Problem
As I use MC more with individually downloaded songs, I find album thumnails less and less useful. Album thumbnail stacks are not always very helpful for navigation, especially since the top thumbnails rotate.
Here is my proposal to improve the thumbnail idea.
Goal:
For each category thumbnail, I want MC to show a picture related to that category, instead of showing a stack of album covers in that category. For example in "album artist" category it could show a picture of "Queen", in "composer" view could show the picture of "Mozart", and in "Album" it view show the usual album cover.
Why is MC so close to this
Ok, a recent advancement in MC15 made this much easier to implement. each level in category view allow now customization of the properties like the thumbnail text. My proposal is to add a new item to that menu, say "Thumbnail path", which will point to picture paths based on the category. For example in Artist view, the path could be "/images/artists/[Artist].jpg", etc. If there is no picture in the specified path, MC would still show the default stack of album folders. In future, MC could add automated facilities to fetch category images from internet, which would make the feature useful for the mainstream users.
Alternative Proposal easier to implement
1. For a class thumbnail, MC would show only the thumbnail of the top record and won't rotate. I believe it already does this for webremote at some point (didn't check recently). This may be a desirable option for people who don't want the thumbnails to rotate anyway. (i find it cognitively somewhat disrupting).
2. I would write a clever sorting scheme so that a record with the category picture will always go to the top of the list. I already have an idea how to do that but this part is difficult to generalize for mainstream useage.
Author
Topic: category dependent thumbnails. MC is almost there! (Read 1325 times)