Thursday, October 4. 2007
Playing with the playlist - Part II
My recent post about some of the features of the new playlist in Amarok2 seemed to really inspire people to come up with visual concepts that would make the playlist not only functional, but also look really sweet. One person in particular submitted a really cool mockup and was later kind enough to provide this as an svg file. After spending an evening turning this svg into a series of elements that could be used for rendering different elements in the playlist, as well as tuning the color scheme a little, as the grey color in the mockup looks really sweet on its own but clashed pretty hard with the blue shades currently used in Amarok, I present you with this:
In general we have not settled on a color scheme yet, so we might still go back to the grey, but for now this looks better in the overall scheme I think. Some of the elements of the mockup has not been implemented. most notably the collapsing of album art. The reason for this is that the current plan is to make the information displayed for items in the playlist customizable, which means that there will be a way t disable album headers completely. The text layout still needs a bit of work still as I think having the text in the album header in two lines might look better..
Also, I have spent some time making the playlist handle multiple groups in a more fluent way. This means, for instance, that it is now possible to "chop" a group in half by adding a foreign element to the middle of it. In the following screenshot, track 4 from the first album group has been dragged into the middle of the second group:
So far, I think this both looks good and promises great usability. But now the real work starts! Stuff like dragging an entire album around or removing an entire album from the playlist needs to be implemented. I am also still undecided about whether it should be possible to collapse the tracks in an album group to make it take up less space, which usually means that I am going to prototype it at some point to see how well it works. So there is lots of stuff still to do!
In general we have not settled on a color scheme yet, so we might still go back to the grey, but for now this looks better in the overall scheme I think. Some of the elements of the mockup has not been implemented. most notably the collapsing of album art. The reason for this is that the current plan is to make the information displayed for items in the playlist customizable, which means that there will be a way t disable album headers completely. The text layout still needs a bit of work still as I think having the text in the album header in two lines might look better..
Also, I have spent some time making the playlist handle multiple groups in a more fluent way. This means, for instance, that it is now possible to "chop" a group in half by adding a foreign element to the middle of it. In the following screenshot, track 4 from the first album group has been dragged into the middle of the second group:
So far, I think this both looks good and promises great usability. But now the real work starts! Stuff like dragging an entire album around or removing an entire album from the playlist needs to be implemented. I am also still undecided about whether it should be possible to collapse the tracks in an album group to make it take up less space, which usually means that I am going to prototype it at some point to see how well it works. So there is lots of stuff still to do!
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