I have just installed MC12 and can confirm that the interaction speed has improved. I have imorted some 12000+ mp3 files and the UI is much more responsive. Note that I am running it on a computer with a rather good graphics card (GeForce 6800 GT) and a resonable good processor (AMD 64bit 3200+ 2 GHz).
This improvement alone is almost worth an upgrade (but is not really worth the price - MC11.1 should not be slow...). I have not yet tried it out thoroughly but there are a some user interaction improvements made. However, this could be taken a step further (for the final 12 release??):
Combine Panes/Genres/Artist/Album views styles.
These view schemes seems to divert. For example, double clicking a stack of albums opens the stack (which IS a good alternative behaviour!) although the option for double-clicking says to start playing now (Options...). The combined view paradigm should make it possible to:
- add/remove vertical panes (above/below a pane)
- show thumbnails in any pane
This would make the separate Genre/Artist/Album view unnecessary and the whole "Panes" view can be removed (and relevant options are moved down to the pane itself). Now this would maybe make it necessary to have two types of panes, which can be called "filter pane" and "view pane" respectively. The options for a filter pane are thus different from the options of a view pane. The filter pane may require additional options to simulate the current Genre/Artist/Album views (e.g., enabling drill-down from one filter pane to another. I.e., double-click: either playing now, drill-down, or do nothing). With this new behaviour I could easily have:
- a top left filter pane showing genres in stacks with genres
- a right filter pane showing a thumblist view of artists.
- a middle vertical filter pane showing thumbnails of albums.
- a bottom vertical view pane showing details.
In addition it is desirable to have quick buttons for a view that allows for quick resizing of the panes to user predefined sizes. Thus, I would like to have three buttons saying "Large artists", "Large albums", and "Large details", which resizes all panes in the view to the size setting (customizable, of course!).
Non-obstructive arrangement of bottom-left details
The detail view in the bottom left corner has a onsbtructive behaviour. The panels do not stick to its place but gets a new place when it is expanded. This rearrangement behaviour has poor rememberability support. I understand the reason why the open panel shall be displayed above the closed ones, but that reason is not stronger... It should thus also be possible to rearrange the order of the panes and have that order stick.
Well, that's that for now. I will likely find more things... ;-) Anyhow, good work!
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Topic: What will MC 12 offer over MC 11? (Read 3382 times)