Having embarassed myself by mouthing off about Amarok without checking the state of play properly, I’m belatedly reading through the various developer blogs to see what they’ve achieved and what is still in the pipeline. It’s an education.

The new design has three columns: on the left is your collection, on the right the playlist, and in the middle a customisable area for widgets. I hated the widget area on sight. Since I don’t really care about the details it shows, it’s a space-waster.1 It separates the collection from the playlist, for no apparent reason. So the first thing I did was remove all the widgets and drag its borders as close together as I could (and complain mentally that I couldn’t just remove the damn thing).

Seems I missed a trick. Reading through one of those blog posts I found the phrase “When you start dragging a track from the collection or the files browser, the PopupDropper’s top item is Append To Playlist.” Can you guess?

Drag from the collection and that central space turns into a menu; you can drop the file onto an option like “Append to Playlist”, and it happens. That’s pretty cool — like someone in that thread pointed out, great party behaviour. I’d still like the option to switch off that panel completely, but maybe we’ll get that too somewhere down the track. At least I’m humbly realising that I should check out what features are in the new release, before panning it for the ones that are missing.

Notes:

  1. This is partly my ideosyncratic setup: I have the screen of my desktop tipped on its edge because a 3:4 aspect ratio makes reading a4-format pdfs more comfortable. So horizontal space is at a premium for me, unlike most folk. [↪]