First of all, thank you very much for opportunity to remove Applet pane.

But, let me ask some major questions as user:

1. For what did you change Browser behaviour?
In 2.1 version I was able to hide Browser by mouse click. Now I should choose having this pane or not. Also there is no simple way to add back this panel after I've removed one.
My usual use case:
- Add some files to play list
- Hide filesystem browser untill I need to add more files...

2. You've added sorting tool to playlist on main window. Why?
How often do you need to sort play list? I am not sure about every user but I don't remember when I sorted play list last time. I think this feature on main window is unnecessary.

3. For what did you add dockable windows behaviour?
I'm not sure that this is useful. Maybe just for me... But often evidential behavior and utility for developer is'not the same for user.
For example. Next scenario gave some troubles for me:
- Go to Settings->Configure Amarok->General->Lock layout
- Close playlist

'Browser' and 'Context' occupy all amarok window.
I should close both of them to reopen playlist.

Also. When I reopen 'Playlist' I have no chance to reopen 'Context' and 'Browser' by right mouse click in main area. I should undock opened windows for open closed... Unlogical behaviour, I think.

Hi!

I'll try to answer each of these as I have my hand in all of them to some extent or another. First of all though, please note that Amarok 2.2 is in very heavy development, and the gui is still be ing worked on, so things may very well change before a release.

1. There were a few reasons we wanted to try a new browser behaviour. Apart from getting rid of the verticaltabs which is, as we have been told repeatedly over the last few years, very bad for usability, the big problem in Amarok 2 so far was that there really was 3 different navigation interfaces in the browsers. You ahd the tabs for selecting browser, then in the playlist browser you had a toolbox type navigation interface and in the internet browser you had the dig down interface. Expanding the dig-down interface to cover all cases makes navigation much more consitent, and along with the breadcrumb, also more intuitive in many cases. We are aware that a few usecases, such as hiding the browsers, have suffered from this, and we are discussing solutions to this issue.

2. According to many users, very often. Actually, adding sorting functionality to the playlist is one of our GSoC projects (the one I am mentoring) and besides sorting on multiple levels, it will aslo allow some cool ways of shuffling the playlist. The current ui for playlist sorting is temporary and was jsut added as a means of testing the udnerlying functionality. Remember, trunk is our playground, so if you run this version, you willg et to see all our experiements, and things can and will change.

3. Dockwidgets was somthing I prototyped based on user feedback from a great number of people who all had different ways they were using Amarok. At first we were very sceptical about this feature, as we really want Amarok to have a distinct look and feel when you start it for the first time, but as we found a way to achieve this while allowing advanced users a lot of freedom it made more sense to us. I previewed this feature on my blog to gather some suer feedback, and the response was, well, go see for yourself: http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/101 ... r-out.html

- Nikolaj

Nikolaj,

Thank you very much for detail answers.
I hasted to ask questions without more detail thinking
I think I should roll back to 2.1.2 version and try amarok 2.2 later