Tuesday, October 30. 2007fosscamp
so as FOSSCamp was in boston this weekend, i couldn't help but make my way down the The Hotel @ MIT and meet (for the first time) other KDE developers! in particular, i finally met jeff---even though we now live in the same city, we had not yet met face to face yet. all in all, FOSSCamp went quite well, most of it was spent hacking with Jeff in order to get a workable demo of Amarok2, but i managed to attend a few sessions nevertheless.
One thing that surprised me was the sheer difference in numbers between KDE and Ubuntu people there  me, jeff, troy, and robert (plus riddell and kwwii kinda  held down the fort against the full brunt of the ubuntu developers... we managed to get a few KDE sessions in, starting with the KDE4 core technologies session on saturday afternoon. without repeating too much of what has already been said, i t hink it went really well, and people were especially impressed with all of our new "integration" technologies like Solid, Phonon, etc. the whole abstraction-and-ease-of-development thing went down quite well with everyone attending. the KDE4 apps session that we did on sunday afternoon was basically a demo of plasma, a few kde apps, and amarok. unfortunately we got a much smaller turnout, but it was amongst the last presentations at the conference. nevertheless, after robert went through the desktop and some basic apps like dolphin and marble, jeff took the stage to demo the awesomeness of the new amarok2. we managed to provide a nice example of how all the KDE4 technologies actually make a difference: the Phonon engine is only ~300 LoC compared to ~2100 for the Xine engine. pretty amazing. anyway, i'm glad i had the chance to meet and chill with KDE developers for the first time.... it felt weird talking about kde and amarok and coding and things that that in real life! Tuesday, October 30. 2007Thursday, October 25. 2007Hardy Kay
Today I started my packaging work for Kubuntu Hardy Heron (god, I <3 the names
 ).Anyway, since I have about 300 packages which didn't make it into Gutsy I'll first have to update them and get them into Hardy ASAP. So maybe I can get some new packages on my TODO. But really, revuing is taking far too long, if I'd start packaging new software from kde-apps straight ahead, I probably have about 600 packages for Hardy+1. Also I somehow doubt the maintainability of that many packages Maybe I can even revu for Hardy+1, after all the target is still to become a MOTU (though, how can I revu while maintaining 600 packages... now that's insane - welcome back to the apachelogger world So on the road are:
Monday, October 22. 2007Ubucon recapWoohooo, we are back from Ubucon. Was nice to meet you folks once again. It was a small but nice event and we had a great time. Our talks went pretty smooth and I think we represented the gearheads pretty well The slides for the talks: Once again a big thank you to Czessi for filling in for apachelogger as my cospeaker. And now some nice photos of the Krew by sven423:
awwwwuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuooooooo!!!! btw: Kpresenter was giving me and a few others quite a headache when I wanted to print the pdfs of the slides. I still can’t get a pdf of the FrOSCon Kubuntu talk only a ps. I would really appreciate hints on why it fails. Monday, October 22. 2007Jamendo downloads now working
Yesterday I had a few hours on my own, and since I had nothing better planned, I decided to actually implement one of the things that I have been meaning to do for a long time. Originally, I had planned to somehow use libktorrent to handle downloading of albums from Jamendo ( Which are only available using bittorrent or edonkey ), but since I have not yet found a way to do this, I decided to go the simple route for now and just launch the defualt app for handling torrents.
The result is, that it is now possible to select download from within the Jamendo service, and the torrent file will be downloaded and launched in your favorite bittorrent client. Not quite as smooth as the Mangtune downloading, but it works! For now, it is hardcoded to always select the ogg torrent, but I will add an option to select either mp3 or ogg.And of course "pictures or it did not happen"  This week I will be working on the Magnatune.com site. We are currently working hard to roll out some exiting new features, that will also make a great impact on the Magntune service in Amarok. But more on that when it is ready! Friday, October 19. 2007Nikolaj's sort of, but not really, weekly status update, part whatever
I thought it was time to make a little noise again, so here is part whatever ( I think it is 3 actually ) of my "What have I been doing this week" updates.
The reason for the irregularity is quite simple that some weeks I end up doing mostly Magnatune stuff. And while this is cool in itself, and I am also working on some features that will have an impact on Amarok, it is not really something I can blog a whole lot about just yet. Anyways, here goes. This week I have been putting some more work into the new playlist. I added some new features ( more on that a little later ) but these turned out to really stress some of the sore points of the playlist with regards to performance. So a big part of this week has been spent making sure that the playlist holds up under load. For now, I have tested it with 3000+ tracks in groups of up to about 500 tracks. The 3000+ track part now runs really well, and as long as groups are not above about a 100 tracks each, these do not pose a problem either. For very large groups, performance does suffer a bit,but since the groups are meant to contain single albums, I am not really sure how much of an issue this is. In general, it already seems to run better with a large amounts of tracks added than the playlist in the 1.4 series. Also, remember that our focus is not, and have never been, on adding the entire collection to the playlist, but instead on using smart and dynamic playlists to provide the same functionality in a much more convenient way ( Dynamic playlist walkthrough ). The new features I mentioned earlier is support for collapsible album groups. The implementation is basically done, but how it will be used ( whether automatic some how or purely manual ) is undecided, so for now, I made it a button that the user can press to expand or collapse an album, along with some very simple logic to make sure, that if we start playing a track from within a collapsed group, it is automatically expanded. I also brewed up some example graphics for how such a collapsed album could be visualized. Here is a screenshot:  Following the last few posts about the new playlist, we got a lot of very positive feedback in the form of mockups and ideas for how to improve the graphics. As I am no great artist, we really appreciate this and would welcome new ideas. However, if you wish to do mockups or try out some new ideas, please base it on this file as that will make actually trying it out in Amarok much simpler. It should be possible to figure out what each element is used for based on the group names in the file, but basically, an album group consists of a head item, a number of body items (one for each track - 2 ) and a tail item, with some alternate backgrounds rendered for every other item. Over the last few weeks, I have also been keeping a little pet project. By showing this off now, I run the risk of being called a "sellout to the vocal minority" but such is life. Since the new playlist is based ( sort of ) on the model/view framework of Qt4, I wondered how difficult it would be to make an alternate playlist view that retains much of the look and feel of the 1.4.x series. Doing a small, but very limited, prototype of this turned out to be very simple, and it is now possible to alternate between the two views by pressing the little star button at the bottom right corner. Switching the view and ( just for fun ) minimizing the context view ( which is already possible just by resizing the 3 panes ), gives us something that looks like this:  That does look strangely familiar I think... Now, heres the kicker ( and why I don't think I deserve the label of "sellout" ). I don't have time to bring this alternate playlist view to a usable state. And I am not even sure it is needed, seeing how the new playlist is really coming along very nicely. But the ground work has been put in place, so if anyone feels strongly enough about this feature making it into Amarok2 ( Some people has certainly been very vocal about not liking the new playlist ), now is the time to step up and implement it! Do note, that there is no guarantee that it will be possible to hide the context view in the future as this currently being discussed.Last but not least, do remember our Roktoberfest We are 75% of the way, but the things are slowing down a lot, so we really need these last donations to reach our goal and keep the Amarok team hacking for another year! Thursday, October 18. 2007Ubucon and end of Roktober ahead!
THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY LYDIA PINTSCHER.
You can find Lydia's regular blog over here. Less than 13 hours left until Sven (sven423) and I are taking the train to Krefeld for Ubucon to meet up with Mark (markey), Myriam (Mamarok), and Marcus (czessi) and give two talks. Our talks will be: “Kubuntu :: Collaboration To The Core” on Saturday “Amarok :: Forming the Core 2" on Sunday So get out to Krefeld this weekend and join us on the first German Ubuntu conference! Harald (apachelogger): Sorry you can’t make it to Ubucon. We will miss you there and hope things turn out well. And since I didn’t post a proper FrOSCon photo yet - here is one of markey, gnux, me, sven423 and apachelogger:  The Rokers at FrOSCon You just have to love this team And don’t forget to donate to Amarok. It is ROKTOBER, folks! Only 1287 Euro left to reach our goal right now. Please help us make Amarok even more awesome next year (pssst: you can win a Cowon iAudio7). The money will be used to pay for developer meetings, travel costs of the booth staff and server costs. Thursday, October 18. 2007Ubucon and end of Roktober ahead!Less than 13 hours left until Sven (sven423) and I are taking the train to Krefeld for Ubucon to meet up with Mark (markey), Myriam (Mamarok), and Marcus (czessi) and give two talks. Our talks will be: So get out to Krefeld this weekend and join us on the first German Ubuntu conference! Harald (apachelogger): Sorry you can’t make it to Ubucon. We will miss you there and hope things turn out well. And since I didn’t post a proper FrOSCon photo yet - here is one of markey, gnux, me, sven423 and apachelogger: And don’t forget to donate to Amarok. It is ROKTOBER, folks! Only 1287 Euro left to reach our goal right now. Please help us make Amarok even more awesome next year (pssst: you can win a Cowon iAudio7). The money will be used to pay for developer meetings, travel costs of the booth staff and server costs. Monday, October 15. 2007Squeeze Squash!
Announcing Squash! Squash is a simple application with a simple purpose - a batch image resizer. A batch image resizer is normally pretty boring, but squeeze has a special purpose. It is crafted and baked specifically for travellers. Fear no more! Don’t clog peoples inboxes with travel snaps, and don’t waste money waiting for long uploads on slow internet connections with worse plumbing than an Asian squat toilet. This application is essentially the result of the scratching of a very large itch - finding a decent, fast image resizer which doesn’t need to be installed and can be run from a usb flash drive. Heck, you could store it on your memory card in your camera. Ultimately Squash will be a fully cross platform application, with binaries from windows and mac. The only dependency is Qt 4.3. If anybody is interested in creating statically linked binaries for Windows or Mac, I’d be very grateful - please get a hold of me!
Source tarball: squash-0.3.tar.bz2 Saturday, October 13. 2007Lefty-Loosy, or Righty-Tighty?
According to this article, viewing this spinning image can tell you which side of your brain dominates your cranial activity. Do you see the image spinning clockwise or anticlockwise? I see the image spinning clockwise, but I can’t say that the “functions” which I am prone to are all so accurate for my day-to-day activities. See if you can convince your brain to view the image spinning in the opposite direction.
Thursday, October 11. 2007Go Solid Go!I've been rather silent on the topic of progress in media devices. Part of this is that much of the work has happened behind the scenes. Just yesterday I spent hours editing device definitions in libmtp and libnjb so that they'd be able to propagate the correct vendor and product info through hal, because hal's handling of it leaves something to be desired. For instance, on my Creative Zen MicroPhoto, it correctly detected the vendor and product. Except that the part of the device detected as a portable media player was the USB interface for the device, for which the vendor was blank and the product name was "USB Interface." Another reason for the long delay was a partially failed experiment that aimed to provide support for many different media devices via a centralized kioslave. It's not that this couldn't still happen, at some point, but it becomes extremely difficult to map protocols that have no notion of filesystems into a filesystem, and have filesystem clients behave properly. There was another foray into a different system that also ended badly -- mainly because there was no way I'd get it finished within a year, much less within a few months. In the end it was decided that Amarok's device plugin system is really pretty decent, providing relatively bug-free and easy device management for almost every device on the market...and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Of course, it's using tons of deprecated classes and methods, but as Trolltech says (my emphasis), "we recommend against using these classes in new code." Good point. So let's get stuff working, and then we can try to design a new, better system in parallel -- but at least something will work in the meantime. So with that decision made, I worked on integrating with Solid. I'm happy to report that today, I plugged in my Creative Zen MicroPhoto, and it was instantly detected and the correct plugin selected. All I had to do was hit Connect. Screenshots:
The first screenshot shows what the media browser looks like with nothing plugged in. At that point, I plugged in my Creative Zen MicroPhoto, and you can see that it was detected and added to the device selector drop-down box:
After this, I hit the Connect button (it's the one on the top left) and artists were displayed. I hit the custom button just so you could see some of the details available:
So it's coming along. I expect this device detection to work on pretty much any kind of music player (except generic/vfat/UMS...more on that on a later post, when I have time to work on it), provided that:
So that's it for now. The next step is to get manual adding of devices working again. And after that, dealing with generic devices in a smart way (the way will be Banshee-compatible too...thanks to Aaron Bockover for the excellent idea!) In the meantime, watch out for the Amarok Device Donation Program. Tuesday, October 9. 2007Mentor Summit Wrap-upGoogle’s warm reception for all of the summer of code mentors ended a few days ago, and I’ve found some time to get back down under and sort through the piles of emails and rss feeds which have accumulated over the past week. The summit was, in my opinion, much better than last year. Those of us who were returning had experience and knew what to expect and how to make the most of the day. The newbies brought fresh faces and new exciting stories. Not only was the summit better, but the entire summer of code program improved. Efficiency, organisation and stress levels all improved substantially from previous years - and we can only expect it to get better in the upcoming years. This is especially true to KDE, because we hope to play an ever more important role in the program. Maybe you didn’t know, but KDE was the group with the largest student allocations, with 40 students. With more confident and experienced mentors we can strive to recruit more students and mentors to improve KDE and grow our community. Of course, we shouldn’t be just trying to grow our own communities with the summer of code program, but everyones. This was partly the reason for the summit - to share our experiences not only with Google but also with the other organisations. For the most part, KDE successfully managed 40 students, 50 odd mentors and over 200 student applications, and Thiago and I took the opportunity to discuss dealing with scalability issues in the program with some of the other large organisations. Of course, there were many more interesting sessions than our own, and including methods to turn students into long term contributors and cross platform considerations.
Here you can see us (Thiago, Jason and me), the Gnome guys, Leslie Hawthorn (Google SoC organiser) and a random (on the right). Astutely, one of the attendees noted that the mentor summit has the highest concentration of open source developers at any single event during the year - with nearly 200 representatives and nearly 80 organisations, even more than FOSDEM. This is probably true and really impressed upon me how important this event is. Let’s do even better next year. Saturday, October 6. 2007Google SoC Mentor Summit Day BeginsJason, Thiago and myself have all arrived at the GSoC mentor summit day at Google’s HQ. It’s a fantastic campus, one which will be very well used for the upcoming North American KDE4 release party. There are many sessions that we’ll be attending, and we are currently sitting in on a talk about “Turning students into long term contributors”. There are over 200 attendees from open source projets here, a really fantastic chance to meet up and make new friends. Here’s a photo from our bus trip.
Thursday, October 4. 2007Playing with the playlist - Part II
My recent post about some of the features of the new playlist in Amarok2 seemed to really inspire people to come up with visual concepts that would make the playlist not only functional, but also look really sweet. One person in particular submitted a really cool mockup and was later kind enough to provide this as an svg file. After spending an evening turning this svg into a series of elements that could be used for rendering different elements in the playlist, as well as tuning the color scheme a little, as the grey color in the mockup looks really sweet on its own but clashed pretty hard with the blue shades currently used in Amarok, I present you with this:
 In general we have not settled on a color scheme yet, so we might still go back to the grey, but for now this looks better in the overall scheme I think. Some of the elements of the mockup has not been implemented. most notably the collapsing of album art. The reason for this is that the current plan is to make the information displayed for items in the playlist customizable, which means that there will be a way t disable album headers completely. The text layout still needs a bit of work still as I think having the text in the album header in two lines might look better.. Also, I have spent some time making the playlist handle multiple groups in a more fluent way. This means, for instance, that it is now possible to "chop" a group in half by adding a foreign element to the middle of it. In the following screenshot, track 4 from the first album group has been dragged into the middle of the second group:  So far, I think this both looks good and promises great usability. But now the real work starts! Stuff like dragging an entire album around or removing an entire album from the playlist needs to be implemented. I am also still undecided about whether it should be possible to collapse the tracks in an album group to make it take up less space, which usually means that I am going to prototype it at some point to see how well it works. So there is lots of stuff still to do!
Tuesday, October 2. 2007The entries are in
Yesterday was officially the last chance to upload jingles for our little Amarok2 startup jingle contest. We have received 15 very interesting a varied entries which the Amarok crew will be evaluating over the next weeks to pick a winner and 2 runners up. There is some really cool stuff among the contributions, and they can all be heard by going to http://ccmixter.org and typing "Amarok" into the search field.
Even if your entry is not among the top 3, it might be used for some of our future projects, such as the Libre/Creative Commons music internet radio station, "Radio Amarok" that our rokymotion team is working on. A big thank you from the Amarok team goes out to everyone who contributed with their Jingles!
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