Amarok Blog

I figured that since I am now getting paid to do this and spending the first few weeks fixing whatever I feel needs fixing in Amarok, I should send my new employer a nice status update of the things I have accomplished during the week, as well as some of the general developments in Amarok2. And since I would most likely blog many of these thing anyway, I thought I would combine the two things into one.

So, here is what I have been up to so far this week:



- Fixed ( worked around ) some rather annoying plasma related crashes that prevented Amarok from actually playing music.

- Quite a bit of work on the new playlist. Made it use the netire width of the playlist view as well as have alternating background colors or each item. Also, the playlist now correctly receives notifications when an album updates its cover image. This means, for instance, that if you add a bunch of tracks from Magnatune and none of the covers are cached, the playlist will initially show the default no cover image for each track. In the background, Amarok will start to download and cache the covers, and once they are ready, the playlist will update itself to show the correct covers.

- Made a much nicer way to present each service available in Amarok. Instead of showing the services as a simple list with an icon, the browser now uses Qt4's delegate system to draw a custom list item for each. It is not particularly pretty yet (need the help of an artist with this one) but it already looks much nicer than the old one and it gives an idea of how good looking this could be made to be with some more work.

- Made the forwards and back buttons actually skip tracks ( and created a nasty crash in the process that was quickly fixed by Seb )

- Spent half a day trying to debug a nasty bug in KIO that has been haunting me for a while. I did not really get to the bottom of it, but did find a workaround for some cases.

- I made the foundations of a new Shoutcast service. This is not really a new thing as the 1.4.5 and later versions already included this in the playlist browser, but since the old playlist browser is no more, the functionality needed a new home. I do think that it will be much more visible this way however as it was fairly well hidden before. Also, doing thos "port" gave me an excuse to try to extend the service framework to work with sites that requires that you dynamically fetch data (as opposed to downloading one unified database dump ). So even though this took some time, it has hopefully been worthwhile as it will make it easier to support stuff like Ampache servers or the mp3tunes locker service in the future.

and now of course, a few screenshots.

This first one shows of the new service browser and the updated playlist:



And this one shows off the shoutcast service:


In these screenshots can also be seen a few other interesting new developments, such as the proof of concept svg buttons for the sidebar, or the new position of the statusbar under the context view. As always, these screenshots are of code in HEAVY development, so dont fret over details just yet! (really, please dont! )

All in all, Amarok2 can actually be used for playing music now (works really well with streams from Magnatune and Jamendo) so progress has definitely been made but he entire team. Our very own project founder markey solved the one killer bug that was preventing the playlist from actually progressing from one track to the next, instantly increasing usability by a couple of thousand percent

Thats all for now folks. More updates to follow, so stay tuned!