well, I'm not a graphic designer by profession, but i think i can give some suggestions to improve the usability of the client.
The option "GUI mode" is great, but i think we can do better by improving the icons and the interaction with the user.
I created a few mockups to give you an idea of how to change some aspects.
The new main interface:
- Big icons, flat, simple, without chrome and shadows, where the icon mean or remind what the label says.
- Only one Progress Bar on top to report ongoing operations (hashing, search, starting in progress, closing in progress...)
- Menu Bar useless. Many items can be placed inside More button. For closing NL there is X button on the right upper corner.
- Status Bar useless. For display only important messages, a notification dialog (with autohide) will be better.
- The views are organized on the tree on the left side.
- The options are organized in the space at the top.
- Grabbers / Searches / Player in the left are redundant, so you can make it unclickable. Only list of results will be clickable.
A search bar "intelligent" and clearly visible. The research is the lung of a p2p client, so it must have more space.
When the user get the focus on the search bar, the view changes automatically for showing additional settings and the list of searches:
It makes no sense to add an icon for each type of link .... only one BIG ADD icon: D
The next window allows you to decide on the type of link to add (ed2k, collection, torrent, magnet, loaded from the HD, grabber).
MORE contains LESS (:-P) used options (and for this they are grouped), and needs to be "smart", show options only if required by the view. We will see "twitter" and "about", but we will not see "clean completed" if we are in the statistics, or Open WebUI if we are already in Browser .... and so on.
Just my 2 cents. ;-)