Panels UI

This new plugin is a little revolution into the foobar2000 world, with supporters and opponents.

Pros
  • Possibility to hide the title bar
  • Possibility to display an image for everything instead of standard buttons or objects
  • Possibility to create really eye candy "skins
  • Possibility to do a wide range of actions via buttons inbtegrated to the skin
  • Transparency management
  • Playlist filter to enhance the management of the media library
  • Ability to create a setup panel to make skins more customizeable
  • Ability to create a mini player mode available in one click.
  • Syntax highlighting
  • Some panels are now useless (albumart, lyrics panels, track info)
Cons
  • Very hard to create your own skin, the increased complexity makes it (as usual) really harder than for columns UI scripting. As a consequence, you are nearly doomed to use other's skins. Even modding an existing skin is time consuming.
  • Saying that foobar is lightweight is no longer exact truth with this plugin (the core is as lightweight as usual). The amount of RAM used increases with problems of memory leak (24 Mo could go up to 60 Mo). And when the window is visible, it consumes 2-5% of CPU resources (Pentium 2,8Ghz) and it could go up to 25-35% on start or when you bring the application to front. It's normal but will annoy people using foobar2000 for its footprint.
  • Already made skins require a lot of plugins and sometimes fonts.
  • On a more ideological point of vue, this plugin has attracted newcomers, but those newcomers do not understand the main features of foobar2000 (Replaygain, masstagging, DSP, etc..)
  • Those skins require perfectly tagged files if you want to have really eye-candy things (but it was already the case with columns UI, and in the major configs, you have a single mode available)
  • It's rather complicated to understand how the scripting panel works with a general layout and then sub layouts. (rather personal)
  • moving songs in the playlist with drag n' drop is not possible.
Some people also say that an eye-candy player is useless as it remains in the taskbar while others say that they use a screen especially for foobar. The controversy is only at its beginning and will probably last for a long time.

Screenshots

panelsUI
panelsUI
picturepicture

Links

Official links Get "skins"
Go back to the website

 

September 20 2007 17:47:43.