Amarok Blog

After attending Fosdem, Linda and I had a few days to spend in Brussels. On Tuesday, we went to the musical instrument museum. This was a really good experience, as they have 5 floors packed with instruments from every age and every corner of the globe, along with wireless headsets that lets you listen to music played by each.

The one thing that I found really intriguing was some of the old "self playing" instruments such as this organ.



This is in essence an early computer, capable of processing many instructions at once from a stored program. The mechanical complexity of it just boggles the mind. And a closer look at the actual "code" shoes just how painstaking a job programming it must have been.



I wonder if it was possible to buy additional "programs" once you had purchased the organ.... If nothing else, this shows that musical software has a long tradition, that we here at Amarok HQ are proud to be a part of!

And just to throw in a bit of Amarok related content. Today I have been hard at work fixing many ( most? ) of the crashes we experienced while demoing Amarok this weekend, so hopefully the upcoming demos at Cebit and OpenExpo will run a lot smoother!

So, Fosdem is over, and I finally have stable network access and time to use it. My initial impression of the event would have to be that it is very crowded. Especially Saturday was quite insane with people being crammed in the halls. Shouting loud enough to explain the wonders of Amarok 2 to people cost me most of my voice.

My own talk went very well, ( at least so I have been told ), but a review of all the talks in the KDE dev room should be online soon.

For next year, I think we need to realise that cramming 12 Amarok people into half a KDE booth is not the optimal solution. Hopefully, in the future it will be possible to get our own area with room for showing off Amarok on more than 2 laptops

I will leave you for now with my favorite among the pictures I took at the event. I actually don't think I am even going to try to explain this one. Suffice to say, that even though our new mascot Mike was quite a crowd pleaser, the BSD pople in the booth next to us had us beat hands down at the attention drawing game...

For the last few days I have been hacking on Amarok full time, and I though it was time to give a brief update on what is happening on planet Amarok.

Lets start off with the screenshot this time




First of all, we have now officially made our svn trunk depend on Qt 4.4 and KDE 4.1 ( current KDE trunk ). This means the that the work that was done with QWebKit ( See my last blog entry ) has been merged into trunk and we have started using QWebKit and real widgets in some of the other applets. Because of this, the Wikipedia and Lyrics applets are also coming along nicely, but they are not really fit to be shown off just yet.

In the above screenshot, there are 4 major visible changes. First of all, the the 2 different statusbars that we were using ( one below the context view and one below the playlist ) has been merged into one that is placed at the bottom of the app. Besides looking much better, this also means that you won't loose a statusbar if you decide to hide the context view. The statusbar code has also been cleaned up somewhat, even though this is still very much a work in progress.

Next up is "source info capability" that can now accompany a track. I thought it was a bit of a shame that it was not possible to tell which tracks in the playlist are local, which ones are from Magnatune.com, last.fm, Jamendo or wherever. So to solve this I added a system for letting each track tell the world a little about where it is from. The first use of this system is to display a small emblem in the top corner of the album covers for tracks from the services. In the screenshot can be seen the emblem for Magnatune.com service tracks. I plan to make displaying these emblems configurable so people who do not like it can turn it off. I am also not sure that the emblem really needs to be shown on top of the cover, but I have no been able to come up with anything better yet...

Then, smack in the middle, is the resurrection of some very old code from before we started using plasma in the context view. Back then, I had this idea that some info was suitable for being presented in a "cloud" format. I had a context box that could display the different moods that Magnatune tracks are tagged with, with the relative size of each mood depending on the number of tracks that are tagged with it. After digging up some old code, it proved relative simple to get this ported and working in a plasma applet. The different shades of blue is thanks to the fade animation that happens when you mouse over an item. Originally, clicking on a mood would add 10 random tacks with that mood to the playlist, but I have not quite gotten to that part in the current implementation yet. There are also many other things that needs to be improved , such as text size adjustments, eliding, and, in particular, scrolling!

Last but not least I have cleaned up the playlist somewhat and changed some of the graphics a bit. The "now playing" marker is now much more visible on very light color themes ( remember, the svgs adapt to the users color settings ) and some redrawing issues have been solved.


Besides the visible, I have also had time for some code cleanup, crash fixes, and a little hack that, at least for now, makes it possible to use the shoutcast service again. I will be at Fosdem this weekend with the rest of the team, so hopefully I will have a little more cool stuff to show off by then!

All in all I don't think that is too bad for 3 days of work

Oh, one more thing! As you can tell, we really need some good artists to come up with a consistent theme for our plasma applet.! So if this is you, please get in touch!

Over the last months, there has been a number of questions about the reason for the large empty space in the center of Amarok 2. I completely agree that having only a "Now Playing" applet there makes it seem kind of useless. The reason that we have not had much to show so far, has not been lack of ideas, but rather that many of the things we want to do requires the ability to do proper html rendering in a plasma applet, something that is just not possible with Qt 4.3.

So, hearing good things about the features that will be included in Qt 4.4, such as Widgets in QGraphicsView and QWebKit, I decided to setup a new development user and build KDE4 and Amarok 2 against the Qt 4.4 Technology Preview 1 to see what is possible.

After an hour or so of tinkering, I had this:



Now, this is not laid out properly, the svg background for the service info applet is horrible ( something I drew up in 5 minutes a looong time ago ) and the white background clashes with the svg colors, but all that will be fixed. The main point is that it is showing properly rendered html!!! This means that I can get rid of the annoying little info window at the bottom of the browser and use the full height to show browsable content. It also gives a sense of what the context view is all about.

This should allow us to start working on applets for Wikipedia info, lyrics, service info and many other things that, until now, has not been possible for us to do.

We have started a git repository for playing around with Qt 4.4, but for the time being, the svn trunk will remain Qt 4.3 to allow Amarok 2 to build on top of KDE 4.0.0 and 4.0.1.