Hello everyone. This is my first post here! I've been an Amarok user for two years, and this is what I've got to say.

See the attachments. These are things I've thought about for a while.

About the graphics: I know many users hate the black background Windows-ish thing, and I know that the mock graphics don't quite blend with the purple et.c. But it is NOT the artwork that is the issue with this post. It is the basic layout that I'd really like to see change in Amarok 2.

THE FIRST IMAGE:

- I don't like that the controls (play/pause/next etc) are located at the bottom of Amarok, while playlist stuff is at the top. It would save a lot of mouse-work if they were closer together. Another problem I have with the current design is that everything takes up so much space.

Therefore, I put all the controls close. The location bar displays how much time of the song that has played, and how long the song is. Then there's some playlist tabs (like the ones Foobar2000 has). To have playlists in tabs significantly increases usability since it makes it incredibly easy to switch between playlists and create new ones, without having to deal with save dialogs and sidebars and such. That's really good if your girlfriend likes annoying music.

The tab interface is similar to Yakuake's, and just like in Yakuake, I think that one should be able to edit the tab (playlist) name by clicking on the active tab. (I just saw that I forgot to include the Clear playlist, Save playlist and Undo/Redo buttons. I thought they should be located beside the Add button. Maybe I'll fix it later.)

I've put the status bar right under the tab bar. In my opinion, it's much more visible there than at the bottom of the screen. Then, there's the Playlist Filter which should not need any further explanation.

THE SECOND IMAGE:

I think it would be cool if media that is not stored locally would have it's own sidebar and controls. The main reasons are that controls that are really useful in locally stored playlists do not apply to "Network" media; and that I think it's annoying that you have to add a stream to the playlist to be able to play it.

So, in this example, I call this sidebar Network, and first it's got a Bookmarks toolbar. Notice the icons, that indicate which protocol/network that the station is located in. Bookmarks would be really useful for people like my dad that can barely read latin letters, but loves to listen to net radio

Then there's the Player controls. First, the icon indicating protocol, then the name of the station, then technical info. On the next row is the name of the song that is currently being played.

Now, this is where my mockup image gets useless and you have to use your imagination.

For Shoutcast streams, there's no location control, so the location bar is useless and should not appear when you're playing a Shoutcast stream (unlike my example). The Next/Previous buttons do not make any sense for Shoutcast either.
For Last.fm radio, the Previous button do not apply. Instead, when a Last.fm station is playing, the Player should show Ban, Love and Skip.

Also in the Player, just to the right of the Next track button, there's a tiny arrow. I call it "Jump to playlist". I thought it would be useful to be able to automatically switch to a local playlist after a certain amount of time. In other words, it works like the Queue, but it's time based. In my example, there's 6 minutes left until Amarok switches to a local playlist (or other stream).

There should definitely be a filter for streams. With the current approach I find it really hard to find a specific station, if you know what you're looking for.

Then there's the browser, which pretty much looks like the browser that is now located in the Playlist sidebar. The only real difference is that the station that is playing is highlighted just like items in the playlist.


I hope you have lots of ideas about this. Please reply if you find any part of this interface cluttered or hard to access. That would be nice to hear.

My personal opinion: don't like it much. I like it that Amarok looks more like MC and not like the other media players. That is the point, why should it copy the UI of other XYZ media palyers. Personally I like that play/pause/skip buttons are at the bottom, most others have it like iTunes and I hate it. Regarding the panes, I think it could be made easier to have one vertically tabbed pane on the left (reorganize it to 5 tabs max) and one horizontally tabbed pane on the right (configurable tabs and context based but playlists having the priority). Media controls, visualizers and status messages at the bottom.

cyrus007: thank you for your comment.
Of course I don't think Amarok should copy any other media player. In my opinion, players like Itunes and WMP do everything just to look pretty and simple, and sacrifice usability. My point was that controls should be close to each other, to save time, and to save space for the playlist. The user should, at the very least, be able to move them and put them where he likes (with the current interface, the toolbars are fixed). And I think many users would like important stuff (such as collection updates) to be at the top, where it's easy to see, so I'd say that would be a better default.

I'm a little unsure about having a sidebar on the right. Many users seem to request it, but I'm not convinced. I can't imagine how my playlist would fit into my screen if I had TWO sidebars. But that's me