elisa-developers team mailing list archive

[Michał Sawicz <michal@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Forwarding David's e-mail (David, please use Reply-to-list).

Dnia 2010-02-23, wto o godzinie 23:14 +0000, David Mcleod pisze:
> Regarding playlists. The concept of a playlist comes from those old
> fashioned jukeboxes you used to find in pubs or old fashioned cafes
> (The Fonz!).
> By their very nature, even in the digital era the basic concept has
> not changed. Jukeboxes were the fore-bearer to the playlist. You load
> up a sequence of tracks, and they play one by one until the end.
> 
> Computers or music applications allowed it to be more visual, more
> tactile in a way (physically selecting one and dragging it,
> re-arranging the list etc) and the ability to save that list for
> later... which is why it got named 'playlist'.
> 
> So, ideas about skipping around whole albums in a playlist, or playing
> a photo and music track at the same time in a mixed media playlist are
> interesting. It just adds a layer of complexity in my mind which
> people may or may not want. Id rather do 1 thing well than 50 things
> like that badly or half baked. Creating and managing the traditional
> playlist after thinking about this for about 2 years during my time at
> Fluendo will be easy enough UI wise but require a good slice of work
> for developers.
> 
> I hate to say it but, sometimes it is almost dumbing everything down
> and not over complicating things, adding too many features so that the
> core of what you are doing remains strong and powerful. Basics first,
> make them powerful and extremely usable, then let them moan it isn't
> powerful enough and at that point, we need to be very careful about
> our goals, strategy and adding any additional complexity.
> 
> Sounds preach-y but...after suffering what is at best 'idea-bloat' at
> Fluendo I get nervous about too many outlandish ideas. Much prefer
> doing the basics and what people expect while driving toward one
> feature or core idea that will make it different and exciting. 

Preachy? Nah. Sure, the idea about nesting playlists is quite new and
appealing, but you're right that skipping a whole album might be tricky.
I think a tree-like navigation in the playlist would be enough. You
could simply go up from the player, then from the album, and start
playing the next thing on the list - simple prev/next should be just
that - simple.

Do you have anything 'against', for lack of better word, nested
playlists? I think we could extend the playlist in-place when we get
more than one playable from a URL, but I think it could get difficult to
navigate through quite fast.

-- 
Cheers
Michał (Saviq) Sawicz

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