freespirit

I thought my last post about the upcoming audio cd collection was pretty cool, but since Leo and I are having a bit of a contest about who has the greater number of cool features ready for 2.2 and he just had to outdo me with his post about the amazingly cool last.fm based dynamic playlist biases I thought it was time to strike back!

A while back, Seb added some cool new headers to the collections in the collection browser. This code was based on the elements in the service browser. Since Seb's versions actually looked much nicer than the ones in the service browser, I decided to "backport" the changes, and make the elements in the service browser look consistent with the collection headers.

Having done this made everything a bit more consistent, but it also highlighted some other huge inconsistencies in the way the browsers look and work. Currently there are basically 3 different navigations methods in place. For selecting the browser we have the oft criticized vertical tab bar, for selecting a service there is the service browser which is a type of dig-down interface, and for selecting playlist categories, we use a stacked toolbox approach. Obviously this is not good for usability, and it does not look good either.

So, in an attempt to standardize the navigation across these different browsers and the navigation between browsers themselves, we started discussing the options at the recent developer sprint in Berlin. We concluded that the interface currently used in the service browser was by far the most flexible and that it might be worth using this for all the browser navigation.

So skipping a few days of extracting, generalizing and putting this code to new use, we now have this:



And since a still image really does not really explaint he concept very well, here is a small vid to show the new interface in action.

This is in a pretty early state of development, and there are many cases where the interface of the different browsers/categories need to be made more consistent. Also, the current plan is to add a kind of "breadcrumb" bar as known from Dolphin to the top of the browsers, making navigation simpler and making it more clear what "page" you are actually on at any given time.

All in all, this cuts down our 3 competing ways of navigating through the browsers down to one, and finally gets rid of the vertical tabs completely.