From the Post 2.0.0 Git Vaults, Part 2, "The Playlist - Evolved"

Back in part 1 I showed a few of the things that will make it into Amarok 2 at some point ( likely for 2.1.0 ).

Today I want to show you another thing that I only recently started working on. Its another somewhat controversial part of Amarok 2, namely the playlist.

Since we first started showing screenshots of where Amarok 2 development was heading, some people have been unhappy with our idea of a new and improved playlist ( and have been extremely vocal about their displeasure ). We have tried reassuring them that the playlist would, in time, come to encompass many of the things from Amarok 2 that they were missing as well as a whole lot more, but it is always hard to communicate such ideas with no screenshots to back them up.

So, since I just today got something running that finally demonstrates some of these ideas, I rush to blog it! Please note that this code is still at a very early state and that there are a few rendering inconsistencies visible that will get sorted out before this ever makes it into trunk.

What this new code does, is basically make the way each item in the playlist is rendered completely configurable. how any rows there should be, what elements ( title, album, artist, score, ... ) should be shown in each row, how much space each element should be given and so on is all fully configurable. (Configurable from a code point of view, the ui for actually configuring it does not exist yet... ). So for instance, configured to mimic the current playlist layout, it might look like this:



That looks a lot like the current playlist, only slightly uglier because of some of the rendering issues I mentioned earlier. Messing a bit with the ( for now, hard coded ) config for the playlist and adding a few elements to some playlist item types we can create something like this:



Here we have added the score to all body item ( tracks in an album group ) and given the title its own line for single track items. Finally, as the grand finale, for people who prefer the Amarok 1 playlist, it is possible to do something like this by making all items have just one line ( and the album header none, thus making it invisible ) and use the same config for body and single track items:



For dramatic effect I have also hidden the context view! Add to this some decent sorting controls, and basically all the functionality from the 1.4.x playlist can be brought back. And yes, some of the items are "jumping a bit", this is one of the rendering issues I mentioned.

I think this playlist will end up being much more configurable and powefull than the 1.4.x one ever was, even if this was not immediately visible in the Amarok 2.0.0 release. But as we have said many times, Amarok 2.0.0 was just the beginning. Now comes the hard part, creating a sane ui for letting the user configure the playlist layout. Luckily, Dan has the concept of how this will work well under control.