Sunday, July 13. 2008
Velocity
About 4 days ago, the Amarok team released the first Alpha of Amarok 2. For an alpha, it actually seems to run very well, but of course it still has crashes, bugs and lots of rough edges.
Since this release, the pace of development has been absolutely astounding. In those 4 days, we have so far had well over 150 commits, including 13 bugs closed. We have not been moving forwards this fast since the very first few days when we started porting Amarok to Qt4 and KDE4, and I am not even sure that sprint quite matched this one.
One of the main causes for this speedup is, in my opinion, the constructive feedback we have received on the alpha release. So I would like to extend a big Thank You to all the people taking the time to test our alpha release and offering feedback and bug reports.
And just to give you something to look at, here is a post alpha screenshot from today. Even though most of the fixes we have done are below the surface, there are still a few visible changes. And yeah, the new applets need to blend with the system colors, which they currently do not at all
As a reminder for those wanting to try out the very latest version, or who are tracking the status of a particular bug, there is always the excellent Project Neon
Since this release, the pace of development has been absolutely astounding. In those 4 days, we have so far had well over 150 commits, including 13 bugs closed. We have not been moving forwards this fast since the very first few days when we started porting Amarok to Qt4 and KDE4, and I am not even sure that sprint quite matched this one.
One of the main causes for this speedup is, in my opinion, the constructive feedback we have received on the alpha release. So I would like to extend a big Thank You to all the people taking the time to test our alpha release and offering feedback and bug reports.
And just to give you something to look at, here is a post alpha screenshot from today. Even though most of the fixes we have done are below the surface, there are still a few visible changes. And yeah, the new applets need to blend with the system colors, which they currently do not at all
As a reminder for those wanting to try out the very latest version, or who are tracking the status of a particular bug, there is always the excellent Project Neon
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
You guys rock, you know?
When ready, Amarok will conquer the music player market in EVERY platform possible
When ready, Amarok will conquer the music player market in EVERY platform possible
Another bit of constructive criticism: there is no way to distinguish the functionality of the two Floppy disk icons on the bottom right.
Also, what do the heart, "5" circle and 23h clock mean? It's not readily apparent at all.
Also, what do the heart, "5" circle and 23h clock mean? It's not readily apparent at all.
I don't know about the heart (maybe a 'loved track' equivalent of last.fm?) but the 5 is number of times the track has been played, the 23h is how long ago it was last played, but I only guessed that because it looks similar to how amarok 1.4 presented that info so it would probably be confusing to people who have never used amarok. Actually, scratch that. The heart is the score and the reason it's 0 there is because amarok doesn't automatically compute scores anymore. When I went in and gave a song a score manually it showed up there. I think it's all good information but as far as making it easier to tell what it is, you either have to add more text there (23h ago, 5 times, etc.) or maybe have a 'quickstart guide' the first time amarok starts up that explains what it is?
Amarok is the program that brought me to linux (and kept me there while I figured out how to use it) and it looks like 2.0 will be a huge step forward for an already great program. Thanks to everybody who's making it happen. My only question is if it's in a state where scripts can start to be written? I miss lyrics fetching enough that I'd like to try my hand at it if enough of the framework is in place.
Amarok is the program that brought me to linux (and kept me there while I figured out how to use it) and it looks like 2.0 will be a huge step forward for an already great program. Thanks to everybody who's making it happen. My only question is if it's in a state where scripts can start to be written? I miss lyrics fetching enough that I'd like to try my hand at it if enough of the framework is in place.
Aaron,
You got the functions right, and I agree that we need to make the purpose of the 3 small info fields in the right of the current track applet more obvious. Also, we are currently discussing having a quick start guide in the form of a plasmoid, explaining the basics of Amarok 2.
As for scripts, we currently have a GSoC student who is completely redoing the scripting interface to be much more consistent, powerful and have less dependencies for the end user. So right now starting a new script might be a bad idea. When we release the first beta, the script interface should have stabilized somewhat however.
You got the functions right, and I agree that we need to make the purpose of the 3 small info fields in the right of the current track applet more obvious. Also, we are currently discussing having a quick start guide in the form of a plasmoid, explaining the basics of Amarok 2.
As for scripts, we currently have a GSoC student who is completely redoing the scripting interface to be much more consistent, powerful and have less dependencies for the end user. So right now starting a new script might be a bad idea. When we release the first beta, the script interface should have stabilized somewhat however.
I agree. ( I put the second floppy icon there, only because I did not know what other icon to use at the time ). Likely the "export" action will be removed from there and added somewhere else, as saving playlists to the database is the new default.
Amarok Links
Calendar
|
September '08 |
|
||||
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
Quicksearch
Archives
Categories
Syndicate This Blog
Blog Administration
We Listen To...
Powered by
