On Apr 3, 2009, at 7:19 PM, Stephen F. Booth wrote:

> I'm writing a CD audio extractor (http://sbooth.org/Rip/), and I've
> been struggling a bit with the user interface that is shown while
> extraction is taking place. I have already been through two
> iterations, and the current state of affairs looks like:
http://sbooth.org/Rip/images/extraction-view.png
>
> I think that the one thing that really bugs me about the layout is
> the placement of the cancel button- but I can't for the life of me
> figure out a better place to put it. I'd thought about moving it
> to a menu item, but I don't feel that would be immediately
> accessible, nor an obvious place for users to look.

You can put it into the menu and give them nice play and stop icons.
Next you could try to place it at the right of the progress bar.

> I also feel that the Elapsed Time/C2 errors/ETA are not visually
> distinct.

The cancel button and the text labels really look misplaced, you're
right. It seems that you wanted to center them somehow, but they
shouldn't be this way. Do you really need so many labels? Wouldn't it
be easier to display the information at just one point (e.g. at the
bottom of the window / above or below the progress bar?)

> Embedding them in a box didn't look quite right, given the cancel
> button in close proximity.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?

In addition to changing the position of the text labels and cancel
button I would suggest that you place the tracks in one list. While I
get that this is easier to see how many tracks are already completed,
it somehow makes no sense to split them. Why not go the iTunes way and
just add the checkmark? The checkmark is easy to see and you would
have one list less. The checkmark plus the second list feels to
redundant for me.

Rafael