Suggestion: Improve Star Browsing's star selection UI

[AstroChara]

Currently the mobile star browsing UI only displays a list of stars without additional information, unlike Windows version which (if I recall correctly) contains useful information like distance of the star from the camera, the spectral type, and the apparent magnitude, in the list itself. This makes it difficult to find stars with desired properties if you are not familiar with the names in the list, a situation that comes up rather often in Celestia.

[Anthony-B-Russo10]

The Windows star browser also has the star's absolute magnitude listed as well.

[levinli303]

The mobile star browser is inside a narrow window overlay, which makes it difficult to fit a multi-column table (require sufficient width to look great) inside. So we might still need to avoid using table layout while providing more info.

One possible way is to show them as cards

---------------------
|.   Star Browser   |
---------------------
|.Star A            |
| Distance:  xxly   |
| App mag: xxx      |
| ...               |
---------------------
---------------------
|.Star B            |
| Distance:  xxly   |
| App mag: xxx      |
| ...               |
---------------------

[AstroChara]

The mobile star browser is inside a narrow window overlay, which makes it difficult to fit a multi-column table (require sufficient width to look great) inside. So we might still need to avoid using table layout while providing more info.

One possible way is to show them as cards

---------------------
|.   Star Browser   |
---------------------
|.Star A            |
| Distance:  xxly   |
| App mag: xxx      |
| ...               |
---------------------
---------------------
|.Star B            |
| Distance:  xxly   |
| App mag: xxx      |
| ...               |
---------------------

This does look good to me. The idea is to show important information about stars in one place without having to click (multiple times, and having to select the star itself too), that can waste a lot of time.

[levinli303]

To make the card layout look good, we need an image of the stars of the spectral type as a background. two example images we can model after from Sky Guide.

Sky Guide's star browser only show app mag in Brightest. So... we can also show only app mag in Brightest, only distance in Closest which has a simple title-subtitle layout instead of a card layout with more info.

[AstroChara]

I like the small icon idea, though I wonder if this icon can be made to be tinted by the color of the star itself, or if we have to make one picture file for each spectral type...

[levinli303]

Apparently Sky Guide's not using tinting for the icons, its app bundle contains multiple icons. the number of types is limited.

for the larger header image, they seem to have one image per spec type.