Amarok Blog

In a previous blog post I showed an experimental prototype that aimed to do away with the vertical tab bar along the left edge of Amarok. The many replies to this post was about 50/50 for and against this idea. In the post, I mentioned that I wanted to add some kind of "breadcrumb" navigation bar to make navigation easier and also to always show the user where he "is", something that the tabs, admittedly, quite nicely accomplished, at least for the lowest level (which browser is active).

Since I had some time off last week, I decided to see how I could improve the original idea and add the breadcrumb interface. I quickly realized that the big vertical, kickoff style, back button was not very pretty, so as you will see, the latest version does away with that completely. It also turned out that when you have a nice breadcrumb bar, having each "category" show its own name, as all the services have been doing so far, really does not make much sense, so this is something that I could remove as well. Finally, this new interface finally gave me the chance to display some extended info about each category, before selecting it, something I have been planning to do for a long time for the services and which now makes sense for all categories. The info that is currently shown is just a placeholder until we figure out the real text/image for each item, so don't place too much importance on the actual info just yet!

I guess you think that I have been writing enough and you want to see the video already, so here it is:

Video on youtube

(note that this vid is available in HD)

I think that overall this works much better than the initial version I blogged about (even though I already liked that a lot) and I am confident enough that I can work out the final issues, that I am going to commit this to trunk as soon as 2.2 opens up for development.