Amarok Blog

I've spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I'll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I'm always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying "amaroK is a joy to use!" than "amaroK sucks!" Which is very rewarding.

Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don't object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What's scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It's funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way.

There's always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK's life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can't remember. Recently I've heard a surprising amount of "how do I put music in it!". I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me:

It's the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop
to the playlist (it's even labelled "the playlist" in big letters on first-ever-run), or use the usual shortcut for open, CTRL-O. We even added a help text for 1.2.0 that shows in the playlist the first time you run it, it explains how to add music to the playlist. Probably it needs improvement. I really want XP style bubble help tips and have half written a cool class to do this. Then I'd add these to all the browsers, and widgets that have cool hidden features, and to stuff that could do with some further explanation.

When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I'm going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It's funny, but once you've cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, "wow that was easy to install!" I just noticed one day that I was spending a lot less time helping people fix their amaroK. But when you think about it, that's human nature really.

I'd like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks!

I’ve spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I’ll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I’m always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying “amaroK is a joy to use!” than “amaroK sucks!” Which is very rewarding.

Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don’t object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What’s scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It’s funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way.

There’s always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK’s life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can’t remember. Recently I’ve heard a surprising amount of “how do I put music in it!”. I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me:

It’s the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop

to the playlist (it’s even labelled “the playlist” in big letters on first-ever-run), or use the usual shortcut for open, CTRL-O. We even added a help text for 1.2.0 that shows in the playlist the first time you run it, it explains how to add music to the playlist. Probably it needs improvement. I really want XP style bubble help tips and have half written a cool class to do this. Then I’d add these to all the browsers, and widgets that have cool hidden features, and to stuff that could do with some further explanation.

When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I’m going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It’s funny, but once you’ve cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, “wow that was easy to install!” I just noticed one day that I was spending a lot less time helping people fix their amaroK. But when you think about it, that’s human nature really.

I’d like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks!

Go somewhere like the All Music Guide and you won't be able to find a single artist, album or track that is defined by a single genre. In fact I can never decide what genre to classify my music as. And worse is that I have loads of music that MusicBrainz assigns genres I have't a clue about! What is "acid house"?

Music players are so behind. amaroK needs to actively support and encourage multiple genres per album/track. When I search for dance music I want all my dance music, even that "acid house" stuff.

I have no time to support this feature this release, so I sincerely hope someone else fancies implementing it. May I suggest scanning the All Music Guide to obtain the genre lists? Thanks! (Also please implement a disc number feature, and make it so amaroK removes suffixes like "[Dis(k|c) 1]" and prefixes like "The ", thanks!)

Go somewhere like the All Music Guide and you won’t be able to find a single artist, album or track that is defined by a single genre. In fact I can never decide what genre to classify my music as. And worse is that I have loads of music that MusicBrainz assigns genres I have’t a clue about! What is “acid house”?

Music players are so behind. amaroK needs to actively support and encourage multiple genres per album/track. When I search for dance music I want all my dance music, even that “acid house” stuff.

I have no time to support this feature this release, so I sincerely hope someone else fancies implementing it. May I suggest scanning the All Music Guide to obtain the genre lists? Thanks! (Also please implement a disc number feature, and make it so amaroK removes suffixes like “[Dis(k|c) 1]” and prefixes like “The “, thanks!)