Hi folks,

first of all: Very nice work indeed altought I'm also not very happy with the layout, but I'm sure that will get mature in the future.

I read a lot of posts about the play-buttons and the volume and played-time sliders and must agree:

Why not add toolbars, like kaffeine has them at the bottom, instead of the panel that holds the buttons and sliders?

One toolbar could include the play-buttons, one the played-time sider and one the volume-slider.  Just take one minute to do some brainstorming which other functions could make their way into a toolbar and I'm sure, you'll think of one or two _you_ would add.

Another advantage would be that for example, additional buttons (just an example: go back 20 sec, go forward 20 sec) could be added easily to the play-buttons-toolbar.

Also every user could select which toolbars he likes and in which order and spacing the toolbars will be layouted, maybe depending on their screen-size or whatever.

Yours Henri

That's a design choice we made. As you correctly said, we are still working on refining the interface in future releases. But we will not completely move things around. The basic layout is here to stay.


PS: I'm personally not a fan of Kaffeine's UI.

@Mark:

Wow, that response was lightening fast

Normally I agree with you and kaffeine was just an example for adding single buttons to one toolbar ( 20 sec back etc), I've also could have said konqueror or any other native kde proggy.

But in my opinion it's simply a waste of free gui-space which could be used in a creative way, expecially because kaffeine (I use nothing other since it exists!) is run on so many different boxes where sometimes you only have 800x600.

Implementing toolbars does not mean you are forced to make the so configurable like it is possible in kaffeine but users with only small screens could select to only show buttons without text in 16x16 and to arrange the toolbars for example to first have the play-buttons and then only the volume-slider.

I know, an extra plasmoid for eg. mobild devices or small screens with limited features is also possible, but why abandon the toolbars option? - I know it's a lot of work, but once it's implemented, it's done forever and offers so many possibillities.

Anyway, I already switched with the alpha version and waited for this release and am impressed! _I_ love the new playlist.

In my opinion the ability of free software, expecially on linux, to scale to small screens like 800x600 is very important because linux is the #1 OS which is donated to projects in developing countries (Entwicklungsländern) and also native social projects which mostly have older hardware, expecially grafics-cards.
Isn't your goal to run on multiple hardware? - So why waste the space to only make it comfortable to use for industrialised countries with their new hardware?

Amarok 1.4 was the best choice and am sure, Amarok 2 will exceed that in the future.

Great work, unfortunately I'm also into more programming projects than are good for me, so keep your pep to make version 2 again the best audio player I erver had,

yours Henri

I agree that toolbars (and other layouts/panels) should be configurable. There was a blog post (or a comment to it) from a developer stating that Amarok 2 UI will be customizeable to an extent possible even creating Amarok 1.4 layout (eg. dragging playlist into middle, context somewhere left-top or smth, buttons bottom etc.), but unfortunately I can't see any customization options (besides the possibilityt o add/remove context widgets, which is very cool).

PS. I like Kaffeine UI very much, but I use it only for watching single videos, movies etc, so I don't use its playlist function much.