Sunday, May 28. 2006Face-lifting amaroK
At K4M, we decided that amaroK's context view should get a more prominent place. After some discussion, a tabbed Playlist/Context/Wiki/Lyrics view seemed to be the way to go. So we just did a dirty hack to try it out:
 This could somehow work, but Florian from Open Usability pointed a lot of problems, and we haven't been satisfied with the huge number of tabs either ("4 is just too many" is a recurring theme here). So we did a second try using a splitter:  This showed that actual code for experimenting is much better than just mock-ups. And it also showed us that we prefer this Kmail-like look - expect this to see in one of your next amaroK installs! Sunday, May 28. 2006More 2.0 than just amaroK!The K3M meeting has been supremely productive for all attendees. If you haven’t been reading up, the coolest things in amaroK have been: Vastly improved start times, inotify signals for collection scanning, porting to KDE/Qt4 (runs!!), UI redesigns and last.fm integrations. I’ve been pushing the notion of web services integration into amaroK for the last couple of days, and I’ll explain why now. With the introduction of web 2.0 not long ago, the internet has become much more than just a content provider - and now has a main functionality of providing a service to the user. Not what it can provide, but how, and with what value and benefits. Last.fm is a social music network which has many hundreds of thousands of users. Services which they provide include statistics of personal listening habits, neighbours, which are people with similar music habits, music tags, and ponies which recommend new music to bored and inquisitive listeners. Imagine the possibilities of providing such services directly from within amaroK. I’ll provide a small example. The audioscrobbler web services provide such as favourite and newest songs, by tag/user/group and more. By downloading the playlist containing the best rock songs, I can import it straight into my playlistbrowser. Some clever work and the playlist will only show the songs which I have in my collection that are also tagged favourites by last.fm users. This is really cool, because now I don’t ever need to browser my music and create playlists, since thousands of last.fm users know more than I do. The real power in importing playlists, however, isn’t particularly in showing the user what they already have in the collection, but rather what they may be missing. By importing the favourite rock songs, we can show the listener that there are another X amount of songs which they might like. Since last.fm provides perfectly legal radio streaming, we can offer the user a listen of the song. Awesome! This is just a small insight into some of the great services which are provided. Imagine more - automatic tagging of songs, labels, playlist generation, radio streaming, similar songs etc The future is promising! |
Amarok LinksCalendarQuicksearchCategoriesSyndicate This BlogBlog AdministrationWe Listen To... Powered by
|
