After playing around with it a bit I have to say I'm impressed with the current playlist handling and the player handling. I also like the way in which other content related to what's currently playing is shown.
I have to admit, though, that I do find some elements of the rest of the UI pretty awkward. Dragging an item onto a "Play" or "Add" command button is actually probably the most intuitive form of control I've seen in a while. That the buttons are greyed out and as far away from the source item as they could ever be placed in this UI doesn't really make things any better. The only element that is even further away is the "Search" entry field. Why an entry field for something that completely happens in the lower left corner of the screen is shon at the very top right is above me, sorry. Especially since you have a second one at the bottom. I would also re-think that little green back button. It took me a moment to find out the logic behind going back to the library through the "Music Library" tab-thing but then I found that more logical, the green back button doesn't really have a place in the UI flow. The layout of the top control thing probably isn't finished, yet? Every button seems to have a different size there and I also found using a slider for the position in the track unexpected. I actually like this idea but I believe the slider needs a label for people to understand what it is for. I also miss a shuffle control. Shuffle and repeat also should support the customized functions for love/ban for some services, I don't know whether they do, I didn't test this. Alternatively, you could put these functions somewhere else, but for some services they are really important. Also, I tend to find that the library is the most substantial part of the content to be shown, it only gets a very small window, although this is of course something one can easily change so not too big an issue. Scrolling is also pretty slow and that's the case independent of the server speed (tried it with my Mac as a server, too). It looks like there's a lot going on concurrently while scrolling that holds the UI and the browser up a lot. In Safari on a Mac I found it very hard to bring up the scroll bars, when I stop scrolling and try to hit them it looks like the UI is irresponsive for long enough an interval to make them hide again (if you don't use a Mac you probably don't know what I'm talking about: OSX hides the scroll bars by default and only shows them while scrolling; the UI is too slow to reliably allow me to grab them before they disappear). It's better in Firefox where there's a permanent scroll bar. I am really missing a way to quickly jump to a certain leading letter, though, like in the default skin. For big libraries and with the slow scrolling this is a problem. The slow scrolling also gives the UI a "jumpy" appearance that makes me lose the focus on an album or track so I continuously have to re-orient myself in the list unless I scroll really, really slowly, would be cool if that could get smoother. I'm sorry if this comes through as a bashing, it's not my intention, I wouldn't take the time to write all this if I didn't think this is a very important and worthwhile activity, we have seen so little development on web interfaces recently. But some aspects of the UI really need improving/re-thinking. They might look perfectly normal to you, but especially the button-dragging thing is something that probably only very few users will swallow (I'd give the WAF of that a plain 0) and the performance also makes it tiring to use (although performance is really probably something that can usually be tweaked). I would also probably re-think the general screen layout and the positioning of elements a bit. Right now I'd say it's a good interface to control the player and have a look at the currently playing music as well as to get related information on it, it's not really an option to browse the library, yet. Oh, and in Firefox I had to reload it four or five times before it loaded but that's probably also just a matter of tweaking. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98186 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
