Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 98.150.203.240]
on December 13, 2008 07:51 AM
> "I hear lots of noise, but nothing constructive."
Sorry, I was at work and didn't feel it was the right place to write an essay. I'll try to be a bit more constructive.
>> "Now it's hard to use"
> "In what way?"
As a Gnome user, when I first installed Amarok 2 in Fedora 10, many dependencies were not caught, so for days I couldn't figure out why NOTHING showed up in the middle pane and no songs would play. No error messages. No clues. Just silence. It took installing a bunch of KDE4 components to get it working (which is fine, but it would have been nice if the package had caught it or the app warned of missing components).
>> "..lacks most of the features that made Amarok 1.x awesome"
> "What features specifically?"
Visualizations, Stop after current song, song queuing, extensive yet concisely laid out song information
>> "and is quite frankly unsightly."
> "What about it do you think is unsightly?"
I guess it's just the visual disconnect of a KDE4 app running in Gnome. I know there are ways to fix it, but why should I have to fix something that shouldn't be an issue to begin with? But I suppose it's also the layout. I used to be able to see 40-50 songs in my playlist on a single screen. Now it's too big. I can barely fit a couple albums worth on a screen. Also, the current album and song info is really sparse now.
>> "I have nearly 9000 songs in my library, so this new layout really doesn't work for me"
> "How does having X songs affect the layout "working" for you? I have 30,000 songs and the layout functions correctly for me."
I didn't mean this as some sort of pissing match, it's just that the new layout is kludgy and hard to navigate compared to v1.4. I could find what I was looking for quickly and easily in v1.4, and it's no longer the case in v2.
>> "and the small, simple features that differentiated Amarok 1.x from every other media player are gone"
> "Again, which features are those?"
See above... I really miss the "stop after current song" and song queue features.
> "Us Amarok devs do not live in a black box totally cut off from our user base. The only way we can improve the feature set and the UI is when we know exactly what our users do not like about it. A simple "The new UI is unsightly" tells us we need to make it better, but not what needs to be addressed. We can take (and even welcome) extremely harsh criticism, but we cannot act unless we have substantial issues to address. Otherwise we shoot in the dark, which doesn't seem to work."
Sorry -- I should know better than to just bitch and moan. It was an emotional response because I really did love using Amarok 1.4, and that joy is largely gone now. Fortunately, I believe the sore spots would be easy enough to fix, but it's really a matter of whether you Amarok devs want to (please do -- pretty pretty please).
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Re(1): Prefer Version 1.x
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 98.150.203.240] on December 13, 2008 07:51 AMSorry, I was at work and didn't feel it was the right place to write an essay. I'll try to be a bit more constructive.
>> "Now it's hard to use"
> "In what way?"
As a Gnome user, when I first installed Amarok 2 in Fedora 10, many dependencies were not caught, so for days I couldn't figure out why NOTHING showed up in the middle pane and no songs would play. No error messages. No clues. Just silence. It took installing a bunch of KDE4 components to get it working (which is fine, but it would have been nice if the package had caught it or the app warned of missing components).
>> "..lacks most of the features that made Amarok 1.x awesome"
> "What features specifically?"
Visualizations, Stop after current song, song queuing, extensive yet concisely laid out song information
>> "and is quite frankly unsightly."
> "What about it do you think is unsightly?"
I guess it's just the visual disconnect of a KDE4 app running in Gnome. I know there are ways to fix it, but why should I have to fix something that shouldn't be an issue to begin with? But I suppose it's also the layout. I used to be able to see 40-50 songs in my playlist on a single screen. Now it's too big. I can barely fit a couple albums worth on a screen. Also, the current album and song info is really sparse now.
>> "I have nearly 9000 songs in my library, so this new layout really doesn't work for me"
> "How does having X songs affect the layout "working" for you? I have 30,000 songs and the layout functions correctly for me."
I didn't mean this as some sort of pissing match, it's just that the new layout is kludgy and hard to navigate compared to v1.4. I could find what I was looking for quickly and easily in v1.4, and it's no longer the case in v2.
>> "and the small, simple features that differentiated Amarok 1.x from every other media player are gone"
> "Again, which features are those?"
See above... I really miss the "stop after current song" and song queue features.
> "Us Amarok devs do not live in a black box totally cut off from our user base. The only way we can improve the feature set and the UI is when we know exactly what our users do not like about it. A simple "The new UI is unsightly" tells us we need to make it better, but not what needs to be addressed. We can take (and even welcome) extremely harsh criticism, but we cannot act unless we have substantial issues to address. Otherwise we shoot in the dark, which doesn't seem to work."
Sorry -- I should know better than to just bitch and moan. It was an emotional response because I really did love using Amarok 1.4, and that joy is largely gone now. Fortunately, I believe the sore spots would be easy enough to fix, but it's really a matter of whether you Amarok devs want to (please do -- pretty pretty please).
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