Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] GUI mockup... let's get this sorted once and for all

[Gareth Murphy <garethmurphy1 eircom net>]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 10:12 +1100, James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> I'm still not convinced that podcast should be part of a music player.
> Particularly one you start getting in to these kind of things, I think
> it would be better as a separate podcasting app.

Understandable opinion, although I think that the majority of people
will probably disagree, including myself. Podcasting is a great new part
of the online multimedia experience, and to not support it in an audio
app such as rhythmbox would be like shooting yourself in the foot.
Admittedly it's going to be a nuisance to work out the gui implications
of these new 'enhanced' podcasts, but we'll get it done, that's what
this effort is for after all ;)

Although I do think this discussion is getting slightly off-topic...
Here are a few things I've been thinking for the new 'enhanced' podcasts
in the gui:

-- We should deal with the actual podcast picture as normal album art

-- We could deal with the new 'timeline' based content in various ways,
so for example, when a new chapter plays, we could pop-up the chapters
image as an overlay (the same way that the 'hover over album art'
overlay would look). URL's could be dealt with in the 'Now Playing' bar
somehow, shouldn't be much bother.

-- Video could be offloaded to Totem or the users choice of video
player... it wouldn't be too difficult and it would save us having to
implement video playback code and the UI enhancements to do it, which
would be a REAL pain to do.

Back to the things which could be implemented sooner rather than later,
you could change the icons pretty much immediately... for the library
you could use the home icon or the home folder icon which is in the
namin spec, for daap shares you could use the network-server icon (which
is nicer than the current one in use, even though it is from Tango
icons) and you could include the other icons such as the radio and
podcast icons from the Tango style with Rhythmbox until they're included
in the naming-spec. I've asked jimmac about using the icons and he said
it should be fine. They were made for Banshee, which uses a MIT license
but he informed me that it shouldn't be a problem to license them under
GPL (the icons I assume) if need be... so we could clarify that with him
and get this wheel moving at last?