Notes for the Now Playing tab and further observations. Some might be a bit nit-picky, but now is the time to ask, right?
1. What is Album Colour Mix supposed to do? I just get a big blurry square that changes colour as I resize the window:
It does seem to be getting its colours from the artwork though.
2. In the context menu, there is an option to display
Neither, which sounds a little odd (not to mention binary).
If there has to be such an item,
None or
Hidden probably reads better, but I wonder who would choose it if the alternative is a big blank square. Better, these items should be toggles and it should be possible to have both lyrics and artist biography displayed at the same time, one above the other.
3. These two menus are the same:
Here be dragons, both for maintaining two versions of the same menu for later revisions and also for confusing users with too many options (and to be honest this duplication happens a lot in MusicBee 2.5 and earlier). There's no reason to have two identical menus, so get rid of one. Probably the sub-menu under
Now Playing - it does sit nicely below the
Main Panel menu, but it sits even more nicely above the thing it's actually affecting.
Also, the menu above the right sidebar uses checkmarks which implies these are independently toggleable items.
4. I just noticed that when
Large Album isn't selected, the menu options are different.
These menus should be redesigned to avoid this, for the two dragony reasons given above. It's harder to maintain and confusing for users.
5. Even in this limited demo, there's already lots of idiot-proofing going on to prevent illogical layouts. e.g. If I have
Main Panel [Left Side] set to display Lyrics, setting
Main Panel [Right Side] or
Right Sidebar to display Lyrics hides the one on the left. Sure, there's no good reason to have two sets of lyrics but if that's what the user wants it could be argued that's what the user should get. Another argument is that selecting something on a menu labeled
Right Side shouldn't affect something on the left side. A third is that you won't get bogged down with chunks of code checking for "If
show this then
hide that" scenarios.
6. The
Main Panel [Left Side] selections are overlaid onto the background image, whereas
Main Panel [Right Side] gets its own little section with its own header menu. The inconsistency isn't apparent from the menus and some users might prefer to have a separate left-hand panel with overlaid elements on the right.
7. For consistency with other panels, double-clicking the small artwork overlay above the Artist Picture could show the full-size artwork.
8. When the Now Playing tab is shown, it isn't possible to adjust the width of the Right Sidebar. This seems like the sort of thing a lot of people will ask for.
9. When maximised, the MusicBee window is stealing a few extra pixels from the top of the (Windows 8.1) task bar. This happens if the window has focus or not.
10. I know you're not requesting bug reports, but you said artwork should be working and I've seen a few albums where it doesn't. There's a
cover.jpg in the folder with the music but MusicBee doesn't display anything. I can't see any pattern to the details of albums that don't work.
[Edit: Fixed. See follow-up post below]Finally...
11. Rather than tweaking all of these widgets and options and layouts, have you given any thought to developing a generic layout parser? I guess this would be a more robust version of the current Theatre Mode plugin (which admittedly I haven't look at too much), and would allow users to create and share their own configurations. A dedicated
Now Playing tab seems a good candidate for something like that and might be easier than trying to manage a million different combinations of screen elements via menu options. I'd love to see a community creating layouts with the quality of XMBC/Kodi skins.