Mini-player Window (Page 1 of 2)

yeah, copy winamp instead

iTunes breaks the HIGs by not having a titlebar and making it winamp-syle (ie: a single titlebar sized line) would butcher the HIGs.. I'd like to try something different..

What about a one long bar sort of miniplayer. The one that's present in songbird might be nice, sure it really makes no effort to fit in with HIG, but it's pretty neat looking and definitely a different approach.

I'm willing to bend the HIG but making one long titlebar-less window is out of the question.. Too many non-standard controls, text is too small (my vision is fine and I have  hard time reading the time in that screenshot) and the lack of space makes it hard to read the artist/title at a glance - esp with longer names.

If you take a loox at the iTunes controllers for Yahoo! Widgets and Dashboard, that's about the size I'm aiming for.

Well, hot damn! That'd be great for me and other laptop users.

Time to pull this topic back on-topic...

I've been thinking about the minicontroller thing, and one of my ideas was that Cog would have the "Show/Hide Toolbar" button that would simply slide away the playlist leaving just the "core stuff". Basically, make the controller a toolbar.

Which leads to another idea. If we actually make the Cog controller bits a toolbar, (which i think would involve making it a single row, (or two distinct rows?)) we could make it "Customizable" with all the fun that entails. Let people go nuts. This would also allow for plugins to add toolbar items that could be added (theoretically, I haven't actually looked into what it takes to make a customizable toolbar).

This would require some UI redesign, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Cog looks bitchin', but I'd like to see Cog conform a bit better. We could move some buttons things down below the playlist (File drawer and info, for example)

Yeah, it's not 100% expected, but I think it makes sense. It wouldn't make much sense to have just a playlist, but we could have it cycle through that too.

I'm talking about making it so there is only one mode, you just hide the playlist parts.

I think toolbars are one row, and having those four buttons there like that might not be the best thing. We would probably need some mechanism where we can mark things as "Playlist related", so they would disappear when in mini mode. I dunno.

You know I kinda like this toolbar idea, although going nuts with it would open a whole can of bugs... If users could pick and choose things like Play/Pause, Next, Prev, 'Track Info' and Volume, it would allow for a great deal of customizability while still keeping the job manageable. I for one would remove all the items but track info because I use keyboard shorcuts for everything.

One thing though: Can you arrange place items above/below other itews in a toolbar? Like the way Volume is right now - below the playback controls, will the toolbar allow someone to position items on there manually?