Amarok Blog

Wednesday, February 28. 2007

KDE4: Backstage

The system tray is a limitedand valued realestate. Besides that it is extremely limited, smal icons make it hard to aim and actions can only be added in a menu, usualy right click menu, which is a problem all by itself.
But the problem is there are a lot of apps that use it as a mini taskbar. Like amarok, kontact, kopete, ... to many to name. And then there's superkaramba with widgets to control programs like amarok and other widgets to display feeds.
There's an opportunity here, what to do if programs want to remain running without a window open? Minimize them to the desktop as a widget. Of course this is not new, it's a concept used in CDE and probably others, they just create a icon on the desktop. But this is something different, so bear with me.

I call this concept Backstage, it would be a part of plasma and a there would be a framework to create Backstage widgets as easy as creating a system tray icon.

As example: the backstage widget for amarok

When sitting idle on the desktop and amarok is not playing the widget would look like the big amarok icon without the buttons.
If you move the mouse over the widget the actions swirl around the icon and stop where they are in the image.
When a track is playing the artist and title would rotate around it and the progress is visible by the percentage of the icon that is in grayscale.
Clicking on the action buttons does the expected thing, clicking somewhere else on the widget restores the amarok main window.

Practically I would implement this with animated SVG's for the graphics, Python for the behavior and DCOP for the communication with the parent application.

Off course the system tray doesn't need to dissapear completely but at least KDE4 apps that run in the background should have a backstage widget and let the user decide.

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 13:33 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Sony-Ericsson K610i + HBH-DS970, a Linux users experience

This isn't a full review of either the phone nor the stereo Bluetooth headset, for a detailed report with pictures and the works read: mobile-review.com k610i and bengalboy about the HBH-DS970 headset

The K610i is 3G candybar feature-phone (not smartphone) with Bluetooth 2.0 , 2 MegaPixel camera and a low-res. camera in the front for video calls.
The kind of phone I was looking for should have:

A2DP support for using a stereo Bluetooth headset.
camera >= 2.0 MegaPixel
media player application (guess that comes with the A2DP)
preferably a smartphone for replacing the mediaplayer if necessary.

The K610i was actually the cheapest phone on my list, unfortunately it's not a smartphone.
It came without headphones. I didn't bother buying a wired, and pretty expensive, Sony-Ericsson stereo headphone, but ordered the HBH-DS970 A2DP stereo Bluetooth headphones from Expansys.

A quick explanation about A2DP:
The Advance Audio Distribution Profile is a recent addition to the standardized Bluetooth profiles and is possible to implement on devices with Bluetooth 1.2 or higher. It allows CD quality stereo sound to be send from a A2DP source (the phone) to a A2DP sink (the stereo-headset). In addition to that most A2DP capable devices support the Audio/Video Remote Control Profile support (AVRCP) which allows the mediaplayer to be controlled using the headsets build in buttons.

I've been using both devices for over a month now, mostly for listening to podcasts. So far I'm very pleased with them. The headsets battery last a least a full day with about 3 hours of listening, half an hour of talking and the rest in stand-by. I wasn't expecting anything more of a small necklace like device weighing only 27 grams.
The mediaplayer application on the K610i is definitely more geared towards music and doesn't support podcasts at all, neither does the windows software that came with it. You can create playlists on the phone but those are not saved as files.

In good Sony-Ericsson style the phone is fully standard compliant, supporting the OBEX Object Exchange protocol over Bluetooth, Infrared (IrDA) and USB connections. Among the supported OBEX methods is ObexFTP, obex push and SyncML over OBEX. This is good news for us Linux users since it insures compatibility with free and opensource software.
Browsing files on the phone can be done in 2 ways, Mass-storage device mode or OBEX transfer. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

The mass-storage mode is fast, using the phone as a USB2.0 card reader for the Memory Stick Micro inside. The biggest problem with this approach is that none of the phone functions are available while in mass-storage mode, so no phone-calls or listening to music. Also, on time of writing, the USB mass-storage driver in the ubuntu 6.06 shipped kernel fails to write all blocks to the MSMicro card, resulting a data loss and preventing safe unmounting. This will probably be fixed in more recent kernels.

I use a recent version of OpenObex to transfer podcast episodes to the phone with ObexFTP over USB2.0. This allows all phone functions to be used while transfering files. It is the same method used by the File Manager that's part of the windows software suit. Transfers over OBEX are slower though, just over 1 MB per second. Meaning a 30 MB file, quite common for a podcast would take almost half a minute. This is no problem for me because I use the USB cable to charge the phone and letting it transfer the files while doing other things. But I can imagine the frustration when you would like to quickly transfer a few files before leaving.

I automated the transfer of podcasts to the phone using a Python script found here. In Amarok I copy the files to a temporary folder using the generic mediadevice plugin, after which the script is used as the post-disconnect command (see screenshot). Transfered files are deleted from the tmp folder.

On my todo list is a Java 2 Mobile Edition application for playing audio files that maintains a playlist and a supporting mediadevice plugin. The idea is that played files are removed from the playlist. The Amarok plugin can then delete the old episodes from the phone and mark the as listened in the database.

If anyone want to volunteer for writing the J2ME player, the mediadevice plugin or improving the transfer script, send me a mail at bart [.] cerneels [@] gmail [.] com.

Suggestions are welcome in the comments (moderated for SPAM reasons).

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 13:33 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

KDE4: actions menu

Task driven menu for applications.
Have a "actions" menu in every kde application containing the most common actions you can do with it. ex. Amarok: "Play Media", "Play Audiocd", "Quit". When using the desktop menubar the actions menu gets renamed to the application name. See my previous post to see why that is useful.
Every user is different so it could change the order of the actions menu depending on the users usage of those actions. It can even insert actions that are not there by default. I guess most items in a well designed menu can end up in the actions menu. The developers have to tag menu items as actions but only a few of them (most used or default) end up in the actions menu. And, since automation seems to be bad usablility wise (according to Ellen), users and developers are able to pin items to the menu.
If you are shouting "this is similar to XP's start menu or the Kickoff menu". You are right, only on a single application level and much finer grained.

Comments are welcome

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 13:33 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

KDE4: Improved desktop menubar

I use the desktop menubar all the time. Mainly because it saves some vertical pixels on every window, very useful on my widescreen laptop. I looks cleaner to.
For those of you that don't know what it is. The desktop menubar shows the menu of the focused application (instead of in the top of the applications main window). It's a feature borrowed from MacOS.
unfortunately unlike in apple's OS the menubar doesn't contain the name of the application the menu belongs to. That creates some confusion for those not used to it and sometimes irritates me.

I suggest that in KDE4, instead of the usual "File" menu (or in amarok 1.4-svn "Engage") be changed to the applications name when using a desktop menubar. Actually, isn't File a bad place to put the quit item? Settings would fit better in there to. KDElibs4 should just rename the first menu to the application-name or just add a icon in front of it like in the screenshot. I guess a lot more people will start using the menubar then.

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 13:33 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Honor system for BitTorrent

Say a vidcaster wants to earn some money with his content, or a great, but canceled, tv-series wants to make a comeback by publishing the episodes on the web. They could try advertising, but aren't the irritating ads the reason why we don't watch TV anymore? Maybe they can ask for a small fee to download the shows, right after they are produced. But would people pay if the show is for download on the P2P nets a few minutes later? Surely DRM is no solution, who in their right mind pays for a crippled file, that might not play on your favorite mediaplayer or portable device. For independent content producers, hosting large video files will be a problem to. Even if the show becomes popular, the income will not be enough to pay the bandwidth-bill.

The cost of distribution can be avoided when using BitTorrent with your own, private, tracker. And by using fingerprinting instead of DRM, customers can play the file on any player that supports the codec, without restrictions.

What I propose is to distribute the files over BitTorrent in a video format that uses keyframes, like xvid and other MPEG4 codecs.
When seeding a file BitTorrent chops it up in small blocks, some of these blocks will contain a complete keyframe. The blocks containing those keyframes are not distributed over BitTorrent but send to the subscriber individually. The BitTorent program will then add those blocks to the publicly distributed blocks and then assemble the complete file. The difference is that a fingerprint is added to the keyframes, identifying the subscriber. The fingerprint is visible but only until the next keyframe comes along, usually within 30 seconds. So transcoding will not remove the fingerprint and trying to mask it will obscure the video.

The content providers use a service that takes care of the BitTorrent trackers, the finger generation and payment.
Users of this service buy credits which they can use for every video that's distributed by the service.
After downloading the fingerprinted keyframes, a certain amount of credits is deducted from their account. If a user breaks the rules, leaks a file, and gets caught, he loses all of his remaining credits. If there aren't any credits left, the user gets excluded from the service for a while.

The big pluses:
Bandwidth cost are reduced with BitTorrent. No DRM is used, yet illegal distribution is discouraged by the honor system.
If similar fingerprinting techniques are possible for other kind of codecs, like mp3, they might be distributed in the same way.

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 13:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

first post

The best ideas are common property.
Seneca (5 BC - 65 AD), Epistles

I agree with the ancient roman guy, thats why I'll post the idea's I get on the most impractical times in the most awkward places on this blog.

I'm Bart Cerneels, a.k.a. Shanachie, a.k.a. stecchino, a electronics engineer, free and open-source enthusiast and KDE hacker.

Want to know what goes on in my head when my eye's turn glazed and I reach for my notebook? Read this blog!

Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 13:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

insert colourful verb here

I did something terrible. I attempted to update my gallery installation on the web server and I did a pretty good job of permanently erasing all of my photos which I had hosted. Adding insult to injury, I took a backup of the database, but I forgot to copy over the gallery data (images, etc). That got wiped hard and clean.

Because so much of my web server time was spent managing gallery and making sure it integrated into my blog, I’m not going to put myself through the pain all again. So I decided that I should use Flickr - the easy uploading, a kipi-plugin and the social reputation that could be made for myself was all the convincing that I needed. By the time I realised that non pro users can only show the 200 most recent photos, I had already commit to the service. Maybe I’ll upgrade. Probably worth it to know that I can sleep without worrying about deleting all my files. Do you have a flickr account? Befriend me!

Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 00:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, February 27. 2007

Announcing Video Player

KDE Commits prempted me (which is fine of course!

), but here is the official announcement of a video player I'm calling Video Player. The all-important screenshot:

If your a Codeine user and it looks familiar, thats the idea. Codeine is the "usability focus, simple video player" that Max Howell (of Amarok and Filelight fame) developed using KDE3 and xine-lib. What usability-focused means in this case is that menus have a limited number of options and that its simple to perform common tasks. This philosophy works really well for a video player. The first dialog pops up with the list of videos you watched. Select it and it remembers where you were in the movie, what size it was at etc. In other words, it keeps state. The (really fairly obvious, but somehow often missing) feature of remembering where I left off in a video was the killer feature of Codeine for me.

So I asked Max a couple of weeks ago if I could port Codeine to KDE4 and Phonon, and effectively become its maintainer. He was happy to see it continue on and has been helping explain some of its mysteries. The name Video Player is actually Max's idea... its simplicity appeals to me but its ungooglable so I'm not entirely wed to that name.

The port to KDE4 is going smoothly. It helped that Max made extensive use of actions, since Qt4 is more QAction-oriented. Max's style of avoiding pretty much any "copy and paste coding" (using helper functions and #define's) made porting easier as well.

Another advantage is that Phonon is really just a good API, and is spectacular compared to other multimedia APIs I've seen. I got it to the point where it showed just the first frame of video in Xine. After stripping Codeine of its Xine dependency, I looked at the Kaffeine4 code. Kaffeine4 is currently small and tutorial-sized so it was quite helpful. Adding Phonon support was quick work - it now plays video and everything. I've just been doing detail work since then.

And big thanks goes to Seb Ruiz for getting Video Player to actually link! Christoph Pfister has been helpful as I get into some Phonon development (as well as writing the aforementioned Kaffeine4).

There's still much work to be done, though I suspect its mostly in the Phonon and its engines.

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 13:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, February 26. 2007

The God Delusion

Just tonight I found a few videos on YouTube, which sum up the thoughts of my last blog entry about God, Religion and History just perfectly. YouTube rocks when it comes to documentaries.

Douglas Adams on religion and god.

Richard Dawkins' God Delusion documentary: (also check out his book!)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Posted by in muesli at 04:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Wednesday, February 21. 2007

6 Reasons You Will Love OpenID

Here are six reasons OpenID is great that other sites haven’t seemingly mentioned:

Convenience

Try out your OpenID on the new phpBB OpenID-enabled test forum. After a quick authentication with your OpenID provider, phpbb has created an account for you with all the details filled in.

No email back-and-forth. You can post your comment to a new forum/blog that requires registration with hardly any delay.
Withhold your email address

Email is generally not required for most OpenID-enabled sites currently. They no longer handle your password so the primary reason for requiring an email no longer exists.
Keep track of which sites have what information centrally

OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com keep track of which sites you’ve authenticated with and what data you gave them.
Stop typing in all your personal info again and again

Your OpenID provider will give the site you’re logging in to the data. Registration is practically instant. You decide what info is provided too. Don’t trust the site? Don’t provide them with your postcode or email address then.
Reputation

Your OpenID can actually build up a reputation because it is linked to you. Nobody can masquerade as you unless they can guess your password. So you should make it a good one
Site-wide registration

Another cool benefit of OpenID will be sites like archlinux.org, or kde.org which currently have 5 or 6 separate services that require separate registration and logon. With OpenID you can authorise the entire domain, then each service, provided it has OpenID support would automatically be authenticated.

People seem a little scared of OpenID, but I’ve been using it for a few months and I find it to be absolutely a step forward in how I use the Internet. I’m having more fun now with OpenID as I can sign up for fun little services with no qualms about registration or what data I’m handing over.

If you want a quick and easy OpenID, try FreeYourID.com, you get an ID of the form firstname.lastname.name, it’s free, no credit-card details are taken, and you can start using it straight away. I already registered http://max.howell.name, so bad luck if you wanted to annoy me

Fun OpenID-enabled sites to try:

http://jyte.com

http://stikis.com

http://imakemistakes.com

None of these sites require anything other than authentication, so they are fun and hassle free.

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 12:09 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

6 Reasons You Will Love OpenID

Here are six reasons OpenID is great that other sites haven’t seemingly mentioned:

Convenience

Try out your OpenID on the new phpBB OpenID-enabled test forum. After a quick authentication with your OpenID provider, phpbb has created an account for you with all the details filled in.

No email back-and-forth. You can post your comment to a new forum/blog that requires registration with hardly any delay.
Withhold your email address

Email is generally not required for most OpenID-enabled sites currently. They no longer handle your password so the primary reason for requiring an email no longer exists.
Keep track of which sites have what information centrally

OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com keep track of which sites you’ve authenticated with and what data you gave them.
Stop typing in all your personal info again and again

Your OpenID provider will give the site you’re logging in to the data. Registration is practically instant. You decide what info is provided too. Don’t trust the site? Don’t provide them with your postcode or email address then.
Reputation

Your OpenID can actually build up a reputation because it is linked to you. Nobody can masquerade as you unless they can guess your password. So you should make it a good one
Site-wide registration

Another cool benefit of OpenID will be sites like archlinux.org, or kde.org which currently have 5 or 6 separate services that require separate registration and logon. With OpenID you can authorise the entire domain, then each service, provided it has OpenID support would automatically be authenticated.

Fun OpenID-enabled sites to try:

http://jyte.com

http://stikis.com

http://imakemistakes.com

None of these sites require anything other than authentication, so they are fun and hassle free.

Comments here pls!

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 07:09

Friday, February 16. 2007

Wocka 0.5 Released

I have released a new version of Wocka.

I rewrote it in D. I thought I’d love D and I do. And I’m sure I’ve written better less buggy code with it.

Fortunately it introduces no new dependencies, and I lose the Qt dependency that was fairly unpopular.

I fixed the bugs, made it more robust, and added –set-version, –set-name, and some other things like package revision incrementation when you –upgrade.

Packages are available here.

Comments here pls!

Posted by Max Howell in mxcl at 22:02

Wednesday, February 14. 2007

History Visualized

Stumbled upon two animations today, which I found quite fascinating:

1. The spread of religion over 2000 years.

Amazing how unimportant Christianity was for most of our history. Sometimes I wish we would have kept it like that. Then again I actually loathe most religions - they just attract too much hatred, superstition and extremism. One would assume that people in the 21st century should be a little too intelligent to fall for something like that. Don't get me wrong, I believe in ethics and logical thinking. But I don't need stories of water to wine, god(s), angels and Noah with his Ark to convince me that charity is a good thing and to make me not murder my neighbor.

2. 5000 years of history: Empires in the Middle East.

Don't think religions spread hatred and cause wars? Well, just have a look at this animation here. Want to guess how many of those empires were founded on (mis-)believe and hatred? How many deaths were caused in innumerable wars? I don't. Wake up, don't believe the lies and make up your own mind. The time for religions is long overdue.

Oh and please... don't even bother telling me about creationism - that's just ridiculous and an offense to your intellect. For me all those creationism-believers pretty much prove that we descend from apes indeed.

...muesli

Posted by in muesli at 06:10 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Monday, February 12. 2007

Magnatune integration and Amarok2 progress

As a relative newcomer to the Amarok project, I thought it was high time that I posted a little blog about my work on the project.

I wrote the integrated Magnatune store that was included in Amarok 1.4.4 and have been maintaining and improving this part of Amarok since. Originally just a silly little "what if" idea, it quickly grew into a pretty big project in its own right, and for me this has been a tremendous learning experience.

Currently, as you no doubt know if you are reading this, we are busy porting Amarok to Qt4 and KDE4. My main focus is of course the porting of the Magnatune store. All in all it appears the the Magnatune store has survived the switch to Qt4/KDE4 with very little adverse effect compared to some other parts of Amarok. Below is a screenshot of the Magnatune store as it currently looks in Amarok2 (which is very similar to the way it looks in 1.4.5).

A number of things still do not work, but it is currently possible to download the Magnatune database, browse tracks and get info about artists and albums. Playing preview tracks do not work as Amarok2 still cant handle streams and purchasing only works right up to the point where the actual download is to take place (which is a bit of a drag if you have just payed for an album... Good thing the confirmation email has already been sent at this point!).

It will take a while to get the music store fully functional in Amarok2, but when that is done, I have a number of ideas for improvements, from minor additions such as a parser for pre Amarok Magnatune purchases emails so these albums can be added to the re-download manager, to major undertakings such as a more generic framework for adding online music stores/services to Amarok.

On a more general note, I am really exited about the move to Qt4/KDE4 as it should enable a series of exiting new features for Amarok and allow us to reach more people through ports to additional platforms which will hopefully allow more people the experience an alternative to the mainstream record labels. It probably won't instantly revolutionize the music industry, but one can dream...

Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen in freespirit at 15:31 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Why DOS uses backslashes instead of slashes.

Larry Osterman tells the entire story: simply because slashes were already used for parameters before DOS even knew what a path or a directory is. Nice read and a trip down memory lane.

Posted by in muesli at 04:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

(Page 1 of 2, totaling 21 entries) » next page