Actually, I have never complained about the tree system. Especially the MC11.0 version was good.
I'm with you Alex. I never really understood why the Media Library Item in the tree needed to be removed (as it makes more sense in a tree "sense"). It was an extra click though (and could hide the important Audio/Video/Images selections from novices), so I suppose it doesn't really hurt to have it gone.
Previously there were the media mode buttons separately for quick access.
Some people have obviously been confused about the differences between the file listings in Playing Now, Media Categories, Playlists and Drives & Devices.
I
really, really think a solution would be to switch the "tree" to it's own tab on the sidebar of the application, and go back to a MC11.1/11.0 style tree. Bear with me...
If there were two honest-to-goodness
tabs at the top of the tree sidebar. One called "Tree-View" and the other called "Icon View".
If you have the sidebar switched to
Icon View, then it would only list a handful of
large icons for "top-level" views, spread evenly along the side. My choices would be: Start, Playing Now, Audio, Images, Video, Playlists, Podcasts, and Drives and Devices. Then, if the user clicks on one of these icons, the rest of the display should "slide down" to the bottom, revealing that particular item's "children" views. I envision this to be similar to the Sidebar in Outlook 2003:
Imagine in the picture above that "Mail" doesn't say "Mail', but "Audio". Calendar is "Images" and so on and so forth. The action window can basically stay as is, floating above the entire Sidebar "pane" (so that it show up on both the
Icon View and
Tree View sidebar tabs). The currently selected view's "children" would show up in the area where the actual calendar is showing above.
Then, under the
Tree View tab, it should have the MC11-style tree we all know and love (or love to hate). This is needed so that you can quickly dig down, drag-n-drop tag, and do all the "complex" tasks that the tree excels at. The other nice thing is that you can "hide" some of the complex selections in the tree ("Services and Plugins", "Imports", "Documents", and custom top-level View Schemes for example) under the tree tab. These would only be exposed when the user wants to see them, and for regular everyday playback navigation they wouldn't be there cluttering up the interface!
I think this would provide the best of both worlds! It would be simple and "not overwhelming" to noobs, and it would retain all the power that "we" (us old fogies) need. Best of all, it uses a UI "motif" that users have likely seen before (who hasn't used Outlook Express at least once), and that is used in many applications.