Amarok Blog

Entries from March 2007

Tuesday, March 13. 2007

KDE4: actions menu Posted by Bart Cerneels in stecchino at 17:57

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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.

In Amarok we had the problem that users weren't finding the features we worked so hard to invent and implement just about every release. This actions menu could help the discoverability of otherwise hard to find but wonderful features without bothering them with things like "tip of the day" or that damn paperclip.

Comments are welcome

Tuesday, March 13. 2007

Podcast appliance Posted by Bart Cerneels in stecchino at 17:45

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Podcast appliance

Imagine a device dock, device in this case being a phone, iPod or any other media playing device, that is connected to the Internet and will download podcast episodes and put them on the device.

This piece of python code is supposed to run on an embedded device without storage. Just a small box that is connected to a docking station using USB. When a USB plug event is detected the main code queries the device specific Plugs for device presence. Podcasts are downloaded and stored directly on the device, without using any intermediate storage. When an episode is saved successfully it's status is saved in a database on the device. Listened episodes can be marked as such in the database. All configuration, database and storage is device dependant and implemented in a device plug.

I can envision more capabilities like BitTorrent support and integration with web-services and maybe an Amarok script to sync the database.

The code is very rudimentary, only 2 plugs are implemented:

local storage plug: for testing purposes, can be reused for devices that can be mounted with usb-storage.
ObexFTP plug: I plan to use this for uploading podcasts to my cellphone. It still uses temporary storage until I add the necessary code to ObexFTP and OpenOBEX.

I haven't put copyright information in the files yet. Mainly because it is using a lot of other code and I haven't bothered looking at the licences. Feel free to use this code anyway you like.

I plan to use this code to upload podcasts to my phone from many different computers and embedded platforms without running any commands manualy. That means PodcastGrabber has to run as a service, listening to USB events, I might use HAL for that, but I doubt HAL is very useful on low-storage embedded platforms.

Friday, March 9. 2007

Amarok2 with Oxygen icons Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 13:30

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Amarok2 with Oxygen icons

Today I've made Amarok2 use the new Oxygen icons from SVN trunk. Have a look:

I'm rather fond of Oxygen; I think it's an improvement over Crystal, and definitely feels refreshing. Unfortunately even Oxygen can't solve some of our fundamental problems with icons:

Amarok needs many very specific icons, like "Update Collection", "Cover Manager", or "Visualizations". We would need someone to create these icons for us.

Our release cycle is independent from KDE's. Sometimes we introduce a new feature that needs an icon. Relying purely on Oxygen, we would need to wait for the next KDE release to get a suitable icon.

The biggest problem: KDE allows users to switch to alternative icon themes. Most likely they're incomplete as far as Amarok is concerned.

Wednesday, March 7. 2007

VLC 0.9.0 Posted by in muesli at 13:02

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VLC 0.9.0

"Good news everyone", looks like VLC is going to ship with a Qt4-based GUI in the future. That means I can finally fix some issues with the clumsy VLC GUI, that annoyed me for so long on OS X.

I would imagine VLC could become the Qt4-project with the largest userbase shortly. A larger userbase results in a better product (usually), helping Trolltech ironing out bugs and finding out what developers really need. I really hope more projects are going to pick up Qt4 in the long-term for exactly those reasons.

...muesli

Monday, March 5. 2007

Evolution vs Creation Posted by in muesli at 09:24

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Evolution vs Creation

As a further follow-up to my last blog entry, The God Delusion, here is an American TV documentary named "Evolution vs Creation". It is rather pro-creationism and pro-christian and is full of hilarious claims like the Bible being a book of prooven facts: "The Bible has always been lightyears ahead of science".

Fancy a laugh? Give it a try:

Evolution vs Creation

Monday, March 5. 2007

An unexpected visit Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 03:05

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An unexpected visit

me and max

Originally uploaded by sebr.

has been in Sydney the last week. For those of you who don’t know him, you should read up on his coding wizardry at his site, and then salute him. We spent the day hanging out, admiring Bondi beach and of course drinking beer.

He also astutely pointed out that USB connectors are bloody annoying because they are always (tried to be) connected upside down. Now fix it, Max!

Friday, March 2. 2007

Test Your Movie Knowledge Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 12:09

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Test Your Movie Knowledge

A little while ago, I posted a music quiz with the aim to find as many bands in the image as possible. Recently a new one arrived in my inbox from lovefilm.com warranting a search of a whopping 100 popular (and probably some obscure) movie titles crammed into one image.