So, with the new release I decided to try out group by album a bit more (chronological sorting!). I decided to remove as much duplicate info as possible from my library screen, ie remove the year, artist, album etc columns, and make the album art thumbnail bigger.
After some testing, it looks quite nice. A lot less cluttered, and as I tweak it (should I decide to stay the course) it will get even better.
But one thing that I find strange is that the album art and the album title header doesn't have the same contextual functionality as the album title in the pane. When browsing the nice, uncluttered, chronological list of albums I want to start one by simply double-clicking at the album art. As it is now (if I haven't missed something... again) either you have to select all the tracks, or go to the pane and double click there (or use context menu).
A little pedagogixal help
http://files.myopera.com/p7389/img/jrmc2.PNGAlso, when increasing the size of the album art to these kinds of level, some whitespace around it would be aesthetically pleasing. Another aesthetical thing is how when the mouse hovers on an item, the line gets highlighted. Which is nice. It's not so nice when it moves under the album art. Perhaps it would be possible to make the highlighting stop just before the art (but perhaps not ideal either). I dunno.
Anyway, need to figure out what to do with all this space now
. Also, I should look into getting some actual info into the playing now display view.
At some point I'm also gonna separate bonus tracks (which I put in their own albums - seing "77" and "77 (bonus tracks)" in the list is ugly...) from the main library, and into a viewscheme of its own... I just need to figure some things, and then actually take the time. But I digress.