Amarok Blog

so my last entry got quite a number of comments, mostly negative, some based on incorrect assumptions or understandings, etc. I want to take the time to explain the design decisions and lay down the facts.

first of all, the major complaint seems to be that the contextview takes up too much room, and makes the playlist too small. the size of the contextview/playlist is configurable. yes, you can drag the barrier to decide how large you want it. guess what, you can even make it take up the complete contextview space, hiding the plasma panel! there will be no barrier to you using the whole window for playlist management if you wish. of course, then you will miss out on any info displayed in the contextview, but that is your choice.

the next big complaint that i have seen is that the playlist items are too "big", not allowing for a lot of items on the screen at once, making it hard to manage them. as we are using the Qt model/view architecture for out playlist items, it will not be too hard to implement an amarok-1.x style playlist as an option for simply managing your music. that is under discussion, and might be the final solution. either way, we envision a way to use amarok that will make it easier to manage music than the narrow playlist.

for those who, understandable, point out that the large contextview makes dragging from the collectionbrowser to the playlist very very hard, we understand you. we are not going to force users to drag anything all across the contextview. our plan is currently to implement a sort of popup drop-box over the contextview when a drag is initiated, with icons or some sort of visual indication for where to drop the selected tracks in order to achieve certain actions. that way the user will not have to drag-n-drop any tracks more than is reasonable.

for those who say they just want amarok to play a large (1000+ tracks) playlist of music, and that they don't care about all the bells-n-whistles like context info, etc, well, i don't know what to say except you might be better off with xmms. if all you want is to hear your music, amarok is probably not the player for you---and has never been. we want to bring the user more context information, in a prettier way, while not hampering his ability to play/manage music. not the other way around.

a few are worried about the potentially wasted space in the contextview as applets can be positioned, and sized, differently. well, applets are not going to be user-placeable except for in a very limited manner. this is where we differ from plasma---the user will not resize applets to her liking, putting them where she wants. instead, amarok will take care of the layout management of the contextview, ensuring that the full width of the view is used, resizing and placing applets where needed to maximise the screen real estate. we will not waste any screen real estate

to conclude, please keep in mind that this is a very early screenshot. the work on the contextview is nowhere near finished, polished, or perfected. the playlist is still in the middle of being redone, and improves every week. we do have usability people who are working with us, and we are not just trying to innovate for the sake of innovation. we are all amarok users before amarok developers, and we want the best possible music player as well.