Custom seekbar widget

[Cody Garver]

We need one. Right now the plan is for it to look like this: http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/8132/scalem.png

I think this will require more drastic measures than I can provide with CSS. Help wanted.

[Cody Garver (codygarver)]

Xnoise has a pretty damn good implementation: http://xnoise-media-player.com/

[Tom Beckmann (tombeckmann)]

Don't you think we should stay with the theme's widget? it would be better for consistency. And at least on those two examples I would personally find it quite difficult to drag.

[Cody Garver (codygarver)]

I disagree. A custom widget offers us 3 advantages:

* A consistent look across themes
* A way to display buffering (a grey, maybe #CCC, leading the current position)
* This is the way the best modern (web) video players behave. Hovering shows users the thumbnail preview for a given mark in a video, then single clicking takes them there. Having the nifty thumbnail feature you implemented eliminates the user's need to grab and manually seek the scale to figure out what happens at a point in the video.

Instead of white, perhaps the proposed widget should inherit an available color from the theme (blue for elementary?) so that we attempt to integrate with the look of the system a little.

This is probably not the perfect solution (may require a circle handle to grab or something at some point after 0.1), but it's closer than the implementation we and all the other guys have.

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

A consistent look with the theme is way more important than consistent look across themes.

Showing buffering is probably a valid use case, and a preview bubble is a great idea too. I think this widget needs designer input because you have rather unique use cases for it.

A concept for the prieview bubble: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5279564/previewbar.png

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Xnoise?! With its progressbar instead of a slider? No please no! You can never click a progressbar to navigate anything, it's a "read-only" widget!

[Sergey "Shnatsel" Davidoff (shnatsel)]

Ok, I've updated the concept to incorporate buffering and show a slider. Same link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5279564/previewbar.png

[Tom Beckmann (tombeckmann)]

The control bar is now completely clutter based (with icons from the theme of course), I hope the behaviour of the seekbar is fine ok. (I guess the preview won't work for DVDs since it would have to read at two points at the same time, so it would have to replaced by a normal handle)

[Cody Garver (codygarver)]

Tom, it's beautiful.

Shnatsel, please evaluate the new seekbar. Your feedback is invaluable.