Entries by Mark Kretschmann

A few days ago, Paul Adams and Guillermo Amaral recorded a pretty nice Podcast interview with me. We were talking about some pretty interesting things (secrets will be revealed!), and about some pretty silly things (ROFLing will be achieved!). At any rate, we had a blast recording this, and I recommend to check it out.


You'll find the Podcast for download here:

KDE and the Masters of the Universe: Amarok founder Mark Kretschmann

PS:
Of course you could also use Amarok's Podcast feature to subscribe to the feed

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer:

I have been very lucky recently. At the fantastic OVI and KDE Sprint, kindly hosted at the Nokia office in Munich, I was given a N900. First of all I would like to say "Thank you!" to Nokia, for doing that. It's a great gift, and I promise to put it to good use (MeeGo port of Amarok...)

I had already heard great things about this device. As a former owner of a Nokia N810, which was nifty, but "not quite there", I was very excited to find out if the N900 got it right. And hell yeah, did they get it right this time. This is the device that every geek has been dreaming of: A full Debian computer that fits in the pocket of your jeans, including a phone. Usability is excellent (far better than e.g. of the N97 Mini, which uses S60). I will admit that this device is probably more suitable for geeks, than for example for my daddy. It's a bit too "computer'ish" for the average non-technical person.

However, I find it easy to use. And features... well. There isn't anything that the N900 cannot do. Every day I'm discovering some new amazing feature. It has: A full Debian OS, with all the apps that you would use on a desktop too, e.g. X-Chat, ScummVM, and even an X terminal. Which brings us to another important point: It runs X11. What other phone does it? None that I know of. The big advantage is that all your favorite Linux apps will run just perfectly, without much of a porting effort.

Hardware wise, this is just the best of the best: The OMAP 3 CPU (well, SoC really) is pretty fast, the camera is neat (although the image noise level is a bit too high for my taste). It has Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi, a real keyboard (big advantage!), pretty decent battery life, and great sounding speakers (they sound far better than my laptop does), and really good in-ear canal headphones, that can be used as a headset too. Ah yes, it also has an FM radio receiver, which I haven't used so far. The display is really good, excellent viewing angle, great contrast. In fact it's so good that watching movies is a pleasure with the device. I watched "Avatar - The Last Airbender" in bed the other day. Btw, that movie is far better than people like to say


So, to sum it up, for a geek, there isn't a better phone currently than the N900. This is the device you want, believe me that. Well, there is one better device, which is the N900+1, but it's not yet released. I will probably buy it on day one, because thinking about it alone it already gives me a nerdgasm.

Here it comes: October in all of its glory! For some, this is a time of falling leaves. For others, it is a time of warm sunbeams. Either way, we are once again nearing the year’s end and are ready to sum up our efforts, while we continue to develop and Rok the World!

In the last twelve months, we have made more than 4000 commits, closed over 4000 bugs, released 6 new versions of Amarok, wrote a Quick Start Guide to Amarok, attended over 10 conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland. All of this, thanks to your donations!


Some of the highlights we worked on in Amarok itself:

new Automatic Playlist Generator

improved cover fetching

new applets for the Context View (Upcoming Events, Similar Artists, Videos...)

moodbar support

better desktop integration (including KNotify support)

better podcast handling

queue support

custom label support

a huge number of improvements to existing features!

For Amarok 2.4 (planned for early 2011) and upcoming releases we have planned:

transcoding, so you can transfer files to your media device in the right format

UPnP support

Playdar integration

spectrum analyzer

completing the Amarok handbook

many more exciting features and improvements!

You might have noticed that our development pace has quickened! In order to continue working on Amarok at such speed, we call on your help. Costs such as server maintenance and travelling expenses are too much for our tiny budgets to handle. Remember, everything we do, we do for free! And this is where you come in!

This year’s Roktober, our annual fundraiser, has a goal of 5000 Euros. Reaching this goal will help us handle this next exciting year smoothly. The funds will help us develop more powerful features in Amarok, pay for our servers, and send team members to conferences; we may even run a developer sprint or two!

As a sign of our appreciation for your support we will add donors agreeing to it to a special section in Amarok’s About Dialog. Your name will then appear in each version of Amarok that gets released in the next 12 months.

So join us, and throw in your share to Rok the World!

I will be attending the Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich. As I hear, the number of attending KDE developers is especially high this year, so I'm really looking forward to meeting many of you.

Before the event there will be a developer sprint hosted at the Nokia office in Munich. This will be the first time I'll visit the Munich office (I've had the chance to visit the Berlin team a while ago), and I'm sure we will make good use of our time and do some cool things with MeeGo and Qt hacking.

So, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming week. It will be interesting to learn new things, and at the same time it'll be fun to meet old friends, and to make new ones.

The four computers in our household are named: Hyperion, Endymion, Serenity, and Shrike. Can you tell that we are big SciFi nerds?

What you're seeing above is a photo of my work place (home-office, which rocks in so many ways!). Hyperion and Serenity are compiling Amarok with 12 compile jobs, using Icecream.

What I really wanted to write about is Serenity, my new ThinkPad X201 lappy, because some of you have asked me for a little review. Before I start I would like to say one thing about the keyboard, which is really dear to me: This is actually a vintage IBM Model M, from 1985. The Model M is often referred to as "the best keyboard in the world". Simply put, that's no lie. If you get the chance to lay your hands on one, never (ever!) give it away. Typing was yesterday, Model M is flying.


ThinkPad X201

This is the configuration I got:

Intel Core i7-620M Processor (2.66GHz, 4MB L3, 1066MHz FSB)

360GB HDD, which I exchanged for a Intel X25-M G2 SSD, 160GB (more on that later)

One 6 cell Li-Ion Battery, and one 9-cell (up to 11 hours running time)

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 WiFi

UltraBase docking station

Price was about 2,000 USD for the ThinkPad, and an extra 350 USD for the SSD. Was it worth it? Totally. It's a sweet machine. What I like about it:

It's fast, extremely quiet (even under full load you hardly hear fan noise), and very small. In fact I like to think, the X201 manages to pack the power of a "real" laptop into almost Netbook format - quite impressive. The SSD was something of a personal dream of mine. It's the first I got, and I must say it's totally worth it. Boot times of about 2 seconds, instant application start times, and especially no more freaking harddisk noise. You often hear the argument "Yeah that's cool, but HDDs are still bigger!" That might be so, but think about the real use of an SSD: 160GB is more than enough for putting your whole system data on it, plus some personal data and such. This is what needs frequent access, so it really matters to have the speed. All the rest, the rarely accessed data like movies you watch once in a blue moon, you simply put that on a dirt cheap external USB HDD. Problem solved.

So, yeah, overall the X201 is really fancy. There are a few things I dislike about it. One of them is the rather poor performance of the Intel GMA HD graphics (which is actually integrated in the CPU). Desktop usage with up to two displays is fine, but forget about anything fancy like gaming. I'm suspecting that the Linux drivers play a rather huge part in this issue. Something else that annoys me is the bad quality of the docking station's audio jack, which produces a lot of hissing noises due to bad shielding. However, the audio jack on the lappy itself is just fine.


Verdict: Buy. (and get a Model M - the most beautiful model there is)

A new Free Software event is born: FrOSCamp. The location is nothing less than the renowned ETH Zurich university, in the beautiful city of Zurich, Switzerland

KDE of course could not miss out on the chance of partaking in the first out of a (probably) long series of successful FrOSCamp events. Thomas Thym, Myriam Schweingruber, and myself (Mark Kretschmann) organized a joint KDE / Amarok booth. On the second day, Amarok hacker Edward "Hades" Toroshchin joined us at the booth as well.

Thomas Thym gave a great talk about "The 7 principles of successful open source communities". Check it out, it's seriously interesting (and I don't say that lightly).

Check out more photos of the event here. And don't miss out on joining us next year! You can talk to the organizers in #froscamp on irc.freenode.net. Also, the wiki page contains heaps of useful information.

The image you're seeing above is showing the Wurlitzer Lyra, an innovative digital jukebox by the Wurlitzer company (a subsidiary of Gibson Guitar Corporation), which has a long history of building famous jukeboxes. The Lyra however is their first all-digital product, marking the advent of a new era.

I wouldn't have blogged about this product if I didn't have a special relationship with it. As it happens, members of the Amarok team were in fact part of the original team of engineers that designed the Lyra. Originally the jukebox was supposed to run a modified version of Amarok, which some of us worked on for several months, including a meeting with the CEO of Gibson Guitar himself, which I had written about earlier.

Although the final product did not end up using Amarok, I'm still happy about the fact that it did not get shelved, but that it was turned into a real device that can actually be bought. Also I'm pretty sure that the Lyra will generate a rather decent sound, which I could witness as I had been partaking in some of the hardware tests. Gibson stands for quality, and they wouldn't have used crappy speakers in their gear.


PS:
As for why the Lyra does not use Amarok now, there are several reasons: For one, the timing was simply bad, as Amarok back then was at version 2.0.1, and it simply did not have the maturity we required for such a use case. Additionally, and for this I blame Gibson, they tried to get away with development on the cheap, and they did not allocate sufficient resources for our development team. Software development is expensive. There is no way around this, if you want quality.

After a summer hiatus with lots of... well, not Amarok hacking... we are back with a fresh release. I won't list all of the changes here in my blog, as you might as well head over to the official release notes.

I will however say that our team now seems to be beaming with a newly found spirit of excitement. We all had to reload our batteries a bit, I guess. If you have ever toyed with the idea of contributing to Amarok, now is the perfect time to do so! We are now starting to work on the "next big version" (likely to become 2.4), and we have an influx of new developers, promoters, handbook writers, and all that makes up a team of this size.

We are also happy to welcome again two teams of students working on Amarok as university projects, one team from France, and one from Germany. Now is the time to introduce new features, and test out all of the wild ideas that you might have for Amarok. Git makes it possible to develop your very own branch of Amarok, and when you feel it's done, you can request a merge into the main development line. Dive in now!

Lately we have made some really nice progress on the Multimedia front, and I thought it would be nice to keep our users (and other developers) a bit up-to-date with all the latest buzz. First of all, I'm happy to announce that we have finally been able to make Phonon-VLC usable and stable. Mostly we have to thank Ben Cooksley for that, who invested many hours in doing some rather complicated detective work for making this work nicely. But now we are there, and most features are working, minus some things like Equalizer support (but we'll get there too).


Let me sum up why exactly this new Phonon backend is so important to us:

Phonon-VLC is fully cross-platform, so we don't need special backends for Windows and Mac any more

It's already far more stable than most other existing Phonon backends

We can now focus on creating one good backend, instead of having 10 more or less broken ones

It simply sounds awesome. I'm not sure why that is, but the sound quality is notably better than with xine

It is currently a bit complicated to build this backend, as it needs libVLC 1.1, which is not yet packaged by most distros. However, we plan to write a tutorial for building it, and we're also happy to help out with questions in the #phonon IRC channel. Give it a try


In other news, Amarok is making rapid progress. Only a few weeks ago we have released Amarok 2.3.0, but thanks to our extremely short release cycle (I had earlier written about this system in this article), our current ChangeLog for 2.3.1 is already rather promising. Not only will 2.3.1 come with many bug fixes and some polishing, but we'll even introduce a number of exciting new features. I'd like to give you a preview of two new features here:

CoverBling

Similar Artists

Left to right: Heike, Klaas, Myriam, Mark

On Wednesday and Thursday a delegation from KDE represented our Kool Desktop Environment at OpenExpo in Berne, Switzerland. Unfortunately I couldn't make it on Wednesday, so that Heike, Klaas, and Myriam were rather busy handling the booth (their voices started to sound rather strained). But yesterday I found some time and could help out a bit.

Klaas Freitag is working for Novell (openSUSE team), and in his spare time he and his wife Heike create a very promising application for businesses, called Kraft. Myriam Schweingruber is from KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu/FSFE (is there anything she doesn't do?), and myself of course I'm from Amarok and KDE.

The event itself generated mixed feelings due the stronger commercial orientation than usual, resulting in less space for Free Software, while the business side (called Topsoft) was more emphasized this time. However, this was not the fault of the organizers (the OpenExpo team is doing a great job). We will see how things are going to work out with this in the future. The Free Software community is hoping that the event could regain the great atmosphere of the past years, which generally used to be very well received.

After the event we went out with Heike and Klaas to the city of Berne, which has a very charming architecture and some great pubs. We ended up having beers in my favorite place, which happened to play videos of Pink Floyd and U2 concerts, and that was just the perfect ending for this day.


Many thanks to Heike and Klaas for attending OpenExpo, it was really nice to meet them!

Image by Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester

As I am finding myself in a similar situation as my fellow Amarok developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen is currently in, I figured that doing something similar as Nikolaj did could make sense.

To sum it up, I have been working as a software consultant for quite a while. Having my own small company (Kretschmann Software Consulting - KSC), I have mostly worked as an independent contractor doing software engineering. Recently I have worked for Gibson Guitar Corporation, and more recently for Collabora Ltd. In my free time I work on Amarok, a Free Software music player.

I am specialized in C++ development with Qt, and I have been an active member of the KDE community for a long time. Further on, my special areas of interest include Software Quality (finding and fixing complicated bugs), GUI Design and Usability, and Multimedia.


If you are a company that would like to work with me, please contact me at kretschmann@kde.org for getting my full CV.


Thanks

Image by Roozbeh Shafiee

Dear Community,

you might have heard it already elsewhere, but I thought it would be a nice touch if I wrote a short article as well. The good news:

Fresh Release: Amarok 2.3 'Clear Light'

We are rather happy with this release, and I think we were able to deliver a nicely rounded start of the new Amarok 2.3 series. As always, you can expect new releases in this series fairly rapidly, as we plan to keep our "roughly 6 weeks" release cycle.


I hope you enjoy this release, have fun

Image copyright by Ben Golub

The Amarok Team is happy to announce that we have produced a new issue of the Amarok Insider, our monthly newsletter. We have prepared many interesting bits of information for you, giving you an insider look into Amarok development. This issue features:

A sneak preview of the upcoming Amarok 2.3.

Many tips and tricks for new features that we have been working on.

An exclusive interview with an Amarok developer.

Last not least: Juicy details about the romantic life of small gerbils.

Please enjoy:

Amarok Insider - Issue 14

PS:
The last part I wrote might not be exactly true, but it's interesting anyway

Amarok teamster Abhishek has again produced a great video, this time explaining some new Podcast features of the upcoming Amarok 2.3:





Here is a direct link to the video, in case the embedding did not work:

Video: Podcasts in Amarok 2.3

Enjoy

What is Kraut Sourcing? No worries, I will explain this later on. First I would like to ask our community for a favor:

The Amarok team is about to release Amarok 2.3 fairly soon (our release schedule is tight), perhaps in about three weeks from now. What I am asking our community (especially artists) for: Creating a new splash screen for this release


This is how the current splash (kindly made by Lee Olson) for Amarok 2.2.x looks like:




As Amarok 2.3 is the start of a new major series, we would love to have a new splash screen. Any takers?


The winner will be chosen by the Amarok team, and the reward is:

1 Amarok t-shirt, a mention in the "Thanks To" dialog of Amarok, and... hmm, a beer at our next meeting. Does this sound ok?



PS:
"Kraut Sourcing" is pretty much what just happened here: A German asking for Crowd Sourcing.


Update: Please note that the license must be Creative Commons, cc-by-sa