View source for Amarok/Proposals/More Contexual Information

== Problem: Not Enough Information ==
In Amarok 2.0 final the Context View is under-utilized. Currently there are two primary information displaying applets: Wikipedia, and Lyrics. And, TBH, it does so in a rather ugly way.

== CV Layout and applets ==
One of the reasons i think the CV is underutilized and not as pretty as the rest of Amarok is that we are fragmenting all the visible information in many different places. When we have different applets that show different data completely independently, not knowing anything about each other, we end up wasting space, on title bars, info panes, etc. This is space that shouldn't be used in this form as it is redundant and unneeded. Furthermore, as we are currently assuming a rectangular shape for all applets, any information which is not best shown in this format wastes space for everyone.

A potential solution that I see for this is to create more "universal" applets, applets that draw information from more than one dataengine and that are *designed* to span the whole containment at once. They would be able to pull different things together and coherently display, say, wikipedia and last.fm artist information next to or right underneath each other. By doing this (which is basically what MashTape does) it would give the user a better "bang for his UI space". Lfranchi 01:35, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

== Solution: Varied Media Types & Sources ==
List of Media types and sources (original list from [http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/73 Mashtape])

'''Artist Info'''
* Last.fm/MusicBrainz/Freebase
* Wikipedia Auto-localised

'''News'''
* MTV Music News
* Google Blog Search
* Digg
* Hype Machine
* Google News
* Yahoo News

''' Photos '''
* Flickr
* SmugMug

'''Video'''
* YouTube
* Yahoo Music

Possible features
* User has the option to select which services are loaded/displayed
** Some services will mix content in the same "pane" others will create a new "pane" accessible via Tab/button
* Scripting hooks so developers can write their own services