Bug 80204

Summary: position of media controls
Product: [Unmaintained] mediacontrol Reporter: Nik Clayton <nik>
Component: generalAssignee: Stefan Gehn <mETz81>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: wishlist    
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 0.3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: FreeBSD Ports   
OS: FreeBSD   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Nik Clayton 2004-04-23 15:44:54 UTC 
Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.2.1)
Installed from:    FreeBSD Ports
OS:          FreeBSD

With 'mediacontrol' embedded in kicker at the bottom of the screen, the track controls (next, pause, play, stop, etc) are located above the 'track position' scrubber (or seek bar).

In my experience, I hardly ever use the seek bar.  I use 'next track' much more frequently.  From a usability point of view, I'd suggest:

1.  Swap the order of the track controls and the scrubber, so that the track controls are at the very bottom edge of the screen.  Fitt's Law then applies, and I can just throw the mouse down to the bottom of the screen and move it left or right to find the right button, instead of needing to precisely target a small 'pause' or 'next' button.

Ideally, this would dynamically reconfigure, so that if it's in a panel located at the top of the screen, the controls would swap back (to their current configuration).

2.  Do some research to see if any buttons are used over the others, and make them correspondingly bigger.  I would expect (but have no research to back up) that 'next' and 'pause' are used much more frequently, so should probably be twice the X*Y dimensions of the other buttons.
Comment 1 Stanislav Karchebny 2004-04-23 21:12:51 UTC 
I'll vote for this. Very much agreed.
Comment 2 Stefan Gehn 2004-04-26 17:35:00 UTC 
About 1: I plan to make at least the seekbar optional (already were sent a patch for it but the patch didn't satisfy me), ideally I plan to make this work like toolbar settings, i.e. you can add/remove/move items with a two-panel-view.

About 2: Rather no, that would make the whole think look quite unaligned and busy, I once tried a bigger play button and it annoyed the hell out of me after a few hours.

To sum it up: I'll try to add 1. but due to my limited time atm I cannot make any promises on when this will be finished.
Comment 3 Stefan Gehn 2005-07-03 15:44:27 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 90389 ***