I was thinking along the lines of Photoshop's Workspaces. With that, you can have toolbars where ever you want them, even custom menus and keyboard shortcuts. I'm not saying I want those last two, but it would be really nice to totally customize my MC layout based around a task, like tagging images, or browsing music or whatever and then just with a single click of a button, everything arranges to suit that task. I'd even include toolbar buttons in that as well. That way you could create your "image mode" and tailor it specifically to what that means to you.
I just sit here and play around with different layouts and realize that... if I close the panes, open up the Tag AW, crank the thumbnail slider all the way up and customized my toolbar buttons, MC could look more like an image organizer than a media player. If I then close the tree pane, switch the panes back on and turn album grouping on, or close the details pane and have a full screen audio thumbnails view, then MC looks like one of those newfangled jukeboxes you see in bars. It's really great how you can do this.
But to get from point A to point B is no easy task. To get from this:
to this:
took me a whole bunch of clicks and digging into the options menus and dragging pane dividers and thumbnail sliders and not to mention a whole lot of knowing that it's even possible to do. And if I also wanted toolbars that fit each layout better, there's a whole bunch more work to do. Granted, my Audio View Scheme now always looks like it does above and likewise my Images View Scheme, so getting from one to the other, once they're set up, isn't that hard, but I don't always want Audio looking like that. It just might be nice to set it like that during a party so people can easily pick music, but the rest of the time I like it to be grouped by Album.
And honestly, I don't think that even if MC remembered separate view settings for every view scheme is all that desireable. I really don't want a big cluttered mess of view schemes all configured differently for different tasks. And a view scheme isn't going to store settings for tree and AW anyway. I think if we could just get a pre-determined number of toolbar buttons that we can assign layouts to, that would be perfect. With a single click I could go from point A to point B. I guess I'm just not the type to set up seperate view schemes that contain the same data just shown in different ways in order to get some work done. I'd rather each of my views have a browsing mode and a working mode, and I guess that's really what my idea would address.
