Sunday, February 27. 2005on Equalizer's
I went to a Barnes and Noble (a large book store with comfy chairs) yesterday and to my present surprise they had the Qt book from Trolltech. I read most of chapter 8, the one on QCanvas. It was quite an exciting read (really!). Got me thinking about amaroK's equalizer. Personally I find it cumbersome to use, it seems like it (and pretty much all computer equalizers) limit themself to being an analogy to the real world equalizer. However last year on my computer, aRTs had this really nifty equalizer that worked kind of like a line graph. You could define points on the line and drag them around, it was really the first equalizer that I found worth using. It came in handy when I DJed for a dance. Since then, I really don't know what happened to this aRTs plugin, I can't find the source for it anywhere.
So after wrestling with the KDevelop C++ template last night (it doesn't work with unsermake for some reason) I have successfully drawn a line across a qcanvas. I plan on developing it as a separate app and putting it into amaroK somehow when it is done. I'm not sure how it should integrate itself into amaroK, since the current equalizer has the advantage of being very simple to figure out. We've missed you mxcl! 
Sunday, February 27. 2005on Equalizer'sI went to a Barnes and Noble (a large book store with comfy chairs) yesterday and to my present surprise they had the Qt book from Trolltech. I read most of chapter 8, the one on QCanvas. It was quite an exciting read (really!). Got me thinking about amaroK's equalizer. Personally I find it cumbersome to use, it seems like it (and pretty much all computer equalizers) limit themself to being an analogy to the real world equalizer. However last year on my computer, aRTs had this really nifty equalizer that worked kind of like a line graph. You could define points on the line and drag them around, it was really the first equalizer that I found worth using. It came in handy when I DJed for a dance. Since then, I really don't know what happened to this aRTs plugin, I can't find the source for it anywhere. So after wrestling with the KDevelop C++ template last night (it doesn't work with unsermake for some reason) I have successfully drawn a line across a qcanvas. I plan on developing it as a separate app and putting it into amaroK somehow when it is done. I'm not sure how it should integrate itself into amaroK, since the current equalizer has the advantage of being very simple to figure out. We've missed you mxcl!  Sunday, February 27. 2005Backtrace Frenzy
I was away for 9 days and I return to an amazing amount of decent commits for 1.2.1, and 500 backtraces (700 before I deleted all the ones for beta4, which I can't afford the time to read).
Gah! I'll prioritise those for 1.2.1-CVS as those ones have better subjects (new code). It's impossible to say what percentage of users this 700 emails represents.. Still I better crack on, 100% stability is a nice goal.. 1.2.1 is out today, we've done good work once more I think The toolbar was rearranged due to asiego's comment (I assume). It does make sense to have the play buttons on the left, so we'll give him that  Still I disagree that the play button is the most used button. For some people perhaps this is true, but I think most people will press it once per session or maybe never (double-clicking instead). If you have resume-playback activated you may even have sessions when you never click it at all.In fact, that's a good point. The play button in the playlist should activate the listview's current-item. Currently it restarts the currently-playing track. Funny how nobody has ever bug-reported us on that one. This is actually tricky to fix, I know markey is rather keen on the restart-track behaviour. Tuesday, February 22. 2005Introduction
As first post to another new blog, I will describe what kind of posting you will find here:
90% amaroK related postings, 10% KDE related postings. Small references to personal stuff may be inserted for context, but frankly I find it hard to care about what happens in my personal life and I'm sure you all feel the same! I hope you choose to subscribe
Tuesday, February 22. 2005amaroK 1.2 - It Crashes Somewhat Less
I'm really pleased with amaroK 1.2. We all worked our socks off the last few weeks, fixing crashes, fixing bugs, tweaking and polishing.
Our new crash-handler really helped to get the crash-count down. Now when amaroK crashes it gets KDE to show a mail-composition window (with whichever e-mail client KDE is configured to use). The email text apologises for the crash and then lists various versions (CC, TagLib, KDElibs, etc.) and requests that the user describe what they did immediately before the crash. We then attach a gdb backtrace and some other details. This really works because:
For 1.2-beta4 we were getting 50 backtrace emails a-day. Which was hard to manage. Now we are getting less (I've been away for 6 days, before I left it was much less, and may still be now), and what we are getting appear to mostly be crashes in widget-styles or other libraries, which means it isn't (hopefully) amaroK's fault. Although I follow them through to be sure we don't pass a null-pointer or something obvious. I think perhaps we will disable the crash-handler for the early 1.3-betas as it is a lot of work sifting through the reports. At least how the system stands currently. I spent a lot of time polishing amaroK in various places, and for 1.2.1/2 I'd like to do a lot more of that. More help tips, more feedback for clicking slow-things, more aesthetic tweaking. More listening to users to figure out what parts of amaroK aren't intuitive or need more work. Suggestions are welcome
Friday, February 18. 2005 |
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