amarok 1.4

[Ralf Jung]

Hi,

> The fact that a particular piece of constructive criticism was not acted
> on does not mean that the developers do not care about what you think,
> nor does it mean that any and all constructive criticism is unwelcome.
> And it's "INVALID" -- in all caps -- because we have a limited number of
> items we can choose from (and all of them are all in caps). I could
> change it to WONTFIX if it will make you feel better.
>
> You need to stop taking this personally. You're reading too much into
> the resolution of the bug.
I don't think I took this personally, I just understood it the way I described 
previously - not being unwelcome against me personally or similar, or not 
ignoring what I think about Amarok generally (you take the time to answer such 
mails, so you obviously care - and I also had some nice chats in #amarok), but 
not caring (or being unwelcome to or however one puts it) about that one 
certain problem which is not a personal problem of mine.

> For the record -- one reason it was closed was because we have received
> other, very similar complaints and will act on them if and when we have
> the time/inclination. As a result, there wasn't much point in keeping it
> open. We have a ton of things we're working on, and a ton of things on
> our plate, and for now we want to continue improving the new playlist. I
> don't honestly know if we'll get the spreadsheet style playlist back,
> but please rest assured that your (and others') preferences for it are
> not forgotten.
From my experience with bugzilla I expected that if this is the case, the bug 
was closed as duplicate, not as invalid. However if you are indeed aware of 
the problem, and just want to keep the number of open bugs small, I'm happy, 
too :D

Since you say bringing the old playlist back is too much work currently (so 
far, I always heard you won't do this as there is no need, which is a subtle 
difference to not dong it because of a lack of time :) ), I'll try to find ways 
the new playlist could be improved. I fear I won't have the time to wrote code 
on my own though, but I will continue to run and test trunk and give feedback 
if necessary.

I would also prefer it if the new playlist could somehow be made as flexible as 
the old one without taking away what makes it better than the old one. Some 
suggestions come to my mind which in that regard, I'll write them down here 
because I am just thinking about this topic - I can make wish-reports if you 
want me to:
- It would be cool to have a better way of controlling the width of the 
individual fields. Moving a slider in the context menu is not that intuitive 
IMHO, and it is hard to get what you want. The layout shown in the preview 
will not even match the final one because the width is adapted for the text in 
it to fit. If the latter would be disabled, and the width could be changed by 
dragging splitters between the items, one could directly see how the space is 
used.
- When I have much information displayed per track, it gets hard to see what 
information is what. In the old playlist, the borders of the columns served 
that purpose. The new one has "dividers", but they take away a huge lot of 
space. If, instead of dynamically growing, the dividers would be just as wide 
as they are drawn (10 pixels, perhaps) and the items containing actual 
information can take up all the remaining space, that would be a big 
improvement.
- In case I want to build a layout which does not use grouping (to mimic the 
old one, as in the screenshot from that blog), I currently have to leave the 
"header" layout empty and make the "body" and "single" layout exactly the 
same. It would be a nice feature to have a checkbox "no grouping" which hides 
all the tabs and uses the one layout I can then compose for both body and 
single, keeping header empty - especially when it comes to column width it is 
hard to keep the two in sync.

I do not know if that is the kind of system Amarok wants to have, but KMail 
also has a very flexible layout manager which can create both nice-looking 
lists like the Amarok playlists and column-based layouts - and a mixture of 
them. Perhaps some code can be shared there?

Kind regards,
Ralf Jung