Since modifying the root item of a treeview was beyond my current knowledge, I wanted to play with plasma a bit, and it gave me more leeway, both in terms of creativity and space, I decided, at least for now, on a Media Devices applet. Some of you may have seen the ghost of this thing in svn and wondered what the dickens it is, so I'll explain to you its current functionality first, and then some of my visions for it.
This first screenshot shows the applet blank since nothing is plugged in (eventually I want it to say "no devices"). Then, for instance, you plug in your iPod (and for now, mount it outside of Amarok) and bam!
Notice a row has been added for the iPod, representing an icon for what the device is, a connect button, a disconnect button, and its mount point. Then you click the connect button and...
You guessed it, it connects (notice the iPod collection on the left). After this, you can work with it like usual, or click the disconnect button and the collection will poof away back to things as you see them in the 2nd screenshot, allowing you to eject the iPod.The Obvious:
- This is what I would call alpha. Yes, the icons are a bit inappropriate and admittedly borrowed, but I'm sure I can get someone magnificent to create beautiful specialized icons later on (*wink wink*)
- There are still advanced features missing (like showing battery % etc.), but again, this can come later without much trouble once the base concept gets off the ground
- Usability! How will people know to go open the media devices applet the first time they try out Amarok with their device? I'm thinking to have the applet open itself on detecting a compatible device for the first time and getting focus to get the user's attention
The Vision:
So back to the stale and orphaned concept. In 1.4, you had to look at orphaned/stale tracks along with your "normal" tracks in the media browser. Now, you could have a scrollable list each of the stale and orphaned tracks, with the same functionality as before, but now it's not in your way! You can continue to browse through your iPod tracks and the orphaned/stale tracks at the same time.
The conclusion:
Well this all sounds quite well and dandy, but if I have a good idea of how this is going to work, and basic functionality for connect/disconnect is already implemented on my personal box, why don't I commit and get all the rest of the bells and whistles going? The same lame excuse: life is busy. Also I'd like to commit it in a slightly prettier more usable form with less of the obvious bugs in there.
That said, if anyone out there wants to help out with this, let me know, and I can even guide you through the code to get you going. For now though, I'll chug away at it in my spare hours.
5 comments:
I like your ideas and screen shots. Would be great to see devices show up as they were pluged in.
Another extension to this idea might also be to show audio CD's when they are put in the drive. You could then give the option of playing it, or riping it to your collection.
Looks great! Is this making it into beta3 or 2.0 final, or (because of the feature freeze) do we need to wait until a later 2.x release to see this in a non-svn build?
Hmmm, I appreciate your effort but I don't thing this is the correct way of managing devices.
The Context View was supposed to be about showing information about your music and artist. Adding a configuration applet seems unintuitive and problematic form the usability point of view.
Also, applets are removable and imho there should be no applets on which the user should depend for managing the collection or configuring Amarok. A Device Tab or configuration dialog seems more appropriate.
Just my opinion, though.
Keep up the good work!
jp: Well, a CD really only has direct musical data associated with it, and it's usually static in terms of stats like space occupied, but ripping features would be nice, yes =)
tim bocek: I'm not entirely sure, given the feature freeze, but let's hope so. Meanwhile I'll keep working on it.
luciano: That is indeed a usability issue. As mentioned though, the original plan was to modify a root item in the collection treeview, to have buttons for connect/disconnect. The long-term idea is to still implement that, and have information about the devices in the applet. It is very unlikely that the devices tab will make a comeback.
Hello, could you please let me know if amarok 2 is supposed to handle the ipods properly. Tried to mount it before starting amarok 2 (i am using kde 4.2.1 on Gentoo) and it still doesnt see it even though i can browse it from the file system. Thanks in advance!
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