Movida gets a smart view
“http://movida.sourceforge.net/screenshots/screenshot.php?thumbnail=smartview070222″ style=”MARGIN: 10px” title=
“The new Movida Smart View” align=”left” alt=”The new Movida Smart View” border=”1″ /> The Sourceforge.net shell service is still
down so I have no way to upadate the website for Movida (a cross platform
GPLed movie collection manager I started coding about 500 years ago).
This is a good excuse to start one of hopefully several posts on the development status of Movida. A public preview is expected for the
end of the month. This would be the first one since I started rewriting Movida to use the new Qt4.
Today I started working on a new view that will display movies and possibly other stuff in future.
Existing collection managers have two standard views: a details view (a trivial tree widget) and a quite useless icon view.
The main hassle with these views is the level of detail: the tree widget usually displays too much data on a single screen page (thus
resulting too distracting) whereas the icon view displays no information at all.
Its only use is when you have icons for all the items in the collection and you want to detect a specific item quickly (assuming the
icons differ enough from each that you can distinguish them in less than a lifetime - and that means less than 1 or 2 seconds as we are
speaking about user interface usability).
To say it all, Movida’s new Smart View it’s not a full view but a simple item delegate that is supposed to work with a
standard list/icon view (QListView in Qt 4 terminology).
The resulti is conceptually similar to Windows XP’s Explorer “tiles” view and ACDSee’s “tiles” view, just to
mention two of them.
As you can see in the work-in-progress screenshot above, each item is depicted as a small rectangle with an icon (the optional movie
poster in Movida) and some text on the right side.
The view only shows the movie title at this stage. The final version will display the most relevant attributes for each item, with
respect to the available space.
Bigger tiles = more details.
Very small tiles = no icons and just some basic info.
A further improvement might be obtained by adding some emphasis to the currently relevant attribute (i.e. the sorting attribute) so that
it can be catched more quickly by our eyes.
PS: Here is a bonus screenshot with the latest version of the movie editing dialog.
Major news: Movie poster handling (with some cool drag & drop) and an improved rating label (with full mouse control).
Parts of the application still don’t handle movie posters and parts of the dialog aren’t accessible with the keyboard at this
stage.