Amarok Blog

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?).