At first, I was really put away by gmusicbrowser too (I hated the default UI and wanted to throw it into the garbage immediately), but then I gave it another try and found a feature that made this program amazing for me: layouts. You can hardly say that this program has one UI, because it's so amazingly modifiable. You can make it look completely different from the default UI, and there are a number of layouts that do exactly that.

Nowadays I happily use gmusicbrowser with the Shimmer Desktop layout, and perhaps you could like the Shimmer Netbook layout, if you want to find a media player that's suitable for usage on a netbook.

You didn't ask for a search function. (That much audio on the netbook?)
Bummer that you couldn't find the program you wanted.

What's wrong with wine + winamp 5?

I could bring up a search window. It just didn't do anything.

• Search function with such deliberately broken behavior that the developer should be ashamed of himself

• Dialogs with minimum sizes (larger than my screen) for no goddamn reason

• No random play

So yes. Full of Fail.

I think it would be good for graphical UIs to abstract away from specifics and just describe what is necessary to interact with the program. You don't need to specify pixel-by-pixel images, etc. You need to specify labels and inputs. That's all. That can be done very abstractly, leaving the implementation up to the platform in question, which knows its bounds and actual user shell. The only need for graphics is commercial "one-size fits all" brand-name software, which on a whole doesn't even fucking work anyway. I'm not all that impressed with GUIs in Linux either. Fortunately, there's numerous very effective and practical command shells which work very well. I use the GUI very little on any platform. I am satisfied with Amarok, but that's because I buy only good music (I throw away the CDs that I'm not satisfied with) so for the most part I'm satisfied regardless, even if that means software shuffling randomly throughout my entire library. I rarely care to skip a track.

99% of software attempts to mimic a basically accepted design anyway. The problem is that most companies/organizations have programmers attempting to build these UIs instead of designers. The end result is pixels that work on a developer's machine and not on the users'. A generic solution can move from CLI, to GUI, to phone portable (and beyond). The UI should be able to easily appear native to the platform. Basic UIs (including GUIs) are only composed of a few standard components anyway.

I'm not a designer so I don't know. I'm a programmer. I know the very least of HTML/CSS to get by. It's a rather poor abstraction, if you ask me. Most HTML/CSS authors (in my experience) don't understand the model and use pixels and various hacks to make things "work" on their given platform (e.g., <table>).

I only have very little experience with very rudimentary UIs, but with Qt it seems you can basically layout a form with various panels that automatically orient "children" a certain way. The result is that they are automatically mapped to a certain layout and size/move accordingly with the container.

I imagine it's far more complicated than it looks and probably breaks down with more complicated UIs (though as we all know, complicated is the wrong direction anyway). In any case, I rather liked the concept. There was no need for coordinates or pixels. It was just foo and bar and the layout was automatic. I rather liked it.

I haven't bothered to study it, but I imagine that XForms is an attempt to bring something similar to the XML-based world. Unfortunately, AFAIK, no browser currently supports it.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-layout/

None, as far as I know. The flexbox solves your stated problem more directly and is implemented by Webkit and Gecko.

But quite frankly, trying to turn HTML into an ambiguous XML document is silly.