [1]. Whether you like them or not is for you
> to
> decide, but for me the worst outcome would be that you said "Oh, there are
> very cool ideas here, but unfortunately we cannot make any considerable
> changes to the UI with the available resources due to Amarok's code".
>
> My impression is that in Amarok 2 the backend and GUI code are still quite
> entangled, making bigger changes to the UI very time-consuming to
> implement.
> Is this going to change any time soon (like a move to a QtQuick GUI), or
> will
> this situation stay for the foreseeable future? If the latter is true, we'd
> have to tell our community designers that they'd have to scale down their
> ideas to a manageable size if they ever hope to see them implemented, and
> define what a "manageable size" would mean.
>
> In either case, it would be awesome if some Amarok developers would visit
> the
> aforementioned thread and give some feedback on whether design input is
> currently welcome and if so, at what scale.
>
> The following is my personal opinion, and does in no way represent the
view of the Amarok Team, but I am slightly pissed right now, so please take
all this with a big pinch of salt:

First of all: how about actually starting to ask us before starting a
brainstorm with ideas? In German there is a saying: "das Pferd von hinten
aufzäumen"... Sorry if this sounds a tad negative, but I would have
expected for people to actually get in touch with us before starting any of
that, not start it without even thinking of the Amarok Team and all the
sudden get aware that maybe, maybe we should ask the Amarok people? Is it
common in the design field to redesign stuff without even asking? Really,
seems a rather strange behavior to me, but I am not a designer, and I had
my share of designers with lack of sense of reality over the last 40
years...

The question is not whether we are open to mock-ups, but what all these
styles have in common is actually almost all are a step back to what we
already had in Amarok 1.x, so far I don't really see many new ideas... Also
we do NOT want to look like application A or B, Amarok has its own
identity, so copying a GUI from other applications is not exactly very
compelling...
I just wait for the first to actually mention Clementine as a starting
point (reminder: Clementine actually IS Amarok 1.4, just look at the code,
it is still full of old cruft we got rid of in Amarok 2.x...) to stop
looking at that whole thread altogether... some screenshots are actually
nothing else than just that *sigh* So there I say: stop, no, we are NOT
going back, we have been there already and there was a really good reason
to abandon that path, else we wouldn't have done it...

So maybe all these people who come up with "new" ideas should first have a
look at what was already there, instead of pretending to "invent something
new"...  Seriously, do they all really think we have no ideas whatsoever?
Looks like, so apparently none of these people only have the slightest idea
what changing a GUI involves, how Amarok looked in the past, and where we
come from.

We have pressing things on our plate, namely the transition to Qt 5, I
would say this is much more important than anything else right NOW. We plan
on working on the Qt 5 transition in Randa, just a questions of
availability of the developers.

The ideas are certainly not what is currently lacking... We even have a big
and shiny playlist overhaul that is ready in the starting blocks, what we
need are the people who are around long enough to do the actual work. There
is enough material in the wiki, btw, how about take these as starting ideas
and come up with something that is actually doable and then be around and
help do the work?

As for your idea of a Qt Quick UI, erm... same problem as above: is Qt
Quick really up to this? It certainly was not last time we talked about
this (at the last Randa meeting, incidentally, as well as during the last
two Akademies) It was actually pretty far away from being usable. Mind you,
I am not a developer, but that is what we came up at the last big
brainstorms, and the manpower situation did not really improve. Feel free
to correct me if I am wrong and Qt Quick really made a big step ahead, but
last time we actually were prepared to do the work the framework was simply
not there (yet?).

Frankly, I am a bit weary with all these "idea givers" who are quick with
words and then go away as fast as they came, because when they realize it
is actually a lot of work on the plate, none actually has the necessary
time to stay around... So yes, come with ideas, but please, also be
available to implement those! So far I can count at least a dozen people
who did exactly that in the past: "oh, there is work involved? Sorry, don't
have time for that..." , and we have had several people who came up with
big promises and then all we got out of them was hot air, and sometimes not
even that. Just remember the Context View overhaul that was supposed to be
done, or the Tomahawk integration, both guys made big promises and then
just disappeared, pocketing Google money along the way and having produced
nothing usable whatsoever... Just ask Domme how much disappointment we have
gone through...

In short: before starting to give mouthwatering ideas about how Amarok
"could" look, be prepared to actually stay and do the work with us! Then we
can start talking seriously!

Again: this is my personal opinion, I might be totally wrong and will shut
up if you can prove me wrong, but right now I have a  "déjà-vu"...

Regards, Myriam

PS: there is enough material in the community wiki, and since the wiki is
rather well organized it shouldn't be hard to find the ideas I mention
above....

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