Idea: blue shading for podcast selection

[Bart Cerneels]

2007/12/30, Henry de Valence <hdevalence at gmail.com>:
> This is more of a general idea, rather than a real patch or working code.
>
> In the current Amarok 2, the podcast menu has a blue text=selected , black
> text=unselected. This a) doesn't really fit with the way podcasts work and b)
> isn't consistent with the rest of kde: eg in KMail and Akregator, blue
> text=unread , blue background = selected , black text = read. The status of
> each podcast episode could be shown by the icon; either downloaded, loading,
> or un-downloaded, seeing as most episodes don't have an icon anyways.
>
> I tried making something that's kinda like that (attached if you want to see
> it, but it's not ready. Also, my first time doing painting, so if I'm doing
> it *all* wrong, let me know). I found that the flat blue was rather
> unpleasing, so I tried making a gradient, and this is what I liked. I don't
> know how to fix the flat blue at the left, though.
>
> Unlike the example of KMail/Akregator, selecting a podcast doesn't make it
> listened to. So the blue text of the "unheard" podcast can't look really
> terrible on the blue selection. If this blue on blue is a really big problem,
> you could make it black text while selected and then revert to blue text
> after it isn't selected.
>
> I think it looks ok, but I'd like your feedback on the idea. The one picture
> is just a regular example. The second is a test with a blue on blue. I also
> reduced the font size, if it's too small, that's not good either, but I
> thought it was a bit big.
>
> PS: if I'm doing it all wrong, please let me know how to do it the right way.
>
> The pictures can be seen here:
> http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/6547/amarokkdepodcastblueshaij4.png
> http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/6466/amarokkde4podcastblueshkq1.png
> (They're ~150KB each)
> --
> Harry de Valence
>

Hi Harry

Yeah, the current PodcastCategory code was just a quick hack job to
get something to test the underlying framework. Thanks for taking on
the job of improving it.

I'm not sure if blue text for not listened is such a good idea, blue
text is less easy to read then black (because of the minority of blue
wavelength receptors in the human eye). But making only the title blue
and keeping the description black is not good either. I propose
indicating the "listened" status with an extra icon, only shown when
status=!listened. The downloading should be indicated with an
animation rather than an icon. Downloaded could be another icon.
So that would look something like this: blue background = selected,
download icon = downloaded, listened icon = listened.

Another note: we need more horizontal space for the episodes, to fit
the title and description. We can achieve that by removing the dotted
lines, drawn by QTreeView and replacing it with something thinner that
still indicates what episodes are part of which channel.
I'll try to make a mockup or ask on irc.

Greets
Stecchino

P.S. I'm cross posting this to the developer mailing list.