Guayadeque needs a pimp up

hellobo · Post by **hellobo** » Sat Dec 03, 2011 2:48 pm

A media player is more than just a pieces of "computer software for playing back multimedia files".

It's a part of a user's lifestyle experience! Music is lifestyle! And this is also the way Ubuntu is going to (Unity, Ubuntu One Music Store). Look how elegant iTunes and Songbird are (I'm so jealous!).

In don't aks for a iTunes/Songbird lookalike, but what about having a drop shadow for each image in the album browser or one in the cover frame? Or what about different skins?

Bo

tamalet · Post by **tamalet** » Mon Dec 05, 2011 9:53 am

It's true that Guayadeque is not the best looking player around. This is in part for anonbeat admittedly being a (great) programmer but not a designer. There are things that could be done and the community could help a lot here.
I also know nothing about design but helped by doing the buttons for the different views.

The other part is that anonbeat is quite constrained by wxWidgets, the framework to do the interface. It's what gives it the kind of 90's look. I've discussed this with anonbeat and he is well aware of it, but unfortunately there is no easy solution. It would be nice to make a port to Qt, but that will require to start almost from scratch.

davdo2004 · Post by **davdo2004** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 1:46 am

I think Guayadeque IS the best looking player for Linux at the present time in my opinion but everyone has their own preference in how a particular app should look. Here is a screenshot on my KDE setup. http://i.imgur.com/c1kNZ.jpg

tamalet · Post by **tamalet** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 6:27 am

That looks great!

l300lvl · Post by **l300lvl** » Mon Jan 16, 2012 3:15 pm

I was wondering if perhaps you could shed some light on any updates to the UI you have planned, anon ?

I'm not experienced in programming but if I was I would love to tweak for instance the library view a bit. I mentioned one enhancement a while ago which was being able to have the album art as an option under 'select columns' so it would show in the track listing the art for each album. Perhaps that was far fetched?

Another thing that would be awesome is to have something like I think it's gmusicbrowser that has multiple rows, for instance even 2 compared to just one, in the albums column under library view.

I'd much rather have the second, and not even use the 'Album Browser' view, as switching back and forth becomes annoying.

Any chance if I were to post a coders for hire site to have some smaller enhancements like these wrote up I might get a response. I know people are busy, but I've seen a lot of people on those types of sites get things done, which they then don't give out. I'd much rather spend money on one of those sites and see the work accepted and merged.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Mon Jan 16, 2012 6:44 pm

Whatever you guys plan to improve guayadeque... please do NOT switch to QT.
There are already numerous players using that toolkit and I dont like any of those.

-1 for QT

anonbeat · Post by **anonbeat** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 12:01 am

hasufell wrote:Whatever you guys plan to improve guayadeque... please do NOT switch to QT.
There are already numerous players using that toolkit and I dont like any of those.

-1 for QT

The toolkit does nothing to do with what you do with it. I think you can do great things with any toolkit but QT have better support and far way more developers behind it.
Its true that wxWidgets offer many limitations for example accessing the GTK theme colors.
Right now port guayadeque to QT will need to rewrite it almost everything.
In the other hand as was mentioned in the old ubuntuforums.org thread you can set a theme for an app. So you can make guayadeque to look the way you want using a theme just for this app.
With the appropiate theme wxWidgets apps can look fine.
I will try to focus more in some gui beautify but for me its more important speed than look.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 1:52 pm

hm, but QT was never about speed. Some people even encounter serious performance issues with some graphics/driver setups (nvidia + proprietary driver for example).

anonbeat · Post by **anonbeat** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 3:05 pm

I dont see speed problems on this demos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=030yVE7AQ7k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwE_UIHSWnY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00a7eSJvWEw
Its something to study but anyway will not be anytime soon.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Tue Jan 17, 2012 3:27 pm

Well, I dont know what drivers/graphics they use in those videos. It's just something that I experienced on different distros/systems with nvidia cards and proprietary drivers.
I have used KDE for half a year and ran into problems like after switching virtual desktop the gui-elements in Dolphin would reload very slowly (like 3-5secs). Startup time for quite any applications was also increased if you compare it to its gtk+ pendant.
From what I can tell by some discussions on IRC-freenode other people seem to have similar issues although others told me it works very nice with their ATI cards.

Furthermore people not using KDE or QT will have to install a good load of dependencies just to get a single QT-app working.

I understand that it may highly depend on the developer, but in the end the users choice of an application also depends on the toolkit and how it fits in your desktop environment/system. Switching to QT would mean to compete with amarok and eventually lose users who like to stick to lxde, xfce or even gnome without a multi-toolkit setup.

maybe I am wrong, but that is what comes to my mind