Amarok Blog

So as Nikolaj has been blogging about his cool new features that he has in store for Amarok 2.1, I feel obligated to reply. Can't let him steal all the thunder and PR!

Amarok 2 introduced many new features, and undoubtedly one of the most controversial ones was the context view. All of a sudden this large area was smack dab in the middle of Amarok, sticking its nose where some users didn't think it belonged. Mostly, this was because it was not always as easy or efficient to display data the data that users wanted, or it was clunky and hard to use. As the context view evolved alongside libplasma, some of the constructs that were used became outdated as well. All in all, the CV was not, in my opinion, living up to its potential and was very much one of the weaker spots of Amarok 2.0.

What is to be done? Improve it, of course! Or, in this case, rethink the basic foundation of how the user interacts with the context view. There are two fundamental things that will be changing in the Context View that you will see in Amarok 2.1:

1) The Layout itself

No longer will there be an idea of "containments, or "activities" (in plasma-speak). This idea, while quite nifty, didn't really work out great in practice, making it hard to manage a large number of applets and move them around. The new CV has a toolbar, almost a bit like the task manager applet for your KDE desktop. This will allow the user to visually see all the applets that are in the contextview, and instantly switch to any applet that he/she wishes to see.

Basic screenshot:



Clicking on any of the applets in the toolbar instantly switches that applet to be the top-most applet. The applets after it are laid out directly underneath each consecutive applet. The little wrench icon that is visible switches between "edit mode" and normal mode. This is the edit mode:



Here the user can add new applets in any location, as well as remove applets. The user can also re-arrange the order of applets by dragging and dropping the toolbar representations.

2) The applets

The fragmentation of data among the different applets provides for a lot of flexibility but not a lot of visual coherence. I personally envision a few select "meta-applets", that take up the whole CV at a time, but integrate data from multiple sources and lay it out in a coherent, simple, and space-efficient manner. So, a "web info" meta-applet would have wiki information, last.fm artist bios, lyrics, upcoming events for the artist, and maybe more.

I do want to point out that these are very preliminary ideas that are still being fleshed out, and have not been fully reviewed nor accepted yet by the Amarok team. But with some luck Amarok 2.1 will have an awesomely solid CV that will be able to display much more information in a much saner form.