Tuesday, May 31. 2005Damn beer Tuesday, May 31. 2005Damn beer Source: Tuesday, May 31. 2005Hairstyle updateOk, hairstyle updated during a party (yes, it is meant to be a joke *g*):  Saturday, May 28. 2005New sidebar for amaroK 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:
I think it looks quite cool, and it's also more learnable and usable than the old widget. Thursday, May 26. 2005Cue 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. Sunday, May 22. 2005Saturday, May 21. 2005amaroK: 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. Saturday, May 14. 2005Friday, May 13. 2005 |
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