Design improvements

[newhinton]

I am using this app for quiet a while, and it works great so far! However, i have some ideas for improvements to the ui that i would like to implement. Before i do that, i want to discuss those ideas to see if you agree with me :)

Main Audio Player:

• Add a handlebar under the controls to visually show the swipe ability to show the current playlist Added handlebar to playerview #916
• The spacing of the title, artist and album looks odd, this could be overhauled (This is only valid if it is shown above the coverart) (Maybe make it default to show it below)
• Change the default set swipe and tap gestures (to allow swiping up the playlist per default) May be solved with Added handlebar to playerview #916
• Overhaul Coverart-Display (To me, it looks a little bit dull, maybe we could freshen this up a bit)
• Make the Title, Artist and Album scroll-able, so that the full Title is always shown even if it is to long(marquee) fixed marquee effect on textviews #915

Library:

• Remove (or move) the current selected album/artist (but keep the behavior, this is great)
• Tap on Tab clears selected stack to show all elements in this Tab

(maybe introduce a top bar where the stack is shown, and move the three dot menu and the search there)

Theming:

• Separate in Base-color and Accent-color
• Introduce colorpicker so that the accent can be chosen from a default (orange,blue,red as it is now) or picked by the user
  (Basecolor would be white,dark and black)
  Solved when Feature/914/themingv2 WIP #919 is completed.

Widget

• Modernize look (i have no specific idea here)

Notification

• Also update the looks
  (If i'm not mistaken, there is a default notification which could be used? At least there are some apps which show the exact same notification style) (if i am not mistaken, this is based on Notification.MediaStyle, which can be used to control media from multiple places.)

Settings

• Group elements
• Introduce some lines to separate the entries

Appdrawer:

• Maybe introduce an app-drawer, to quickly have important settings at hand, like medialibraries or the about-page
  This would require the most work, and i am not sure if there would be enough elements to justify a navigation drawer. Although we could move every single element in the 3 dot menu there, which could look quiet nice

Maybe use a custom font?
(While that is meant half as a joke, we could include a font for view-impaired persons, there are some fonts available that are easily readable, that could be a way to make this app more accessible)

I think that would improve this app very much and would make it even greater

What do you think of those ideas?

[newhinton]

I can create mockups if you want that

[Kaned1as]

@newhinton can you add screenshots like "before"/"after" to your PRs?

[Kaned1as]

Introduce colorpicker so that the accent can be choosen from a default (orange,blue,red as it is now) or picked by the user

https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools guy has such colorpicker, can be taken from there

Maybe introduce an appdrawer, to quickly have important settings at hand, like medialibraries or the about-page

There is an obstacle, both library and full playback view have an action on swipe on both left and right sides. So the appdrawer will only be accessible through the top toolbar, which is nonexistent in Vanilla.

[Kaned1as]

Maybe use a custom font?

I'd use it for full playback activity, for title/album/artist views.

Group elements

At the very least we can add icons and subtext to the groups so preference view won't look so boring

[Kaned1as]

@adrian-bl have a look, too

[newhinton]

@Adonai I have attached screenshots to #916, but i cannot create screenshots for #914 ^^

I couldn't find the colorpicker you meant, but here would be another one which offers quiet some styles and options like default colors and so on https://github.com/jaredrummler/ColorPicker

Oh and by the way, my ideas are based on the current version on fdroid, so some stuff is not up to date, as an example the default-actions for the queue and the spacing is already better on the current master

[newhinton]

I have experimented with the appbar, so that we could move the search and so on, but i am not sure if i like this:

(The currently selected Artist is "Peter F. Hamilton" and the album is "Die unbekannte Macht", i have moved this selector to the appbartitle instead of the limiter which would normally be on the bottom left)

[itsmusictomyears]

Design-wise, I believe it would be a good idea to take the optional swipe gestures on the playback screen one step further. See for example the layout of the built-in music player of Sony's Android-based DAPs: https://helpguide.sony.net/dmp/nwa100/v1/en/contents/TP0002433010.html

Most parts of its interface are always accessible with a swipe up, down, left or right, they're also always accessible with a button press, and also worth noting is that the entire interface is dragged when swiping one way or the other. For comparison, when you tell Vanilla that you want to open the queue by swiping up on the playback screen, it doesn't smoothly scroll the queue into view, but when you swipe up on the playback controls up it does go smoothly.