Version: (using KDE KDE 3.5.4) Installed from: Gentoo Packages OS: Linux How about if the sidebar at the context tab window wasn't a sidebar but took the whole window taking the place of the playlist too... This way there would be a lot of space to have all the information given in the sidebar visible without having to scroll up and down. You could also have a lyrics pane and short info of the artist from the wiki, visualizations etc. Of course all the other tabs should have the playlist pane visible. This way you could switch to the collection/playlist tab to make your playlist and then back to the context tab to rediscover your music ;) There could also be an option for this. (i.e. Show playlist on context window On/Off) Also at the status bar the "Playing: Sthing by Foo on Bar" would be better be replaced by something like "Coming up next: Sthing Else by Foo on Bar, since I'm already seeing what's palying right now.
We tried this already at our meeting in may, and decided it was a sub optimal solution.
A UI redesign is planned for Amarok 2.0. Then we will consider your proposition. It seems to be more reasonable than what we quickly hacked together some time ago. However, this will be quite some work to make it behave nicely.
In similar lines, I had these improvement ideas @ http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/topic,13537.0.html Excerpts ... I think it can be improved to make it such that even the die hard fans of iTunes on Mac OS X would only want to use iTunes for purchasing but Amarok to actually play and enjoy music, once KDE4 comes out and Amarok is ported to OSX and Windows. Here are some of the ideas: 1) Keep 4 tabs on the left - Collections, Playlists, Magnatune and Media = Files + CD/DVD + Media Devices all combined. It will have a corresponding narrow pane on the left. 2) Keep 2 tabs on the top - Context and Playlist views but possible to add others using config option (Lyrics, Artist etc from preferences menu) It will have a corresponding wide pane to the right. ...