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mutlu wrote:If you have a look at the blog posts and mailing list discussions of the amarok developers, you will see that they are aware of the fact that amarok isn't pretty enough yet. They are honest about it, working on it (among many other things) and are, I think, generally on a good track. The playlist is a great example for this trend. They created a new playlist from scratch, asking users to give them time to re-add features we have come to love. With 2.1 (coming soon), they will be there. Not thanks to those users who kept complaining and abusing the developers, but despite them.

Well I am not one who abused any developers. I've quietly suffered and used Amarok2. Amarok1 was easier to use (interact with) than Amarok2. Amarok1 had more options than Amarok2. Amarok2 is subjectively ugly, but more importantly, it's less useful.

For this "usability" you would simply need some additional Amarok-Plasmoids.
A cover-overview and maybe a more flexible placement of the Plasmoids. I think flexible, user defined Layouts would be the best solution.
I think the interface is great. On the left side: media sources. On the right side: The played tracks. On the top: The normal controls (volume, play, stop, Last.FM-buttons...) and in the middle all stuff you want. For a minimalistic player you can hide some parts or you can use the Amarok-Plasmoid.
Styles affecting both - Widgets and Plasmoids - are needed. Simple like for Plasma.
The current 2.1 interface is good enough to allow nice styling.
.
Maybe some more conservative interface options should be added like a simple table of tracks displaying all the information. There should be something like activities, you could switch between a huge table, some small Plasmoids, visualization...

A little off topic, but...
Do you use BOTH search inputs (database and now playing playlist)?

I would really like to have 1 search box with ability to start search as start typing. To search now playing playlist, auto playlist with now playing songs could be added to DB.

What do you think?

Of course I do:
Left search input:
Search in streams, local playlists, local database, radio-channels...
Then I drag it into the playlist. Sometimes it gets chaotic and I can search for a track/album/stream. But this was never the case.

einar wrote:A lot of the trouble with mockups (as expressed by some Amarok devs) is that to implement those (or any graphical suggestion) the artist him/herself would have to continue communication with the developers: according to what the Amarok developers wrote in the past, they've had a number of people dropping out instead.

I'd like to hear if they tried to contact the dude from the first mockup. Because he's had his mockup way before Amarok2 came out. And I'm sorry to whom ever dreamed up Amarok2, but I do not at all appreciate your sense of GUI style. It would have been better to not change the UI at all.

And to the poster who ask for specifics:
- the playlist
- widget like things in the center ( I guess it's supposed to have the album image... that doesn't work out)
- the collection explorer
- the overlapping buttons (why overlap them at all?)
- the volume control slider (that is now conveniently where I normally put my OSD, which pops up every time you change the volume)
- the +,- buttons at the bottom center
- the song progress bar (just looks out of place, like something i would throw together at hate myself for)
- again the playlist... no longer useful for batch META data manipulation (used to be able to do that with entire folders before)

Also, what happened to all the config options? Audio backend (I guess replaced by Phonon) , alternative album info storage (MySQL?) This "widget" craze is not working out for Amarok2 IMHO.

Add a large table-plasmoid, use toolbars for the volume, play, pause... and allow profiles and some configuration for styling and backends.