GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 447082
move progress bar to the right of toolbar to preserve space
Last modified: 2012-03-28 22:11:10 UTC
There is no sense to put the progress bar under the toolbar, it can really be moved at its right! This would preserve vertical space really much.
This is a duplicate of Bug 389170
Not really. That bug seems to be about completely changing the way the slider works for some reason.
*** Bug 633470 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 591011 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 623516 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Jonathan, given the amount of duplicates and comments (this is an often heard criticism of rhythmbox's user interface) could you state your stance on whether or not you would agree with such a change (make the position slider part of the main toolbar, which has a big empty space anyway)? It would also make RB blend better among other GNOME3 apps, for what it's worth. I'm sure if you'd agree to this, there would be plenty of people willing to attempt a patch at fixing this. I have to say that it's the only annoyance I have with RB's ui. I would be more than willing to help mockup a cleaner design (or perhaps even attempt a patch if it turns out to be trivial).
With that change done, we'd get another group of users filing bugs because the seekbar has become much too small and they can't seek accurately in their 1 hour long audiobook/podcast/... which is the reason why the seekbar was moved from the toolbar to where it's now.
Precision seeking: there may be an elegant solution to that then, such as pitivi in bug #629327: replace the time label by a gtk entry that allows the user to specify a precise time to jump to? And, as for the actual width of the slider: I argue that the benefits of saving 1/5th of the screen height (at 1024x768 or 1024x600) outweighs the losses of ~15-30% of the slider's width (depending on screen resolution). I'll also venture a guess that people "in the world at large" who listen to podcasts are a small minority, and those among them who *also* need extreme precision in seeking their podcasts are a minority out of a minority. Like 0.1%. Yes, I'm pulling those estimates out of my arse, but I do think they're reasonable. Also, to de-dramatize a little bit, even iTunes doesn't have such a big slider, and I'm sure there are many people listening to podcasts on it (and the itunes time slider is much smaller than the change that has been proposed here).
Created attachment 186121 [details] screenshot and mockup Whatsmore, a custom search (http://tinyurl.com/3rgrgk5) in the history of rhythmbox's bugs reveals that there was only one bug report that was ever filed about this: bug #170508, over 6 years ago. Back then: - GNOME's user interface design principles were different - Widescreen was not the defacto screen aspect ratio. Nowadays, screens are much wider than they are tall, and vertical space is at a premium. Losing about 200 pixels of the slider to the toolbar buttons is not a big deal, but wasting screen height is a big deal. - Netbooks didn't even exist However, what was obvious in the search results was a great amount of bug reports requesting that the slider gets merged into the main toolbar: bug #623516, bug #591011, bug #591252, bug #398259, bug #152723, and so on. I'm not saying we should revert back to http://rhythmbox.sourceforge.net/screenshots/Screenshot-Rhythmbox.png With the current design and featureset, we can do much better. See the attached tarball, which contains a screenshot of the current UI at 1024x768 and a mockup of proposed changes. This saves space in low resolutions and has an insignificant impact at high resolutions.
I'm probably going to do something like this fairly soon. I'm not going to commit to doing exactly what this bug report (or any other bug report) asks for. I think quite a few things need to be reconsidered in order to come up with a working design here, such as giving plugins the ability to add buttons to the toolbar, the arrangement of the play order controls, the location of the browser toggle, and where the elapsed/remaining time is displayed.
to preserve space on small screens we can enlarge music browser by modernizing search box end moving it to the toolbar like in gnome3 System Settings and we can enlarge side pane area by extending it to the menu bar end confining status bar in music browser like in Nautilus3.
Created attachment 198603 [details] mockup
*** Bug 661056 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
okay, done