What it looks like¶
The interface is deliberately plain. It borrows GNOME's shape — a header bar, a sidebar, boxed lists, no menu bar — because that shape is familiar, quiet, and well understood by the people who will contribute to this project.
A clickable prototype of every screen was agreed before any of this was written. The screens below are the result.
The sidebar¶
Shows at the top, bookmarks under them, and Podlibre's own pages — Plugins, Tasks, Preferences — pinned at the bottom. Episodes are not in the sidebar: a show can have hundreds, and the command palette finds one faster than a tree ever will.
A bookmark can be an episode or a moment inside one. "Pickup to re-record" points at a position in the audio, not merely at a file.
First run¶
Two ways in: import a show you already publish, or create a new one. A podcaster with an existing feed is working inside a minute, which is the whole argument for shipping RSS import in the first version.
The workflow is the episode's home¶
Opening an episode shows the work, grouped into phases — Prepare, Transcribe, Edit, Enrich and publish — with each step's state beside it. Finished steps stay visible. Steps that no installed plugin provides stay visible too, greyed, saying Needs a plugin.
That last choice is deliberate and costs something: a user sees things they cannot do. The reason is that a workflow which hides what you cannot do is no longer a map of the work, and the map is the point. Podcasting has a shape, and a first-time podcaster deserves to see it.
One editor, not four¶
Four workflow steps — edit the audio, insert music, correct the transcript, mark the chapters — open the same screen with a different pane in focus. Tracks and their waveforms on top, chapters on the same timeline, the transcript below as a document.
The transcript behaves like a word processor, not a table of rows. The caret follows playback and playback follows the caret. Every edit in this screen can be made from the keyboard:
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
Ctrl Space |
play / pause |
Tab |
jump to the next correction suggestion |
Alt S |
change the speaker of this turn |
Ctrl ↵ |
chapter at the playhead |
Ctrl ⇧ S |
split the clip at the playhead |
F2 |
rename the chapter |
The command palette¶
Ctrl K from anywhere. It searches the commands — every action in Podlibre is one — then the
open show's episodes by title, ranked with recency, so yesterday's episode comes before last
year's. Typing nothing lists what you were last working on.
Both halves are matched the same way: letters in order, anywhere, the way an editor does it, so
lsds finds Le son du silence. Each group keeps a share of the list, because a shell with
eight commands in it would otherwise push every episode out of sight.
Asking a local model a question from the same box is intended, and arrives with the models in Milestone 3. There is no model in this version, so the palette does not pretend to offer one.
The palette is not a shortcut for experts bolted onto a menu system. It is the primary way to reach anything, and the menus are a second view of the same registry.
Keyboard¶
Every command the palette lists shows its keystroke beside it, which is how people stop needing the palette for the things they do constantly.
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
Ctrl+K |
Open the command palette. Ctrl+Shift+P does the same |
Ctrl+B |
Show or hide the sidebar |
Ctrl+D |
Bookmark the episode on screen |
Ctrl+Q |
Quit |
Ctrl+P is deliberately not the palette: it stays Print, which is what it is everywhere else.
Tasks¶
Everything slow is listed, with progress and a Stop button, and a line along the bottom of the window shows what is running without interrupting anything. A failed task says what failed and what it means — "The server answered 404. The episode imported without its audio." — not an error code.
Themes and language¶
One light theme and one dark, following the system by default. Six languages at launch: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.