Monday, November 24. 2008Saturday, November 22. 2008Thursday, November 20. 2008YarlyThursday, November 20. 2008
Just, you know, more Amarok OS X ... Posted by Leo Franchi
in lfranchi at
15:28
Comments (10) Trackbacks (0) Just, you know, more Amarok OS X goodness
so the amarok 2 experience has been getting better and better in the last few weeks. one of the major issues that i've always had with using the amarok natively is simply that most kde apps look very out of place on os x. really, rather than out of place quite a few look *really bad*. this is not anyone's fault, oxygen by default just doesn't fit well with the os x interface, and all the subtle grey gradients and boderless elements just turn into a big white empty space. example:
![]() The playlist browser on the left is especially horrendous, not only does it not fit into a reasonable amount of size and get truncated, but it also seems to contain arbitrary squiggles to delineate the different possible tabs, all swimming in a sea of monochromatic grey-ish. now, i had been trying change style for a while, but when someone helpfully pointed out i can set the style in kdeglobals (i don't have systemsettings or kcmshell4 on os x), i was finally able to play around. lo and behold, with the tweaked QtMac style (which illogic-al tells me is oxygen tweaked for os x), amarok already looks a lot prettier!: ![]() it is hard to see in the screenshot above, but the overall color is darker, and feels less empty. there is much more definition around elements, and in general it seems like a half-decent UI. all i know is that i would no longer feel ashamed to show this to a non-techie friend of mine when the ask what i spend all my time doing. now, amarok is still not a beautiful os x application. it is still mostly grey, with different shades used to distinguish and delineate elements. this was a conscious design decision in the amarok development process, and although we are in the midst of talking about tweaking the UI for future releases (2.0 is finalized), this is how amarok 2.0 is going to look. I think in the long term we need to look at how to tweak the different ports of amarok---for example, in my pipe dream i'm seeing amarok using qt/cocoa and getting native toolbars and sidebars---think itunes or mail or safari or last.fm player type header with the control buttons init. of course, currently qt/cocoa doesn't include qt3support hence it is a little more complicated for kde, but nevertheless, i think one day we'll get there. meanwhile, we continue to quash mac os x amarok bugs, and you can now resize your window like normal! (who would have thought you need to manually add a QSizeGrip to get a size grip in amarok's main window?). Thursday, November 20. 2008Localized Content
In my last blog entry I talked a bit about how cool it is to have such a strong lineup of services ready for the launch of Amarok 2.0.0.
Since then, something else has started happening in a big way. Scripts containing localized content has started to appear. Peter was first with his Chinese Radio Service, and then all of a sudden yesterday, things started to move fast. In quick succession we got service scripts for Radio France and Bulgarian Radio Stations and this inspired me to put together a Danish Radio Streams script that was released a few hours ago. While each of these service scripts are very simple and have an audience that is limited by language or region, I think that together they represent a very powerful aspect of Amarok 2 as they make Amarok feel 'native' to people who do not have English as their first language. I know that personally, for me to be able to present a nice list of readily available Danish radio stations, will be a huge plus when showing Amarok 2 to friends and family who are not overly technically inclined (read: non geeks). I hope (and fully expect) to see a virtual flood of scripts of this type, and while I an most others will each only use a few of them, I am very exited that they are appearing! Saturday, November 15. 2008A-Team
Friday, November 14. 2008
"If we have 2 or 3 good ... Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
in freespirit at
16:38
Comments (13) Trackbacks (0) "If we have 2 or 3 good services at launch I will be happy"
With Amarok 2.0.0 rc1 right around the corner, now is a good time to reflect on where Amarok 2 comes from and where it is going. So I felt like writing a bit about the journey of the idea of "services" in Amarok 2, as that has been my main focus, even though I have managed to get my hands dirty all over the place it seems!
Just over 2 years ago, Amarok 1.4.4 was released with a cool new feature, which also happens to be my first contribution to Amarok, the integrated Magnatune.com store. ( Here is a cool page that Magnatune did to document some of the responses ). The overall response to this was quite good, and Magnatune started selling quite a few albums through Amarok, and eventually ended up hiring me, and I still work for them. Something else started happening as well. People saw the integrated Magnatune store and started asking if there was any chance that their favorite store could get a similar integration. Most of the Amarokers agreed that this could be cool, but there were several obstacles. For one, the way the original Magnatune store required a huge amount of custom code to do simple stuff like adding tracks to the playlist ( and as many will likely know ) the metadata representation of these are not perfect. Also, The Magnatune store had its very own tab on the left side of Amarok, and it was clear that we could not just add an arbitrary number of these as we started to add more stores. Finally, the Magnatune store in the 1.4.x series of Amarok is tied very closely to the rest of Amarok, meaning that it cannot easily be removed, and that people are more or less forced to load part of this code, whether they use the store or not. Luckily for me, after a time, something big happened in Amarok-land, the 1.4.x series was put on maintenance mode and the work on Amarok 2 was started. Since I was only responsible for porting over the Magnatune store and had almost no other code in Amarok, I decided that this would be a good time to try to tackle some of the issues mentioned above, and prepare Amarok for further stores or other services to be integrated. To make a long story short, we now, after a year and a half of work, have a framework in place that allows services to be implemented as plugins and loaded/unloaded on demand, a service browser to show them in and overall much better integration into Amarok overall, basically solving all the issues that needed to be solved before we could add more services. My original plan was to port at least the Magnatune store to this new framework, and as the title of this post shows, when I started this work, I would be very happy to have 2 or 3 working services to show up when 2.0.0 was launched. As the image on the left shows, this is not quite what happened. This image shows the services that are currently available, either included with Amarok 2 itself, or via download from kde-apps.org ( easily installable from within Amarok 2 using the "Get Hot New Stuff" system ). Some of these services are coded using the C++ framework, and some are scripts that run on top of the "Scriptable Service" framework, which is itself an extension of the underlying service framework. I have done a number of them myself, but more and more services are added or maintained by others. There are 13 of them. This is way more than I had ever hoped we would have available anytime soon, and really shows off the power of the framework well. Especially the scripted service framework, that lets people relatively easily add content from an online source ( although in a somewhat limited way compared to a full C++ plugin ) has received a lot of interest lately, and these scripts seem to be pouring in at the moment. Looking at the picture of all these services, one does start to appreciate how useful it is to be able to only load the services that are interesting to you, and not having to have them all in the list all the time! So what will the future bring? For starters, I have realized that I might need to extend the API used by service scripts a bit, since these seem to really be taking off in a big way, and requests for new features are already coming in ( and some have already been implemented ). Beyond that, I know of quite a few services that are being worked on, or are in the planing phase, both scripts and very advanced full plugins, so as with the rest of Amarok 2, this is not the end result, it is merely the beginning, and cool things will happen over the next many years, as we fully realize the potential of the new codebase! Thursday, November 13. 2008
Installing Amarok 2 from SVN in your ... Posted by Mark Kretschmann
in markey at
20:02
Comments (14) Trackbacks (0) Installing Amarok 2 from SVN in your home directory![]() Update: I have corrected some information regarding $KDEDIR on April 3rd, 2009 So you would like to check out the latest Amarok 2 goodness, without messing up your system? One way to do this is by using our Neon Nightly Builds. But if for some reason this doesn't work for you, or maybe if you are toying with the idea of contributing to Amarok, here's a simple guide that shows you how to compile and install Amarok 2 in your $HOME, without any danger of interfering with your Linux distro. You can uninstall it anytime simply by deleting the folder. Nice and easy, the way we like it! This document explains how to install Amarok 2 from SVN in your home directory - in an easy way If you already have Amarok installed from your distro, uninstall it to prevent setting conflicts and similar. Install compiler and KDE 4 development packages: In Ubuntu, Debian, and all their derivatives: sudo aptitude install build-essential sudo aptitude install kde-devel In Archlinux: sudo pacman -S base-devel kdelibs kdebase-runtime In Gentoo: sudo emerge kdelibs plasma-workspace Append the following to $HOME/.bashrc: export PATH=$HOME/kde/bin:$PATH Reload your edited .bashrc: source $HOME/.bashrc NOTE: if you are not using the bash shell, edit your proper shell config file (~/.zshrc or ~/.tcshrc or whatever it may be) Make KDE aware of Amarok's plugin location: echo 'export KDEDIR=$HOME/kde' >> $HOME/.kde/env/myenv.sh echo 'export KDEDIRS=$KDEDIR' >> $HOME/.kde/env/myenv.sh Create folders: mkdir $HOME/kde mkdir $HOME/kde/src mkdir $HOME/kde/build/amarok Check out Amarok from SVN: cd $HOME/kde/src svn checkout svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok Building: cd $HOME/kde/build/amarok cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok make install Updating KDE Config kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental Now you are ready to run Amarok 2, by typing "amarok" in the shell. NOTE: If you have installed MySQL Embedded in non-default location (i.e. $HOME/usr), Amarok may fail to start with error regarding libmysqlclient library. In this case, add the following string to your ~/.bashrc: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib/mysql:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH where $HOME/usr is the path you've used in --prefix option. Have fun Wednesday, November 12. 2008
Amarok podcasting 2.0 and post-2.0 plans Posted by Bart Cerneels
in stecchino at
11:22
Comments (2) Trackbacks (0) Amarok podcasting 2.0 and post-2.0 plans
Hey fellow developers and users,
In Juli 2007, at Akademy Glasgow I started implementing podcasting support in Amarok2. Since then I was sidetracked a little, as you may be aware. The little time I did manage to spend designing and implementing was short and far from focused. So a lot of features are not finished or just plainly missing. The framework I created underneath suffered from the same lack of focus and is need of a good review. I'm aware there is probably some overdesign and some parts might be to complex. If you feel you can help in that area I suggest you take a look at extragear/multimedia/amarok/src/podcasts . Send questions, comments and suggestions to amarok-devel@kde.org . The 3rd beta from Amarok 2.0 is already out the door and podcasting support is still not finished. In order to make it I had to reduce some goals I had set for myself during those rainy summer days in Scotland. Here's the plan: Amarok 2.0: The focus ATM is on finishing the SqlPodcastProvider, Podcastmodel and PodcastCategory (GUI). SqlPodcastProvider uses tables in the standard SQL database, adds and updates the feeds using PodcastReader and downloads to disk using the regular KIO-jobs. To make the podcasting fully functional though we'll need to reintroduce:
The GUI currently shows all episodes ever read from the feed, which obviously needs to be addressed. The GUI for 2.0 should be very similar, if not identical to Amarok 1.4, probably minus folder tree grouping support since that is better handled generically for all Playlists (which PodcastChannel is in our class diagram). If anyone has a bit of Qt Model/View experience and would like to see podcasting in Amarok 2.0 I suggest you send a mail to amarok-devel@kde.org or ping me on irc (Stecchino on #amarok). Without help we might have to drop it's from 2.0 completely because it's a bit much for me alone to complete and stabilize. Amarok > 2.0: I do have a plan for a complete GUI overhaul post-2.0. I'll get some art and usability advice in another blog post when the time comes. The 2.x releases should see more advanced features being introduced that the framework is already designed to support: For the SqlPodcastProvider specifically:
Saturday, November 8. 2008
Everything you always wanted to know ... Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
in freespirit at
18:38
Comments (3) Trackbacks (0) Everything you always wanted to know about writing Amarok 2 service scripts but were afraid to ask!
With the release of Amarok 2 growing closer and with such cool scripted services as NPR, BBC and Free Music Charts being recently released ( if you have a recent version of Amarok 2 , all of these services can be installed simply by going to the script manager, clicking the "Get More Scripts" button, and clicking install on the scripts you want ), we are starting to receive quite a few questions about how to start writing a cool service script for any number of on-line content sources.
This finally got me to take the time to do something I should have done a long time ago: start writing a guide. So, if you want to write an Amarok 2 service script, check out the scripted services tutorial on the Amarok wiki. So, if you have a favorite website that provides freely available audio content, writing a service script is a great way to make this accessible to a large number of new users! Thursday, November 6. 2008Amarok on TwitterMost of the Amarok crew are on Twitter - it’s been said before. But if you’re a little more excited about developments in Amarok as opposed to the lives of the developers, you should checkout the official Amarok twitterer. You’ll be able to follow announcements, updates, cool tips, links, and we might throw in a few early announcements there Thursday, November 6. 2008
Amarok & NPR :: 13 Years of News ... Posted by Casey Link
in ramblurr at
04:21
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Amarok & NPR :: 13 Years of News Media Now Available at Your FingertipsEarlier this summer I had noticed that National Public Radio (NPR) launched a brand new open API based on open source technologies. My initial reaction was at best skeptical. I assumed any sort of “API” released by a major media outlet would turn out to be nothing more than a few customizable RSS feeds. If the company was particularly progressive the RSS feeds might include full articles, rather than the neutered one-sentence teasers you find in all the big name’s syndicated content. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. NPR’s API is no small potatoes. Just take a look at the comprehensive Query Generator to get an inkling of the types of complex queries you can create. Looking at the Query Generator also sheds some light on the content you can retrieve using the API. The API’s main page says the API exposes the entire NPR archive of content starting from the launch of the NPR website in 1995. Just how big is this archive? Over 250,000 stories including text, images, video, and audio! This quote from the article announcing the API caught my eye immediately:
This isn’t the first open media API. BBC was the first to offer a public open access API, however BBC’s API is restricted to the content from the past 7-days. Seven days! That’s nothing compared to the (approx.) 4748 days - and counting - that NPR’s API offers. NPR and the BBC are two large companies leading the technological shift towards open and free information. But that’s only half the story. After discovering this fantastic API I had to do something with it, and the new service architecture in Amarok 2 provided the perfect platform to build a NPR mashup. That was several months ago, and at the time the scripting API in Amarok was still being flesh out (Thanks to Peter). On Monday I noticed the BBC scriptable service Nikolaj had created for Amarok 2. I happened to have several hours of free time, so I cooked up a similar service for NPR: You can get it at kde-apps or via the “Get More Scripts” button in Amarok 2’s Script Manager. There is definitely room for improvement and in fact here are a few things I plan to do with it:
Major props and thanks go out to the entire NPR technical team and all the contributors who made API a reality. Thursday, November 6. 2008
Amarok NPR :: 13 Years of News ... Posted by Casey Link
in ramblurr at
04:21
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Amarok NPR :: 13 Years of News Media Now Available at Your FingertipsEarlier this summer I had noticed that National Public Radio (NPR) launched a brand new open API based on open source technologies. My initial reaction was at best skeptical. I assumed any sort of “API” released by a major media outlet would turn out to be nothing more than a few customizable RSS feeds. If the company was particularly progressive the RSS feeds might include full articles, rather than the neutered one-sentence teasers you find in all the big name’s syndicated content. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. NPR’s API is no small potatoes. Just take a look at the comprehensive Query Generator to get an inkling of the types of complex queries you can create. Looking at the Query Generator also sheds some light on the content you can retrieve using the API. The API’s main page says the API exposes the entire NPR archive of content starting from the launch of the NPR website in 1995. Just how big is this archive? Over 250,000 stories including text, images, video, and audio! This quote from the article announcing the API caught my eye immediately:
This isn’t the first open media API. BBC was the first to offer a public open access API, however BBC’s API is restricted to the content from the past 7-days. Seven days! That’s nothing compared to the (approx.) 4748 days – and counting – that NPR’s API offers. NPR and the BBC are two large companies leading the technological shift towards open and free information. But that’s only half the story. After discovering this fantastic API I had to do something with it, and the new service architecture in Amarok 2 provided the perfect platform to build a NPR mashup. That was several months ago, and at the time the scripting API in Amarok was still being flesh out (Thanks to Peter). On Monday I noticed the BBC scriptable service Nikolaj had created for Amarok 2. I happened to have several hours of free time, so I cooked up a similar service for NPR: You can get it at kde-apps or via the “Get More Scripts” button in Amarok 2’s Script Manager. There is definitely room for improvement and in fact here are a few things I plan to do with it:
Major props and thanks go out to the entire NPR technical team and all the contributors who made API a reality. Wednesday, November 5. 2008Delete Multiple Files
Again, school keeps me busy and away from solving issues, but here's the most recent thing I've been working on.
![]() (Yes, the dialog isn't at all final, I just put it there as a placeholder)A few collections like the MP3Tunes service, and the local collection, are actually able to delete tracks already! They just... have no GUI to make it all happen. Devices like iPods and MTP devices can delete too, but only one track at a time (far from optimal). So I'm working to bring this ability to all collections alike. Actually getting this working isn't too hard, but making the code nice, understandable and maintainable is a bit of a trick. Luckily I've got a pretty good idea now of how I want it done. Beta 3 is out =D but still so much left to be done on my end: - fix MTP track playing, so that the next track properly loads/plays - add orphaned/stale track checking for iPods - enhance the Media Devices Applet, and add interface to root item of TreeView for connect/disconnect - fix cover-related things on iPods (and _possibly implement it for MTP devices, by popoular request) The list goes on, but that's already enough. More manpower for any of these jobs is MORE than welcome. Do apply =) Monday, November 3. 2008
Still alive and some updates. Posted by William Viana Soares
in liw at
23:17
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Still alive and some updates.
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