Amarok Blog

As madpenguin will confirm, everytime I move house I vanish for months at a time. I do apologise for this, I'm not sure why it happens. Most likely it's just I find it hard to adjust to new places and new routines.

Things are going well for me now, in that I'm now being paid fulltime to write code in Qt 4 by an interesting upwards-going company (computer forensics), and I quite enjoy doing it too. But I miss KDE devlopment, and since I'm a Qt 4 master now, really want to do some KDE 4 stuff. But my Linux box is offline because my 19in monitor fizzled and broke a while ago, so all I've had for quite a while is my company laptop (which is pretty rocking, but runs only Windows XP).

Anyone got any monitor recommendations? I want one 1600x1200, or a widescreen LCD, or two 17in LCDs. The sooner I can get the monitors the sooner I can do stuff again. I have time, or I'll make time, and at the very least I'll stay logged into #amarok.

Qt 4

I write better code with Qt 4 I think. But often it takes more code, but the code is easier to read. The Qt foreach macro is wonderful. I love code like:

foreach( QString bah, QStringList() << "foo" << "bar" )

    qDebug()  << bah;

    o->addItem( bah );

}

The view delegate system is complicated, and the Qt3-esque QListView (QTreeWidget in Qt 4) is slow and has a poor (relative to the rest of Qt 4) and different (relative to Qt 3 QListView) interface. But amaroK 2 playlist will rock with model/view/delegates, if we even have a playlist in amaroK 2 (I assume we will! heh).

Codeine

I haven't forgotten Codeine, I'll be working on it fresh again as soon as I've got my new monitor(s).

Filelight

I think on Filelight often, I'll release 1.0 hopefully soon. Because I want to make a version for Windows too you see, so I have fresh motivation.

amaroK

First thing I'll do is make a volume element psuedo-plugin for xine-engine, and hopefully that will get me back into regular development. This feature is needed for better fade in/out in the bottom 5% of the volume range. Currently xine only offers volume adjustment at integer values from 0 to 100, and since people hear things on a logarithmic scale, the lowest volume fade section sounds bad. Also I noticed Winamp copied our fade-out on exit feature, and they do it better, and I can’t have that because Winamp is teh suckz0r.