Amarok Blog

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!