Bachelor final year project to improve Totem
I’ve started my bachelor final year project last week with Christian Frøseth and Eirik Askheim, and we’ll be working on visual improvements in the Totem media player.
Our main focus will be the full screen ui, redesigning it with Cairo/Composite effects.
Given this context, I’m very much looking for input and ideas on how to design a full screen user interface. We have some ideas our self obviously, but maybe you have something that has been bothering you with Totem, or something you feel is missing. Or something you think Totem does better than any other player, when it comes to the UI.
This is your chance to really influence our work for the coming months, and the Totem media player, so grab a pen and start drawing (or just write a comment.)
My money’s on rather spartan approach: play/pause button, long enough seek bar, volume control and the the usual played/time remaining info.
Comment by APz — January 18, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
The eyetv program from MacOSx has a straightforward, but still pretty, UI (theres a review with screenshots at http://lunapark6.com/eyetv-3-review.html) that would work nice in a fullscreen context. Alpha-blended overlays are nice since they allow for big buttons without distorting the space the movie takes up, and fade-ins/fade-outs for when keyboard shortcuts are used are much less distracting than the in-your-face overlay text of say, MPlayer.
Comment by William C — January 20, 2008 @ 4:29 am
Not sure if I’m posting this too late (I didn’t see this post until a few days ago), but here’s one idea that really sticks out in my mind:
Put the seek bar at the bottom edge. I don’t mean just putting it at the bottom inside a container/box, but really, I mean that the user should be able to push the mouse cursor down against the absolute bottom edge of the screen, then click and drag to seek.
Seek bars are useless in vertical terms; they only convey/accept information in the horizontal dimension. Putting the seek bar at the bottom (with a few pixels of height, of course, 1. for visibility and 2. to be more forgiving of imperfect aim) reduces the user’s task from aiming in both dimensions to aiming in only one dimension.
Also, this seek bar would have a width of 100% the screen width. All the user has to deal with is the width of the screen (faster to process); if the seek bar’s width is anything else, then the user has to reorient to make a judgment about clicking on something with its own isolated metric.
With a 100% screen width seek bar, the slider might also need a slight redesign: instead of a “V” or “^” shape, it could be a “|><|” shape (so that when the slider is at the absolute leftmost position, with an x position of 0, there is still the “” arrow is offscreen). This seems better than having a half-offscreen “V”/”^”.
Just my very specific thoughts on the seek bar…
I’m looking forward to seeing how this project turns out.
Comment by Fyda — February 12, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
Ugh, sorry… should’ve known the lesser-than and greater-than symbols would result in a whole chunk of text being parsed as an invisible HTML tag.
Comment by Fyda — February 12, 2008 @ 11:45 pm
Though it’s been a while since this was posted.
I really like Fyda’s suggestion of using the absolute bottom of a full screen view it makes it a big target to hit and could be very easy to use if done correctly.
Comment by Scott Newson — December 15, 2009 @ 4:27 am
is good for me,thank you
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