freespirit

So, thought it was time to post another little update on my work on Amarok2, and as a bonus throw in a bunch of screenshots!

Having "ported" the Magnatune store to the new service framework as discussed in the articel The Road to KDE 4: Amarok 2 Development is Underway, it was time to add some new features for a change. I recently found out that Magnatune has added a descriptive note about many of their albums to their site, and when I asked, they were happy to add this info to the XML file I use so this info could also be displayed in Amarok. Nothing revolutionary, but still a nice little addition I think.

When Magnatune added the album notes to the XML files, they also added "mood" tags to many of their individual tracks. A track can be tagged with several moods that somehow all relates to the track. One track could for instance have the moods: "track has vocals", "sexy", "night or nocturnal", "menacing", "dark", "mysterious or strange".

I really wanted to be able to display these moods in a nice way as they provide an excellent way to start exploring the very diverse Magnatune catalog, but I could not find a way to do this in the current Magnatune Store gui. So I decided to try something entirely new. Seb recently introduced a new proposal for how to handle the Context View. Instead of using a HTML part, the new prototype uses a Qt4 QGraphicsView. This allows for a whole range of new ways of displaying context data. To try this out, and learn something new in the process, I created a simple cloud view to show weighted items. In this cloud view the Magnatune Store can display moods weighted by the number of occurrences in tracks of each mood. Clicking one of these moods adds 10 random Magnatune preview songs tagged with the selected mood to the playlist. The result looks something like this:



For now the cloud only shows moods with more than 20 occurrences. There are MANY different moods in the Magnatune database, and displaying them all would make the cloud view a couple of pages long... To spice things up a bit, I added a nice little fade effect when moving the mouse through the cloud. The following picture does not really do this effect justice, but it gives the impression of what I mean:



These are just the small things that I am playing around with at the moment. There are many really cool things happening with regards to Amarok2 at the moment, so we all have something to look forward to!