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Brace yourself; I've gotten a little too close to doing graphics work for public safety.

scott wheeler's picture
Submitted by scott wheeler on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 02:01.

So the JuK GUI hasn't exactly been stunning historically. There have been a few times that there have been plans to make it nicer, but they've never amounted to much. Well, I finally decided to try my own hand at it and had a little fun with Sodipodi. I think it's a pretty big improvement and if all goes well I'll have it checked in soon. [image:454]

None of the buttons actually worked yet, but I'll get going on that soon. Smiling I also played around with a new icon, but I think I still need a few iterations of trying things before I arrive at one that I like there.

I also spent this last weekend mostly at the Linux Audio Conference in Karlsruhe. There were some interesting talks and there's some interesting stuff in the works. However I at one point felt that it should renamed "The GUI Hall of Shame and Linux Audio Conference". Wow. Yikes. Some of the stuff was just really bad. And coming home excited to try out some of the mentioned stuff a lot of it isn't really stable enough to be usable yet -- maybe someday.

Let's see -- also working on ripping out and replacing bits of the KConfig internals. That was looking promising until my short affair with SVG stuff this weekend.

Also I really need to get around to reviewing / integrating some patches. I always feel bad when I let them build up, but they're time consuming to review and normally not much fun.

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robert's picture

Skinning

Submitted by robert on Sun, 05/16/2004 - 02:40.

I really don't understand this obsession people have with making their apps look different. I don't see what's wrong with just using plain native widgets. I mean, when it comes to these special pretty buttons, the question is just 'why?'.

Back in 1999 skinning was all the rage, everyone wanted to make their apps 'individual', but one person's 'really super 1337' was another person's eyesore, and the thing that got tore apart in the middle was UI design. Thankfully a lot of people have now realised just how retarded skinning is. Although I hear it's still quite popular in the shareware world.

If you want proof of the evils of skinning, take a look at this and this. I mean, what the hell is going on there? Of course, these examples are a million times worse than what you're suggesting, and I'm not for a minute trying to compare yours to them. Another example is xine-ui. It is probably the worst UI I have ever used (deafult skin), mainly because it tries to pretend its a physical dvd player like you would have under your tv. Well, it's not. We all know it's not. But we still end up hunting for the button which does the right thing.

So what's my point? I know what you're doing isn't skinning, so why am I going on about skinning?

If I wanted a media player that looked super 1337, I would use xmms or Noatun with one of those godawful skins you see floating around. But I don't. I want a media player that uses the same native widgets that the rest of my desktop does. Not some crazy pixmaps that are supposed to look swish and behave unpredictably. That's an attraction of juk so far. That's one of the things that makes juk great.

On a more practical level, if you do this you lose out on some of the flexibility kde's toolbar classes give you, such as choice of text position, icon size, text only, icon only, etc. And then what happens when the user changes their gui background colour to green?

I am not trying to be mean. That is not at all what this comment is about, in fact I quite like the design that you have shown. I just think it would be a huge pity if juk went down this road.

Not every media app has to be an iTunes "let's put pixmaps EVERYWHERE" wannabe.

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mattr's picture

no wonder you've been quiet!

Submitted by mattr on Wed, 05/05/2004 - 14:30.

hmmm, this puts your recent inactivity in perspective. I'd better get my ass moving if I want to stay ahead of you on the bug charts. Eye-wink

It all looks cool though. Smiling

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big biff's picture

skinnable GUI:s

Submitted by big biff on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 09:02.

Pretty funny. I was thinking of multimedia apps(i.e. xmms, juk, amarok)
just this morning. Having run iTunes when visiting my sister and her
Wintendows machine I was thinking that it looked kinf of different from
most other windows app. It looked "skinned". But then again if you run
iTunes under MacOS X it looks like all the other brushed metall apps.
And if you run IE on MacOS X it lookes "skinned" in comparison
to Safari.

Which led me to think about themes vs. application skins and so on. Do
we need/want to able to skin each application? And if we do need to
why not all applications? Why just the multimedia apps. Also, if we
can skin every single application do we need themes?

Scott: I kind of like you mockup, however, couldn't sort of the same
look be achivied with some smart toolbar system and an icon theme?
I mean, it's basically just new icons on the buttons.
An improved/extended slider and the search bar is moved up.

/Biff

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tom14's picture

I like it how it is

Submitted by tom14 on Wed, 05/05/2004 - 08:06.

If JuK was going to become a skinable app this would look good. However, I prefer Juk how it is. IMHO Juk has a very nice interface at the moment. Although I like the idea of having the title with the tracker. Probably the only thing I like in XMMS and others that isn't in Juk is pwetty visualizations.

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sad eagle's picture

You can change the look of every app

Submitted by sad eagle on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 14:48.

All of them take the --style option Smiling. So you can have, say, JuK using Keramik, KMail using Liquid, and everything else using HC.

Since the style API is quite powerful, nothing is stopping anyone from creating an ultra pretty/ultra unusable look for widgets, and running their favorite app w/it.

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scott wheeler's picture

skins

Submitted by scott wheeler on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 09:51.

Actually I'm not a fan of skinning at all in general. And even recently I've made the joke about how it's a bit funny that everyone somehow associates skins with multimedia applications, but not say mail clients.

I'm not sure what you mean by "smart toolbar system". Basically all that's there now is a base toolbar, a couple of alpha-transparent images and a widget in the middle. Eventually the buttons will be split out into different images and composed into the "base image" on the fly.

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aseigo's picture

icon themes, ui consistency =)

Submitted by aseigo on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 07:30.

looks rather cute. am i correct in assuming that these buttons aren't derived from the current icon theme, but custom artwork and therefore won't change with the icon theme? if so... i wonder if that isn't a bit of a step backwards. sure, it makes juk look nice, until the user changes their icon set and then it looks nice and out of place. Eye-wink hrm.. and how do those bevels look with non-keramik sytles?

hrm.. i'd also just changed kscd's play timer and volume slider to mimic juk's out of a desire for consistency and now that's all changed. haha.. funny.

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scott wheeler's picture

> looks rather cute. am i cor

Submitted by scott wheeler on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 09:46.

> looks rather cute. am i correct in assuming that these buttons
> aren't derived from the current icon theme, but custom artwork and
> therefore won't change with the icon theme?

Well, actually they aren't based on Crystal -- I drew them myself, But no, they wouldn't change with the icon theme. However the majority of our user either use a stock icon them or one from their distribution (i.e. Fedora, which as I recall doesn't even currently package JuK) and relative to most "normal" icon themes these are pretty neutral.

> if so, i wonder if that isn't a bit of a step backwards. sure, it
> makes juk look nice, until the user changes their icon set and
> then it looks nice and out of place.

Well, I'd rather have it look nice with one icon theme than bad with all of them. Eye-wink

> hrm.. and how do those bevels look with non-keramik sytles?

Yeah, actually I tested them with a variety of styles / color schemes and they seem to be ok. i.e. here's one with a darker color scheme and using Plastik.

> hrm.. i'd also just changed kscd's play timer and volume slider to
> mimic juk's out of a desire for consistency and now that's all
> changed. haha.. funny.

Yeah, actually I missed that commit the first go around and didn't actually notice it until I went looking for the volume button code yesterday. But really this is something that's been talked about for a while -- it was even on the 3.2 feature plan, but didn't happen.

All said and done I'm not set on this design; my "artwork" certainly isn't the greatest -- hence the title. So if some team of KDE artists swamps me in the next few weeks all competing to produce the best looking JuK possible, well, great. I won't hold my breath. Maybe a couple of them will be shocked into action. Smiling

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leinir's picture

Very cool, just one tiny thing :)

Submitted by leinir on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 17:29.

As others have mentioned, you must watch out not to create a new theming system that goes against the rest of KDE... I'm the guy behind Reinhardt, and these buttons will stick out rather like a sore thumb on a Reinhardt desktop (the borders and the rest is fine), so if you really have to theme them specifically, please make sure they are named somesuch as juk_play, juk_stop and so on, so it's possible for icon set authors to create alternatives...
Other than that, I am liking what I see Smiling It also hit me, about the popup thing, maybe it would be possible to lay it out like this:

+-------+  Artist: ......            +-------+
|   <   |  Song title: ......        |   >   |
+-------+  Album: ......             +-------+

Now, have I been smoking something I should have shared, or would that work? Smiling It would seem to me a way to enable a fixed size of the popups (I have my system tray on the left side of the desktop, and the Next button keeps changing position... Not very pleasant usability wise Eye-wink )

---
..Dan // Leinir..
http://www.leinir.dk/
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tom chance's picture

Let it theme!

Submitted by tom chance on Mon, 05/03/2004 - 12:29.

Well, I’d rather have it look nice with one icon theme than bad with all of them.

You can achieve this without losing the ability to theme, surely? From your mockup, I can think of two solutions:

1) Make each icon a standard size (22x22, 32x32, 48x48 )

2) Scale PNGs and SVGs if they can be found

But whatever you do, PLEASE don't make Juk break the KDE standard and try it's own unique theming system. I don't see any need, and it would not only annoy all the users who don't use the standard icon sets, but also potentially open the door to a lot of usability issues.

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