Well, without the text labels it makes all sense, just icons, with rightly horizontal orientation.

As others also said, Amarok is increadibly feature-rich. That makes it a _very_ handy app, and also quite usable if you use it enough to get accustomed to it to a level that you don’t need to visually search for your icons and labels because you know where things are. For me, it’s the best music player around, and the main reason for that is it’s large feature set.

But, as always, people are people, and they are different. So, for Gnomes [i.e. Gnome users :P] who live and die by the simple-is-better and simple-sometimes-means-no-features and simple-sometimes-means-no-customizations, well, good that we have those three dozen different music players that they can choose and use happilya ever after.

Now I must admit to being a gnome user because cleanliness is important in my view.

All this indeed got me thinking. If I find the time, I will dive into this a bit more and think about how an application like Amarok can be improved without messing with its featureset. The problem is of course that they’re already working on a KDE4-ified version of Amarok, and they probably already have a goal set for its UI.

Still, even if it doesn’t get used (and it most likely won’t), it’s still a nice exercise.

Anyway, I’m sure the Amarok dev’s would love your suggestions.

And that’s serious. They realize they have a very complex app, and everyone who has a practical idea to do something better is very very welcome. So if you do have any suggestions for improvements that actually IMPROVE the situation without removing stuff - I’m perfectly sure they would listen.

Here is my personal opinion on Amarok user interface.
In my opinion, what makes Amarok design very good is that there are really a lot of features BUT all the complexity is hidden. When I look at the user interface, it remains quite simple actually. I’d say that the UI is made of only 2 parts : the playlist on the right + “special feature” part on the left (let’s call it like that for the moment).

- Regarding the playlist part: it is displayed as a really simple list but behind this simple list there are some very powerful features (the search field, the right click, the queue manager, etc…)

- Now regarding the “special feature” part, I think it’s the same: the complex features are hidden and I only get what I want. If I want my mp3 device manager I click on the tab and the other feature are not displayed, if I want lyrics, I click on context/lyrics and it’s the same, I’m not bothered with features that I don’t need. If I just want to play my mp3, the “special feature” part displays by default the “context” that shows me what is currently being played in the playlist… and THIS is (IMO) the most important information I want to read in the interface and that’s why I think this information is displayed in the right place (top-left).

I don’t want an application with fewer features… I like all these useless features (Wikipedia integration in Amarok, etc…)… I’ve heard A. Seigo say that that “a user use only about 30% of the features… but every user use a different 30%”. The point in KDE apps is not to remove features, it is to integrate all these feature into a simple user interface.

However, maybe some people think that Amarok could I failed creating a really simple application… but I really don’t think so. I really think that the vertical tabs are a good solution. Another KDE apps that taks benefit from the vertical tabs: Digikam.
The reason why those tabs are really goods:
- Each tab is kept quite simple
- I can access to any advanced feature with only 1 or 2 clics.
- It makes the UI very intuitive