Today I installed the latest svn version of 7.0 and tested this skin again. Some comments and suggestions follows.
1. I still feel that the screen space usage is the major issue. If you look at the attached pictures you can see how much more information that could be seen in the old default skin compared to the new skin. The albums gallery page show that you could see more albums simultaneously, but you can see a big problem in the page that shows the tracks for a single album. In the old skin there was even space left below the last track on a 12 track album, in the new skin I need to scroll the see the last tracks if the album has more than 10 tracks. The screen shots are from a 1680x1050 screen where the web browser takes up the whole screen size. I would imagine that the problem would be even worse on a 1024x768 screen which some people might use if they run SlimServer on an old computer. If we at least could get rid of the white border around the whole interface. 2. I really like the blue colors, but my feeling is that the interface still feels a bit old. It isn't as bad as the current default skin in 6.5 but it doesn't feel like a skin made year 2007. I think my problem might be the medium gray background color behind the header titles on the left pane and behind the status display header on the right pane. Maybe this could be change to some more fun color ? The best would be if we could have some sort of graded fill background effect where the colors were started a bit lighter in one corder and was graded to a bit darker in the opposite corner. But I know this can be a bit hard to accomplish so it still looks good in all web browsers. 3. When moving around with the mouse over the items that get highlighted I have a bit hard time to know where on the selected item I can click to get to different pages. It would be nice if there was some sort of mouse over effect where the text or button changed when the mouse moved over it. As an example in the single album page, when you moved the mouse above the album title it could light up and when you moved above the artist title on the same track the artist could light up. I'm not sure if this will be "too much", but I feel that it would be good with some better feedback about what could actually be clicked on. 4. On the album page I've always felt that there is a wasted screen space on the right of the album cover. In the Custom Browse plugin I use this to show additional information about the album. It would be great if the default skin also could use this screen space for something useful. I'm not sure what could be displayed there without major changes in the perl code beside, but maybe there is some information or functionality that could be accessed from there. I've attached a screen shot of the album page that the Custom Browse plugin uses. 5. Maybe it would be possible to create a cover art gallery page with the small thumbnails but without the text. By doing this I suspect that it would be possible to show at least 8x8 album covers on the same page. The album title could be shown as a tooltip and when you clicked on a album cover you could get to the album page from where you can start playing the album. 6. The menu where you selects sorting and album cover size looks really great. Maybe this could be used also for other things. For example it might be better to have a menu like this to launch mixers instead of showing the mixer icons directly above the album art. If you look at the screen shots from the default skin you can see that there might be a number of mixer icons available if some of my plugins are installed, so it could get a bit tight to display them all inside the album cover. A menu might be more suitable. Michael, at last I just want to say that it's really great that you have chosen to get user feedback this way. Often one just get to see the finished result, but this way people actually have the chance to comment while there still is time to do changes. So keep up the good work. +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: newmanyalbums.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=3248| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.homeip.net) 'My download page' (http://erland.homeip.net/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and RandomPlayList plugins' (http://wiki.erland.homeip.net/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=37848 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/beta
