Yes, and it works without patching amarok's source code.
And yes, you're not responsible, if amarok crashes (because of bespin, of course)
And yes, there are no official releases.
But hey, until there's no other solution(, if there ever will be a native one in amarok).

Greetings
m0nk

I gonna stand out from the crowd and say how much I LIKE the middle pane.

(Ducks to avoid hurling of shoes).

One thing I've always loved about Amarok is the Wikipedia applet that displays artist info. In 1.4 it was usually hidden. Now in 2.0 I can have it in the middle of my screen all the time. This is great!

Just thought I'd post this to show how UIs are all a matter of taste. I hated it at first, because it was different, but I've come to love it.

FatGerman wrote:I gonna stand out from the crowd and say how much I LIKE the middle pane.

(Ducks to avoid hurling of shoes).

One thing I've always loved about Amarok is the Wikipedia applet that displays artist info. In 1.4 it was usually hidden. Now in 2.0 I can have it in the middle of my screen all the time. This is great!

Just thought I'd post this to show how UIs are all a matter of taste. I hated it at first, because it was different, but I've come to love it.

Thanks Someone who actually saw the light, that's pretty rare.

But really, we have realized that the Context View (official name) still has some usability issues, and Amarok 2.1 will help a lot with that. We've reworked large parts of it and made it more usable and prettier.


Stay tuned for 2.1-beta1, and make sure to test it

FatGerman wrote:One thing I've always loved about Amarok is the Wikipedia applet that displays artist info. In 1.4 it was usually hidden. Now in 2.0 I can have it in the middle of my screen all the time. This is great!

Same for me, except with the Lyrics pane. It is so well placed I can't even recall where it used to be on 1.4

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

annvan wrote:Can you make it possible to put "the middle screen" on the left?

No, we do not intend to do this.

I do not like the concept of what I like to call "LEGO" applications, where the user shuffles around elements of the interface until the application works.

You don't like the concept of "LEGO" applications where the user is able to place some elements of the interface according to his needs?
Imho the middle pane comes very close to such an app.
Why do you want to give us users the freedom to decide whats and where its viewed in the middle pane but not where the middle pane itself is located?
For me some kind of horizontal split view on the left (or right) hand side would make much more sense.
In fact I would prefer to completely turn it off beacause I really don't need this feature.

Right now, I'm using Amarok2, and loving it even more than Amarok 1. It was Amarok the killer app that made me switch from Gnome to KDE...

By the way, I think that a nice improvement in the UI would be adding a "Shuffle" and "Repeat" buttons on the playlist pane. I mean, you can toggle them on and off via menus, but having space for the buttons, It would be great to have it just at a single click away.

P.S.: I love the "middle pane", its lyrics, wikipedia, etc...

I, also, had my doubts as well about the middle screen as well.  And when Amarok upgraded with the Ubuntu upgrade, I was initialled annoyed and tried other players.  But after I found quirks with others I tried it again and I'm very happy with it.

Things I like:
I have hot keys working (which is important to me) and I love the look of the playlist on the right side.

cont...

I also love the dynamic playlists (which isn't that new) and the new proportional bias/fuzzy bias settings.  The proportional bias especially solves many problems for me. 

The lyrics in the center is very helpful to me as I am trying to learn spanish and using music as one of the learning tools.  Of course, This and other widgets in the center do need to be able to be customized to a greater extent*.  (The lyrics should be able to go the full horizontal length of the page.  The same goes for the other discs from this artist.)

*I am not using a nightly build so these things may already have changed.  I am okay with waiting until it gets down to my neck of the woods.

Hi,

yet another User who'd like to move or hide the middle pane according to my use case. I always liked the Wikipedia + lyrics View but why not give the user the power to easyly place it elsewhere/hide it? It wouldn't make a difference to all the Users who like the Pane the way it is because it would still be that way. Just the few of us nitpicking all the time would be a great deal happier.

I can of course understand if the programmers don't want to implement that grade of customizability if it is a pain to code and maintain or if it implies stability or performance issues that users who like the middle pane shouldn't need to suffer; but is any of this the case?

As far as I know, there will be an option in amarokrc to hide the middle pane permanently.
To switch it on or off use the KDE4 Bespin style, as stated above.
Take a look at my screenshot here.

Greetings
m0nk

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

Valentin.Pavlyuchenko wrote:

Mark Kretschmann wrote:Usability of the Context View (middle pane) will be much improved in 2.1. We have implemented a panel-like system that makes it much more pleasant to use.

http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/859 ... pt.-1.html

Ok, but will users be able to hide middle pane at all? - it's not clear for me. It is really required by users.

You can already hide this pane (by dragging it), but we developers find it one of the defining features of Amarok 2, and as such we don't see it as a good thing to do this.

I fully understand that this is a matter of taste, and I accept your views, but please also accept our opinions

Mark, is it really that difficult or that much of a philosophical problem for the amarok 2 team to make a simple tick box to hide the middle pane (=pain to some!)? That way ALL are satisifed. I accept that the developers have their preferences and opinions, as do the users, but such an option seems like such a small thing to implement, without compromising those for whom the middle pain is the reason d'etre of amarok 2.

For me, the dragging method doesn't completely hide the middle pain (see attachment), yet I see others have managed it. Why this is, I wonder. Is it because I use GNOME, perhaps? Hmmmm.

Cheers.

sultanoswing wrote:For me, the dragging method doesn't completely hide the middle pain (see attachment), yet I see others have managed it. Why this is, I wonder. Is it because I use GNOME, perhaps? Hmmmm.

Try collapsing the left most pane, then the middle, then re-expand the left most. Make sense? It behaves oddly.

I'm not a fan of the middle pane either, for what it's worth. I imagine adding an option to permanently hide it would be trivial, but at this point I just load the entire collection into the playlist and collapse both left and middle panes. Basically I should probably just use MPD since the features I liked most from Amarok 1 aren't in version 2.

a wrote:

sultanoswing wrote:For me, the dragging method doesn't completely hide the middle pain (see attachment), yet I see others have managed it. Why this is, I wonder. Is it because I use GNOME, perhaps? Hmmmm.

Try collapsing the left most pane, then the middle, then re-expand the left most. Make sense? It behaves oddly.

I'm not a fan of the middle pane either, for what it's worth. I imagine adding an option to permanently hide it would be trivial, but at this point I just load the entire collection into the playlist and collapse both left and middle panes. Basically I should probably just use MPD since the features I liked most from Amarok 1 aren't in version 2.

That worked a treat - thanks!

[EDIT: It worked until I tried to drag a song from the collection to the playlist, then amarok froze, requiring a killprocess. Have started a bug thread on the 'help' forum]

Also, on the idea of adding an option to hide the middle pane....I'm betting the OSX designers didn't think users would generally want to hide / turn off the dock bar, but at least they provide the option to do so. As I've noted previously, it's not like we're asking for Foobar levels of customisation

Once more for the def:
There will be an option to hide the middle pane via editing amarokrc. So realization via GUI should be a matter of time.
In the meantime use the Bespin "hack" if you want to have runtime hiding of the middle pane.

Perhaps someone should read more than the last post to be informed.
Opening a bug report on crashes in SVN is a waste of time, I think. That is work in progress. Information about  the status is another thing.

Greetings
m0nk

Don't you mean deaf, blind & lazy?

I took from Mike's comments above that the option was not in the works, but am pleased (and not surprised!) to read otherwise. Thanks a lot for clearing that up....now there's at least one more thread that people can find this answer on!!