life at the end of the universe

Comment by thierry

June 13, 2009 @ 11:14 am

Hey, I just posted in the amarok forums that building isn’t working as of yesterday and then I read this… doh! How can I help stabilize things? I’d love to help…

cheers,
thierry

Comment by Lydia

June 13, 2009 @ 11:17 am

@thierry: If you want to help it is best to come to our IRC channel #amarok on freenode and ask for someone to get you started. As it is weekend it might take some time though until someone answers.

Comment by zacH

June 17, 2009 @ 9:43 am

Hi! This is a bit random, but I wanted to talk to an amarok dev, didn’t want to get lost amongst the comments in the main blog, and am somewhat intimidated by the irc channel (not an irc regular). I hope you’ll be patient with me.

I’m a big fan of amarok 1.4, and am still looking forward to new amarok gaining back its old functionality along with the new tricks it has learned. With each release the gap does seem to be closing, and it is also nice to hear that it is now possible (if I understand correctly) to use a more classic-styled two column layout, as seen here:
http://blog.jasondonenfeld.com/153

There are three things I know of offhand (I do not have 2.1 installed, as I am using Ubuntu Jaunty, and don’t wish to upgrade past the current repo at this time) that would improve general views of new amarok considerably. One, bringing back the equalizer, is more of a personal thing for me, but I know that while it will probably be a lot of work to reimplement, will make a lot of people happy. I know this has been brought up before, but I figured I should mention it because I do make frequent use of it on all my media players (I’ve been trying quite a few since I lost my precious 1.4). The second two ideas may require less work (though I can’t say this for certain, as I have no coding experience), and yet they may stave off some of the new-gui haters out there. I have some mockups with very long urls to go with these, so here goes:

One thing that I think would make the amarok gui look much nicer is to bring back a touch of the old gui that was lost in transition: the cool mini visualizer next to the playback buttons. Without this cool feature, classic amarok would have had a strange gap of nothingness much like the new gui has. The visualizer adds a touch of color and fills in the empty space nicely. I made a mockup:

It looks sloppy because I stretched it, but in practice it would look much nicer. Note that I also used the classic volume slider: this isn’t necessary to my mockup, but I do think the triangle looks very nice, and makes sense visually as the volume increases.

My second idea takes this and goes one step further: it would be really cool to be able to put that entire row (buttons, visualizer, volume) at the bottom of the player (songbird has this option, which is one of the things I thought was neat about it). In this way it allows the user to put the controls down where classic amarok put them, and in my opinion it looks really spectacular down there. Also, my apologies if current amarok is already able to do this and I just don’t know about it. Here’s my mockup:

In this second mockup I also extended the visualizer and volume to the end of the window, and gave it more room on the left by moving the buttons next to it into a vertical line (which I think actually looks pretty nice, even if the visualizer is not possible). I like this mockup a lot, in particular.

Anyway, I’ve taken up far too much of your time at this point, but I hope you liked my mockups, even if they may not be possible to implement at the moment. I spent a lot of time on them because I am a big fan of the project, and would love to help make it as beautiful as it always has been innovative. If you’d like to post these elsewhere for others to comment on, or think that I should bring them to the attention of people on irc or elsewhere, please let me know. Really, I’d just like to hear your thoughts.

Thank you for your time, and good luck with amarok.

Comment by zacH

June 17, 2009 @ 9:46 am

I’m not sure my links worked properly, so I’m just going to post html here:

mockup 1:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v71/dancemasterglenn/amarokconcept1.png
mockup 2:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v71/dancemasterglenn/Amarokconcept2.png

Again, do let me know what you think. Thanks!

Comment by Lydia

June 17, 2009 @ 11:29 am

Hi Zach

thanks for your mockups and ideas. We are working on the visualization. They require work on Phonon which is currently being done by one of our Summer of Code students.
I am not sure if moving the toolbar to the bottom is possible at the moment with Nikolaj’s new layout. It is definitely something we are thinking about.

Comment by zacH

June 17, 2009 @ 7:44 pm

You’re welcome, I’m glad they got through properly the second time around. I’m glad the visualizer may make a comeback soon, I think having something in that space next to the buttons helps make them look less… lonely? And in general, it feels like the less empty gray area on the player, the better. The movement of playback controls to the bottom is purely aesthetic, but I think that a lot of people would enjoy (especially since it harkens back to the classic look). I dunno. They’re just ideas kicking around in my head, but I’m glad they have been/may be considered in future releases. Like I said before, feel free to use my mockups elsewhere if you needed them for some reason. Thanks again for your work on amarok.