Whilst there's no denying Canola's amazing interface and usability, there is one feature I would like to request. I have over a thousand songs on my card, and scrolling down the list of all tracks takes a few minutes and gives me a very sore finger. What I'm thinking, is maybe a normal scroll bar taking up, say, 50-100 pixels on the right hand side of the screen to go to a part of the track list, then use kinetic scrolling to find the exact track. It would save a lot of time, and also save excessive frustrating finger flicking.
That would definitely help. However, I like even better the idea of an alphabetical listing on the right side, maybe 50 pixels wide. Touch "E", and you are at all the top of the songs starting with E, then you can scroll from there. In fact, having that same bar with Artists and Albums would also be good, especially now that 16 GB memory cards are on the market.
That would definitely help. However, I like even better the idea of an alphabetical listing on the right side, maybe 50 pixels wide. Touch "E", and you are at all the top of the songs starting with E, then you can scroll from there. In fact, having that same bar with Artists and Albums would also be good, especially now that 16 GB memory cards are on the market.
To expand on this slightly, the height of each alphabet letter should be proportional to the number of songs with that letter.
So if you have 25% of your songs starting with "E" then the area for E should be 25% of the total height. If you have no "Q" songs, theres no need to waste space with it.
Easy to reach for and stands out well enough to use.
No need to waste fractions of the height on letters which don't exist.
liqbase kinda makes use of this in the book file selection view - it displays folder heights proportional to the number of books they contain (though personally something feels wrong with it still), but I think it would make excellent sense on a track listing.
Hmm, I see what you're getting at. Although I think letters would take up too much space, and a plain scroll bar would still be better. I'll try liqbase to see exactly what you mean.
Keep in mind not all filenames (or artist - songname) start with a letter.
In fennec you can touch up, down, right and left. (More 'touch gestures' is ofcourse debatable provided they make sense.) Therefore, I'd say, drag to the right to 'pop up' a touch-keyboard in which you can define a filter.
Id be ok with just the d-pad working in the scroll. Where it gets faster as you hold it down, and lists the current letter youre on, like the zune or ipod or most other pmp's
but more advanced ones would be cool too I suppose
If tracks are listed in tracknumber order, and not alphabetically, I think alphabetical buttons to press wouldn't really help much. How about pulling out the keyboard (on N810) or bringing up the onscreen keyboard) to search as you type <shameless-plug>like here: http://mediabox.garage.maemo.org/walkthrough.html</shameless-plug>.
I second the idea of the alphabet going down the side. It's implemented on some [cough] Apple products we know, and it's sufficiently unobtrusive even in their relatively narrow portrait mode. Granted, they have more vertical room to lay out the alphabet, too, but I imagine it would work fine. After all, N8x0 screens are as many pixels tall in landscape as those devices are in portrait (!).
We have been tweaking with those alternatives and I think once we are back on track (beta10 released and running, code released etc) we will be able to implement a couple of the suggestions said in the thread:
The first one :
using the keyboard to jump to the letter. This is going to there for sure. No only as jump but also as "search" if the user keeps typing.
The second one is the "jump" bar.
While I do believe it would be good to have something like a scroll area where you can jump from bigger points (we had that in the first beta and users didn't understand because it was invisible).
So We have also another idea that I will maybe post here the prototype:
the track bar as jump bar in the bottom. Click there it pulls the track bar that can jump you to a letter (if the list is alphabetical) or to the item number (if it's not alphabetical etc)
I think I need to clarify, but I will again (as we need to close a design to be implemented) prototype all of the alternatives, and discuss it here as well.
again, thanks for the suggestions, really valuable, as good ideas are the best foundation for good solutions.
