UI design changes

[sbooth]

I have heard some grumbling in the past about Play's UI being clunky. I've been playing around with some alternatives to see if I can come up with an improvement. Here is a screenshot of a mostly-working layout that saves some space:



Opinions on this design?

Another alternative would be to relocate the play/ff/rew buttons, progress meter and search bar to the window's toolbar.

[RonaldPR]

I like the existing lay-out better, especially for classical music, with enough room to display the full information:



(I use UNO, hence the unified grey appearance.)

[Fuga]

I agree. I, too, play mostly Classical, and there is often quite a lot of info. Perhaps make it optional?

[sbooth]

Here's another mockup:



I made the progress/seek bar longer for easier seeking in longer files, and gave the title/artist/album text fields each a line of their own.

[Fuga]

I like it. I'd like try it.

[RonaldPR]

Yes, better and cleaner.

The vertical separator line is not really needed and for me it would feel more natural (and more consistant with other applications) with the search field at the top, like this:



I do not like the white square indicating an active button. The existing buttons would be OK for me.

[Fuga]

Even better with removing the line. And I agree with the buttons although my reason is then they're closer to where else I'm more likely to be mousing around.

As for the white square, I am conflicted. I do like visual feedback coz my brain is slow. But the white square backing reminds me of some icons' backrounds when the icon just isn't all that well plotted out.

[RonaldPR]

Instead of the white square to indicate an active button, I would rather see something simple like this:



But why not keep the existing buttons, they look fine to me:



(Grey background caused by my use of UNO.)

[RonaldPR]

Could be positioned closer to each other:

[Fuga]

Yep. I like either of those better.

[sbooth]

OK, here is what I came up with. Hopefully it is an improvement over the current design.

[RonaldPR]

Nice buttons. I like these better than the ones with the rounded corners.
But the icons on the buttons should now be moved 1 pixel downwards on the buttons:



should be:



Edit 1: I think this design is an improvement.
Edit 2: Shouldn't the minutes:seconds at the left be moved a little to the right to properly align minutes 10 and more?
Edit 3: Or maybe use 00:29, 01:44, 12:31 etc. to keep the numbers nicely aligned.

[Fuga]

I think y'all have nailed it. I am particulrly interested in this as I am moving towards retirement. Having much time at home and having too damn many CDs getting old I see me moving to archiving much stuff into lossless. And with much stuff already in non-iTunes playable stuff, Play looms large in my future.

[sbooth]

Nice buttons. I like these better than the ones with the rounded corners.
But the icons on the buttons should now be moved 1 pixel downwards on the buttons:

I noticed that as well, but I couldn't get NSButton to draw the images exactly centered. I will keep looking for a workaround.

Edit 2: Shouldn't the minutes:seconds at the left be moved a little to the right to properly align minutes 10 and more?

The text is left-justified, so for minutes over 10 the entire text will just slide to the right. The converse is true for the time remaining text- for minutes over 10 the whole string will slide to the left.

[maya]

This may seriously be the most silliest request ever for the UI, but is it possible to add an option to choose between an all-brushed metal window or unified?

I'm sure if one wanted to, they could recompile to have that, but I have no idea how to.. :/