Bugzilla – Bug 17510
Album Art always partly obscured by baddly laid out controls.
Last modified: 2011-09-17 13:55:26 UTC
Hi It's an annoyance to people who care about album cover art that part of the art is always covered over (needlessly) by baddly placed screen controls. This is a poor interface design issue, but it's easily fixed with a little more thought. First, let me describe the problem in more detail. After you tap to remove the 'current play position' slider, the top 10% or so of the album art is always covered by the 'Go Back' button, the 'Current Playlist' button, and the shaded background that extends down around them. There are many many ways this could be improved. Here are just two improvements that would fix this issue. Solution No.1. No one really needs the Player name constantly displayed so prominantly all across the top line. At least halve the width of the button and make the font a little smaller to match. Leaving it centredstill, you could move Up the 'Back' and 'Playlist' buttons to flank it. The space this would create below would completely solve the problem and the artwork would be clearly visible in an unfettered clean view. Solution No.2. Create a menu under the hardware 'menu' button where the name of the player is stored and switchable. After all, I'd guess that more than 90% of Squeezeplayer owners only have one player anyway, so why should this rarly used control dominate the precious screen area? If tere's a problem with making it smaller (Solution 1.) then remove it completely, and allow the 'Back' and 'Playlist' buttons to move Up into it's space. Solution No.3. Reduce the vertical size of all the buttons by just a few pixcels. The cumulative saving being calculated to stop the controls flowing over the top lines of the artwork. There are many many other solutions possible. It just needs a little love and attention. Thank you.
Consider it badly laid out on _your_ device. It might be perfect on another one. Maintaining pixel perfect layout for every screen resolution available is impossible.
It is badly laid out on my device. 'My device' includes the Duet Handset over which you have complete control. Even there the artwork is covered up by poorly thought out controls, so you can't plead the 'maintaining pixel perfect layout for every screen resolution available is impossible' argument when we're talking about hardware you designed for. Of course the Duet has a menu option 'show artwork' that, by it's very presence, is an admission that the main screen's attempt to show the artwork properly has failed. Gosh, even 'show artwork' has the bodge of a black bar at the bottom to partially obscure the time, wifi link symbol and other screen ephemera. Since you didn't get the artwork to show properly on your own hardware perhaps I am in cloud cuckoo land to ask if it could be shown correctly on one of the biggest selling mobile platforms out there, the HTC Desire range. Personally I think it is possible (see the range of solutions I put forward in my original post) so from what you say I think the problem is one of acknowledging that this is a problem and a very solvable one. After all, web designers deal with a far bigger range of hardware, screen resolutions and browsers than you face, and they do it successfully every day.
FYI, the Duet shares no code with the mobile application whatsoever. Completely separate codebases. Michael's comment about not being able to perfectly layout every possible screen resolution for the mobile app is entirely valid. If you don't like the Duet artwork layout on the NP screen, it's configurable. Spin the wheel while you are on the NP screen halfway around and it will render in a smaller format. If you want that to be the only way the artwork is rendered, select Settings->Screen->Now Playing Views, and uncheck Large Artwork. > Of course the Duet has a menu option > 'show artwork' that, by it's very presence, is an admission that the main > screen's attempt to show the artwork properly has failed. that's a totally false statement. We wanted to have an option for a user that wanted to see only the artwork on the screen. It has nothing to do with the layout of the NP screen. > Since you didn't get the artwork to show properly on your own hardware also completely false. That artwork treatment is called "Full bleed", and it's intentional. Clearly you think that's a horrible aesthetic choice, but it's the design choice that was made. It's used pretty heavily now on media applications, e.g. iPods.