I noticed that I hit a weak spot here, and I'm truly sorry if you saw my post as just dissing. It's absolutely not! I love MJ and only want it to be as perfect as you want.
About the "old" issue. I didn't criticize you following the windows standard. Probably it's the look and feel of icons, symbols, choose of fonts and such that does it. I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but take a look at WinXP and some of the newer programs that developes. Everything seems...flashier or something. One thing that have gotten critics before is the tiny jukebox for instance... But hey! The development isn't done yet, is it?
Some suggestions, as promised:
Tree view general
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At first, you have a great overview over all parts of MJ. But expanding only Artist/Album makes the tree list hard to navigate (if you have 200+ artists, there's ALOT of scrolling), expand a few times more and you'll have to resize the pane to see the text.
Suggestion:
Break up (I would try to remove the tree list alltogether) the tree view into different layers. Tabs perhaps? Playing Now, Playlists, Devices. Here you could have one layer only for searching as well.
Tree view (the different sections)
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Suggestion:
Imagine the standard Explorer in Windows. When you click on Media Library, you could get the different View Schemes as "folders" in the main window (where the list of songs show if you with the current design). From there, the user could double-click on the desired "folder" to see that particular View, or expand the tree in the left pane if she wishes to.
It might not change functionality radically, but newbies will have an easier time to understand the structure (coming from a family of computer illiterals and being a former "basic computer knowledge" teacher, I know they rather like going through folders that way , you know, DblClick My Computer - dblclick C: - etc, instead of using trees...they simply don't understand it!). The added view for songs/images is a great step on the way, but I believe that one can develop it further.
I can't remember the details on the rest today, as I've been pointing out in an earlier post, I've only got MJ9 installed at work. But I will gladly try to leave more suggestions later on when I see the interface again tomorrow.
Cheers and thank you for being patient with some of us!