PMC use case

[Christophe Olinger]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 March 2010, Christophe Olinger wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Tuesday 30 March 2010, Christophe Olinger wrote:
>> >> Hey everybody,
>> >>
>> >> I think it will be really difficult to have the UI scale from 50"
>> >> screens right down to 5" screens. At the moment we use a top panel for
>> >> playback control (and mode switching) and will use a bottom panel for
>> >
>> > i don't think the mode switching should ultimately be there, the modes
>> > should be shown as mammoth icons in a main menu in the browser itself,
>> > that would be a kind of "root folder" for it.
>>
>> From the wiki:
>> On PMC startup the user will see a beautiful home applet that has (PMC
>> is meant to be fullscreen):
>>
>>     * Buttons to switch to the following media modes: Pictures, Music,
>> Videos (later: Games, maybe an all Media Mode)
>>     * Area with information about your recently played media, highest
>> ratings, things that allow you to jumpstart to a specific media.
>>     * Possibility to add normal plasmoids, like note apps, web slice,...
>
> do you plan to make that home applet the top bar?

No, the home applet should be the first thing that the user sees. Upon
entering a mode, the top and bottom bars appear


is not fullscreen enough,
> and put all the possible mode here will quickly run out of space an be
> cluttered, in the bar there should be a single button, triggered also from a
> single real key (could be esc or home, or whatever in keyboards, the more
> adapt case by case on remotes)
> that "home applet" if you want it really isolated could be a different
> containment, so would be a totally standaloe fullscreen thing, but i don't
> think i like it.

I more thought of it as an additional applet. On switching to home
mode, everything hides and the home applet appears

>
> i really do think it should be right into the browser, the "modes" together
> eventual plugins to do other stuff should be right into the browser as items,
> so they can be as big as possible taking the whole screen or scale decently if
> some day there will be many of them.

the general PMC home applet does not have a browser. each mode has its
own specific home applet which actually is a browser which shows media
specific dataengines. This one will have big icons


>
> the "adding normal plasmoids" part divides in two categories:
> tiny plasmoids with a brief informational value:
> couldbe put somewhere in the main containment, an rssnow with finally some
> adaptments for panels could be put in the bottom bar for instance, or we could
> want an analog clock somewhere in the screen while a videos is playing and the
> controls/info are shown on top, just because we can...

hmm, sounds all really cool. Initally I thaught they would be only
useful on the home applet, but we could also think about a dashboard
thing for each applet.

>
> or on the other hand there could be some plasmoid that scale well as full
> screen things, like a browser or a way more detailed version of the weather
> applet, those could take their own containment and be shown as fullscreen,
> launched from the browser

Nice, this would just be buttons in the PMC general home screen that
display fullscreen applets on top of evrything



>
>> So eventually only the home button will remain in the controller and
>> the home screen will be the root of everything. On media type switch
>> we will then alwys go via the home applet (2 clicks). At some point we
>> thought that having mode switch buttons in the controller would be
>> good to reduce switching to 1 click. At one point I imagined holding
>> the home button in the controller would make a sort of drawer expand
>> which would show the other mode buttons.
>>
>> >> displaying information about media. The bottom panel might be reusable
>> >> for a big screen UI, but the playback control migth have to be
>> >> transformed into something else. Anyway, the way Alessandro designed
>> >
>> > as long as it scales big enough to be readable it will be perfectly fine.
>> > on a tv that thing will be purely informational since you won't click
>> > that buttons, because you would have play,stop, fast forward etc
>> > directly into the remote
>>
>> anyway, the controller has a "toggle autohide" button, we can set it
>> to always autohide on big TV screens
>>
>
> it should -always- be autohide and what is lacking at the moment is a way to
> decide what autohide at the proper moment.
> when you are watching a movie you can want to unhide only the top bar ith the
> progress and the bottom bar with informations.

This is already done. Every mode can decide whether it wants autohide
on or off. In picture browser mode it is off for example.
I will do the same for the botom panel. It will be easy for us to find
good default values for this

>
> another thing is when you decide you want something else, so you could want to
> unhide the browser and/or the playlist. the two things don't make much sense
> shown at the same time, really.

well for playing music it makes sense I think, also when browsing
videos I want to drag stuff from the browser to the playlist.
An autohide function of the browser we do not need (I sound like Yoda
:-)) , since when I iniatiate an action fromn the browser, a mode
switch will be done which hides the browser. The latter is true fro
picture modes. For video mode. the browser hides when I hit play. For
music mode, the browser never hides (only in visualization mode)

Puuhh, long discussion :-) nice

>
> Cheers,
> Marco Martin
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