[KimDaBa] Some ideas from iTunes/amarok

[Jean-Michel FAYARD]

Hello Jesper, hello list

for me KimDaBa is to a (big) picture collection what iTunes or amaroK
are to a (big) music collection, while a folder-based photo management
application is somehow the equivalent of WinAmp/XMMS. Ones usually
begin by using and loving the winamp´s side for his simplicity, and
then soon or later switch to the iTunes´s side as the collection get
bigger.

So I looked at Amarok to see what good ideas could be taken from them :

************
It seems to be a general trend in KDE that everytime you have a list
which may go big one day, you put a search field at the top, like this
:
http://amarok.kde.org/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=25&page=view&imgid=67&hit=1

When you browse by collection, amarok has actually two of those search
field, one in the collection, one in the playlist. I find that very
convenient.
http://amarok.kde.org/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=25&page=view&imgid=61&hit=1

Others examples of this in KDE includes the "configure shortcuts"
dialog in KDE 3.3

I think it would be very convenient to have this when Kimdaba´s
browser display a (frequently big) list of Persons or Locations or
Keywords.


***************
 Amarok records for every song the first time you play it, the last
time you play it, and how many times you play it. (It also computes a
"score" : if you heard the whole song, it´s a sign that you like it,
if you switched to another after 10s, it may be a sign you dislike it,
but I don´t think it´s relevant for Kimdaba)

See the right panel here :
http://amarok.kde.org/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=25&page=view&imgid=67&hit=1

Not bad, but it get more interesting because you can construct a
playlist based on those information. Look the "smart plalists" at the
bottom of the right panel here :
http://amarok.kde.org/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=25&page=view&imgid=60&hit=1

I find very convenient for example the "Never Played" thingy. Thanks
to this you can say : "Oh I never heard that while that´s beautiful,
shame on me !", and so you do not hear always the same twenty songs.

How does this relate to KimDaBa ?
- "first time you heared it" is more or less the same as the date
extracted from exif data, so need for this
- An equivalent for "you heared the song" is "you displayed it in the
viewer or set information for it in the Ctrl-1 or Ctrl-2 dialog"
- An equivalent of the smart playlist would be another feature of the
browser. I´m not very sure how it would look like, perhaps something
like :
* Persons
* Locations
* Keywords
* Date
* Seen last time (a kind of history)
     (when you click on it)
     * i18n( today )
     * yesterday
     * monday
     * last week
     * September
     * August
     * ....
     * 2003....
* Other idea for Seen last time : a dialog like the date dialog
* Viewed
    (when you click on it)
     Never Viewed (very useful)
     Last 100 Viewed
     Most frequently viewed
     Viewed 1-2 times
     Viewed 3-5 times
     Viewed more than 5 times


Comments ?