Hi rhythmbox-devel! I checked Oliver's rhythmbox--merge--0.9 branch today, like the features and the fact that rhythmbox is "moving" again.
Seeing that the UI needs some love I did a few mockups... 4th one is my "final" version for now and quite a bit different from the 1st but I'll explain them all so that you can follow my thoughts. My aim was to keep the application recognizable as rhythmbox but work around some limitations of the design, introduced by the song queue and cover pictures but also removable media: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~monreal/gnome/rb1.png First thing I did was cleaning up the "Album" view. I really like the idea of having the covers displayed so that I can look for a specific album but don't have to read the text. The big spcacing looked a bit weird, especially when no covers are availabe so I changed the list to a colored one which helps alot already (note that spacing could also be made smaller in this case). Same for the "Artist" view, looks better and is more consistent. I added some information to the albums view as the space doesn't have to be unused and release year and track count can be potentially interesting when chosing an album. The "Covers" header made no sense to me so I changed the label to "Cover" (it's "Album", not "Albums"...) Next thing, the song queue seemed too small for my taste. My first attempt to get some more space for this was to remove the cover icon here and put it to the control bar. Not perfect but it works... You can fit more songs in the queue now without scrolling, which is good. I've also renamed "Sources" to "Location" and extended it's functionality, but more on this later. http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~monreal/gnome/rb2.png When the first mockup was ready I still didn't like the way the queue looked like. It was still a bit small and I prefere a view more similar to the browser so I redid the song queue: I removed it entirely from the sidebar and added GTKFileChooser-like buttons above the browser views. The first button always takes you to the "Browser" (still named "Library" here but I renamed this in mockup #4 which is better), so for "Library" this is what you see in the screenshot, for "Radio" it's the known web radio interface. The second button is the list of queued songs. This should just be a table view with the columns you have configured in the preferences (artist, songname, duration and so on). Special: you can drag songs here to enqueue so you don't have to use/discover the option in the context menu. Third button displays a page with lyrics... Other music players do it as it is something users like and it fits nicely here. Only show this if we have intenet access, if possible. http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~monreal/gnome/rb3.png Not needing the space for the song queue anymore, I moved the cover pic back to the sidebar. I've also put some additional song information there (this example is copied form the amarok music player), could also display bitrate etc or even audioscrobber information... I think this is quite nice. The rating stars should be interactive if put here so that you can edit without going to the file preferences. http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~monreal/gnome/rb4.png Not much new here. Changed the first button to "Browser" as it is used in every location, not just "Library". Also makes sense because this shows the browser, which is what people know and will look for. Speaking of the locations, I added a "Music Store" and some "Music Shares". First one could integrate something like pymusique, to interact with iTMS or some other music store. The shares are DAAP music shares, dynamically added upon discovery. Some additional notes to the locations view: the first section contains static items (library, web radio, music store), the second section is created dynamically, it shows only stuff preset in the system that rhythmbox can interact with: - External Hard Drive: Some people have music stored on external disks. When you connect one, g-v-m mounts the partitions and rhythmbox should add the entry if it finds (through recursive scan) any music. - Audio Disc: I know that we have goobox which is a very fine cd player and totem handles audio, too... but providing the ability to play audio cds in rhythmbox would provide the user with a unified interface and it would simplify the usage because you could put cd tracks to the song queue and play cd tracks in between songs from the library! This is very nice if you use rhythmbox as a party jukebox and someone wants you to play a song you don't have in your library. - Data Disc with Music: Same as external harddrive. Perhaps ask the user if he wants the music to be copied to the local library? - Blank CD-R Disc: This shows up if you insert a blank cd into your cd writer. Provides easy access to rhythmbox's burning feature so you don't have to create playlists anymore. Gotta love this! =) - Portable Player: iPod and hopefully other players, provide the ability to play the songs found on the device as well as copy local songs to it. Tell me what you think, --Michi _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
