Amarok Blog

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!