Amarok Blog

Tuesday, May 31. 2005

Hairstyle update

Ok, hairstyle updated during a party (yes, it is meant to be a joke *g*):

Posted by eean in eean at 13:34

Saturday, May 28. 2005

During the last days I've been working on a new browser-sidebar for amaroK. In amaroK 1.2 we have been using a standard KMultiTabBar in VSNET mode, which means it showed icons by default, and the descriptive text is only shown for the active tab. For quite some time we've been thinking that this solution had some usability issues. The icons were very small and hard to distinguish, and quite often you clicked the wrong tab in the heat of the moment.

Clearly we needed another solution, so I started a series of experimental commits for replacing the KMultiTabBar. We went through QToolBox and KJanusWidget, but both proved to be unsuitable for our needs, namely they use too much valuable screen estate. QToolBox eats a lot of vertical space, while KJanusWidget gets unacceptably wide with its horizontal text.

So we did some brainstorming, and Leinir came up with the idea to go with a modified KMultiTabBar widget. I've imported the source into amaroK and added a custom style with dedicated painting code, along with some other modifications. I'm quite happy with the new solution. We've improved on the original style in several ways:

All tabs have the same height, evenly spread over the full widget height. Makes it easier to press a tab, looks better and maximizes space utilization.

The active tab is clearly distinguishable by its highlighted background color.

A mouseover animation (glowing effect) increases the iCandy level and provides visual cues.

I think it looks quite cool, and it's also more learnable and usable than the old widget.

Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 09:40 | Comments (42) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, May 25. 2005

Cue Support and Coincidences

Yesterday, we received a patch for amaroK for simple cue file support. Very cool!

Many thanks to Martin Ehmke!

It really is a small world. Two days ago i took a look at worldwide.kde.org, and felt so lonely, being the only KDE developer in Syndey. As these things happen, yesterday I was in my Operating Systems class when I discovered that the person sitting behind me was the one and only Clarence of KolourPaint fame. Heh, small world.

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 21:06 | Comments (9)

Sunday, May 22. 2005

Smart Playlists

Untouchable just commited to SVN! You know what this means?!

Smart Playlists are now EDITABLE! Woo! you're the man, Untouchable.

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 03:34 | Comments (15) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, May 21. 2005

amaroK: We like to hear from you

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been numerous discussions, opinions and evaluations of the usability of amaroK.
At the amaroK HQ, we believe this to be one of the critical factors in maintaining amaroK's appeal to the community, and getting to know how users best respond to different features, implementations and the quirks which they have. A large part of requests which we had we believed to be handy, but were unable to implement them ourselves for various reasons. We wanted to have such a wide range of functionality, so we gave users the script manager. These scripts range as widely from outbound-streaming, transcoders to remote web interfaces. Allow users to download scripts via the interface, and, BAM!, we have a winner.

Some of the more 'pressing' issues with amaroK are some of the tabs. We have had many discussions about what to do with them. The 'Home' section of the context browser is useless, wastes space and is difficult to read, use and interpret. We hope to solve this by replacing it with a Statistics section. If anybody would like to help us redesign, or if you have any ideas, why don't you visit the wiki?

What about users who don't have an iPod? What is the point of the tab? Nothing, I suppose. We would like to make this into a general media device accessing interface, with support for multiple devices, including those chinese usb-flash storage devices. I'm sure they are useful. No, really.

I personally experienced great grief with the Playlist Browser. Playlists were cool to use, but Smart playlists where difficult to use, there was a fixed stream entry, and so much space was wasted. Smart playlists are, after all, a type of playlists. Why separate them? Many users suggested the ability to add streams, remove default streams and smart playlists, amongst other great ideas. For those of you using 1.3-SVN, you will know that Party Mode config is in an akward location, unintelligable and has a steep learning curve. I have started moving this to the playlist browser, and it seems to fit well. If you want to try SVN out, beware that this section is under heavy development and there are plenty of non-functionalities. Although, let us know how to improve it.

The playlist browser is the first of a number of improvements you will see coming towards our upcoming 1.3 release, and be assured that we love to hear criticism about the application (we love thanks as well!!!). Remember, no matter how anti some of the developers are to some ideas, we all have our (usually) good reasons - feel free to ask us why we won't do something.

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 00:38 | Comments (59)

Friday, May 13. 2005

How we will take over the world

Good news!

Phase one of taking over the world is nearly complete! the amaroK users audioscrobbler group has surpassed to over 2000 members. This ranks us as the second largest group in the Audioscrobbler/Last Fm network. amaroK is only 120 users short of position one, and is also the fifth highest submission plugin.

You know, I'm not even too sure why this is so exciting, but it just is.

Now, where to build the secret development lair...

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 20:10 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

amaroK on MacOS X

Kudos to the Fink Project!

I installed most of KDE and a fresh svn-version of amaroK on my iBook today. Worked pretty much without a problem. I just needed taglib and the gstreamer packages from fink's experimental repository (thanks RangerRick) and a small patch for amaroK.

Hooray!

...muesli

Posted by in muesli at 02:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, May 12. 2005

amaroK Live a Huge Success - Over 9,000 Downloads

Well, I am totally blown away by the fact that we have had 9,118 downloads of amaroK Live from all sources, ftp, http and bittorrent. This is far more than i was expecting, and it is very exciting.

So, with the first one being so successful, planning must begin on how to top it for the 1.3 release of amaroK. Several ideas have been discussed with regard to acquiring music to include, and I have settled on approaching Magnatune first about sponsoring it by providing 16 tracks that we would have permission to distribute. I have sent them a letter and we await their response.

Other ideas included putting out a general call for music, kind of like how the last icon was developed, or doing a friends and family edition, where musicians that the amaroK devs know would get featured. Ultimately, I think doing a joint promotion with another group that would have an interest in success is the way to go.

As far as features go, I'd love to hear all your ideas, either in the amaroK Live forum, here in the comments, posted to the amaroK-devel mailing list or brought up in #amarok on freenode.

Posted by Greg Meyer in oggb4mp3 at 23:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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