Friday, June 10, 2011

Live from Randa (timeshifted ;) )

Here is what was^W currently is^W^W we are^W^W. I give up, can fool anyone that I actually blogged about real work from Randa. But I did blog about foosball!

So in the aftermath of the Multimedia sprint I finished up a few branches I started working on in the Swiss Alps:

Drag and drop tracks to any Collection
While copying tracks was already possible using the context menu we've made it a lot more intuitive with drag and drop support. And as a free bonus drag and drop from The Playlist is also working now.
While this feature is not specifically meant to fix iPod support, it might earn us some cash: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/2011-May/009047.html

Artify Amarok
Let's call a horse a horse: Amarok on desktop looks ugly. This is what happens when you put design up for review by a committee and bike-shed any good idea to dead. In order to improve the looks KRF and me skipped the whole discussion and started implementing some design artwork that was submitted to us by Lee Olson, Thomas Lübking and others.
I've removed the statusbar and replaced it with a smaller progress and message area on the colored bar in the Media Sources panel. This bar is always shown and is painted using the current schema's highlight color. Notice the logo in the background of the browser, this breaks empty areas a little, but there is still a "field of gray" effect going on. The other panels will get similar background logos.

Both features can be seen in this screenshot:

An the non Amarok specific front I participated in the Phonon, KDE-Multimedia & Communitydiscussions, help Colin with a little UI review and generally ran around like a headless chicken a lot, once time in the vicinity of Seif to find a good single malt.

Also did not get a single night of decent sleep, which I why you could find me crawling into bed @2:00 and asking for early breakfast @5:30.... man I hate bunk-beds.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi. I am a user of Amarok and I agree that the interface is a bit clumsy and apears clutered. If I may make a suggestion, I would transform the playlist into a plasma widget and have the middle panel cover 2/3 of the space. The left pannel is then "Your collections" and the right pannel "Interaction possibilities". It seems to me that it would become a cleaner and more intuitive interface. The middle pannel now does not confuse the users as it is the one where you can drop things to and the playlist will be a part of it, not a separate thing.
I hope this idea helps. Keep up with the good work.

Thomas Richard said...

I've got to say the mockups 94472-1.jpg and 94472-3.jpg look absolutely fantastic!!

Keep up the good work on Amarok. It's still the best music player around ;)

Unknown said...

I take my previous comment back. Mockups 94472-1.jpg and 94472-3.jpg are gorgeous. Go for it!

damian said...

Those mockups defenitely look a lot cleaner than current UI, make a bit more oxygenized and it would be the perfect gui for amarok.

Anonymous said...

Will it be possible to change the images or espesially have no image at all? It doesn't fit at all with Oxygen background pixmaps (new feature in 4.7) and Oxygen-Transparent (makes the current Amarok look as cool as your wallpaper) so it would be nice to have option that would work with 'em.

But keep up the good work, can't wait to see what it looks when it's finished :p