The Mac OS X playlist view’s column sizes are arbitrary, leading to unreadable data in individual rows
Figure 1: a common example.
I first pointed this issue out in a (snarky, obnoxious) offhand tweet; in all honesty, the lack of coherent notional sizes for the columns in VLC’s playlist/media-library view has been around for quite a long time (circa version 1.0, assuredly – but not as old as 0.5.3, the first version of VLC I can recall using, and one that lacked a “playlist” feature analogous to the contemporary IIRC).
In the snarky tweet, I made reference to auto-layout – but upon inspection of VLC’s codebase, as best as I can personally ascertain the columns in the VLCPlaylist objective-c class – a subclass of NSOutlineView – make use of an undocumented Apple API in that aforementioned parent class.
Since the corresponding XIB doesn't constrain these columns beyond the nominal, if I had to recommend anything, it’d be the depreciation of the use of the undocumented API calls in favor of a fully constraint-based set of definitions for those columns – which (as long as I’m wildly speculating) could possibly benefit from moving VLC’s layouts onto storyboards and away from XIBs.
N.B. calling my familiarity with the VLC codebase “passing” would be an embellishment – a better colloquialism would be a simple “we’ve met” – but so my assessments of where the issue lies and how it might be addressed are possibly entirely wrong and/or off-base… I’m just sayin.