Amarok Blog

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.