Navigation interface

[tom jacobs]

So, the time has come to design the way you can navigate around and select your music.

BT1 I think was quite good in that it sat you straight in front of a row, and you could press up/down/pgup/pgdown to scroll up and down the row, and left/right changed rows. It was good because you don't have to worry about navigating around the 3D world manually, lining up and looking around then moving forward to get there etc.
You may have noticed that BT2 so far just has a very "flying a spaceship" way of moving around. Not the best.

Also you might have noticed that in BT1 the searchbox always had focus, so whenever you typed at the program, the text always went into the search box. Very handy. (But the search was too slow, we'll speed this up).

BT1 was annoying for selecting/browsing music tracks. You had to click on a folder and then wait 1 - 2 seconds for the folder to fly up ( and the cover image to load ) before you could see the tracks. This shat me after a while.

So, how should it be? Remember, we can do anything we want to. It's all software.

I propose:

- BT1 style where it "helps you navigate" in a sense, i.e . it could have you always hovering at a good viewing height above the albums. Your view is kept north facing. Bit more relaxed camera style though, not so rigid, but still useful. The up/down/pgup/pgdown/left/right keys move you in their directions.

- Gettin' the mouse into the picture:
       - Allow quick very browsing of tracks by having mouse over albums cause the track listing ( and _possibly_ large cover ) to display. Possibly 80% transparency if I can git that workin'.
       - Then when you single leftclick the album it makes the tracklist full-opaque and thus the tracklist stays there, until you click anywhere else ( grass, close button on it ).
       - Single left-clicking on the grass would move you over to that area. That way you could "jump" around the place quickly by clicking places on the grass everywhere.
       - Again with the hold down right mouse button for free-form view around, ala BT1 ? (Right-drag is an obscure combination though.)

- Search box always having typing focus ala BT1, so _whenever_ you type when you're looking at the 3D land, it searches.
      - Side note: I was thinking of this cool search results display where every CD that is _not_ a result folds back flat ala the board game "Guess Who?" ( but backwards ). This is totally computationally feasable, in fact it is not all that much more of a CPU strain at all. Problem with this is then one has to manually navigate over to those (unfolded back) results. The grass-clicking would help.

- There is also the "each album remembers its individual x, y position in the world" thing as well. This then introduces the ability to move albums around with the mouse and put them in your own order in the world. Would be cool with cooler worlds ( rooms, etc ).

Man, we gotta get a physics engine in this thing or something, that would be so freakin' impressive rad-rad. Someone hook me up!

Thoughts?

--
Tom.