INTERACT FORUM

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: [1]   Go Down

Author Topic: Less is more  (Read 1177 times)

p7389

  • World Citizen
  • ***
  • Posts: 171
Less is more
« on: January 11, 2008, 07:08:13 pm »

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.PNG

Also, 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.
Logged
[img width= height= alt=My Top Albums]http://lastfm.obsessive-media.de/3month/7x1/p7389.jpeg[/img]

Bod

  • Recent member
  • *
  • Posts: 23
Re: Less is more
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2008, 09:20:48 am »

Looks great!

I'm fairly new to this, so please forgive me if this is a dumb question.  How do I get the "playing now" pane on the right hand side?  Also, where do you change the thumbnail size?
Logged

Launfal

  • Regular Member
  • Recent member
  • *
  • Posts: 17
  • I'm a llama!
Re: Less is more
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2008, 10:08:01 am »

Looks great!

I'm fairly new to this, so please forgive me if this is a dumb question.  How do I get the "playing now" pane on the right hand side?  Also, where do you change the thumbnail size?

It took me a minute to figure that one out, too.  Split View, 2 columns, click on the new column and select playing now from the tree.  Up until now, I hadn't had a real use for split views before, but now I may have to play around with them to see what I can do with them.
Logged

p7389

  • World Citizen
  • ***
  • Posts: 171
Re: Less is more
« Reply #3 on: January 13, 2008, 11:30:54 am »

Also, where do you change the thumbnail size?

Make sure you use the image (large thumbnail) column. To resize the art, just grab it and drag as you would resize any field.


I've played around a bit and have no created this view where I have only studio albums as thumbnails sorted by release. Doubleclicking on an album cover brings up the file info pane, and doubleclicking again hides it. To play an anbum in its entirety (which is what I usually do) there's the play link when hoovering. (But I won't stop using the artist/album pane though - I like that one a lot.)

Anyway, the main point with this post is as you see I've created some manual whitespace here. It's just two custom fields (I could have used any built in field that I don't use, but this feels better). At first there was truly no title, but after a restart they took on their core field name. But id doesn't matter much since all I get is ... since they're so small. It was not exactly what I talked about in the original post, but it will do.

http://files.myopera.com/p7389/img/jrmcatn.PNG

EDIT: http://files.myopera.com/p7389/img/jrmc3.PNG - realised I could drastically size up the playing now cover art with this scheme...

Also, if you want to have a playing now and libary view at the same time, I learned, just a couple of days ago, that options > general > behaviour > jump on play: none seems to be a nice setting for such a setup.
Logged
[img width= height= alt=My Top Albums]http://lastfm.obsessive-media.de/3month/7x1/p7389.jpeg[/img]
Pages: [1]   Go Up