Entries by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen

Following recent tradition, here is another post mostly unrelated to Amarok (next one will be on topic, I promise)

The company that I have recently co-founded, Memolane.com is in need of a graphical and interactive lead designer.

So what do we offer?

As a very young startup, we offer long hours, constantly changing tasks (we all need to pitch in wherever needed) and huge responsibility for doing the best you can as there is no one else to fall back on.

But for the right person we also offer a unique opportunity to help shape a new company from a very early stage, to become a key part of a small, young and dynamic team, a very decent (for a young startup) salary and a nice little bag of lottery tic... uhm... stock options

If this person is you, get in touch with some examples of your previous work. If it is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, a good bottle of champagne or two is up for grabs for the person who refers us the designer we end up hiring.

Anyone interested or who wants to know more can mail me a "Nikolaj{at}memolane.com" or leave a comment below.

So, recently I was looking for something to do, but now I am in the position of having to turn down interesting offers because I am already committed elsewhere.

One of the projects I have been in touch with is of particular interest to me, as even though it is for a commercial company, the project that they need someone to work on would very much benefit the Free/Open Source software community in general and Amarok in particular, and therefore I offered to blog about it in the hopes that someone else might be interested in working with them. Had I not just a week before more or less accidentally co founded a startup (much more on that later), I would have been all over this project myself!

Basically they need a way to synchronize iPods on Windows and OS X, and rather than going a commercial route, they want to look into using libgpod and friends. Libgpod however is currently not ready for this task, as various bits are missing or needs to be improved on Windows and OS X, so the job is basically to do whatever is needed to fill in these missing bits.

They are looking for someone who can work full time on this and are willing to pay good money for it

If this sounds interesting, leave a reply here (remember to put your email in the comment form so I can get back in touch with you)

I am currently at an event called Startup Weekend in Copenhagen. The event aims to get as many talented people and people with good ideas as possible together and the see what they can come up with over a weekend.

I joined a team working on an idea that could potentially revolutionize the way you think about your social media ( Bold words, I know ). The basic idea is to form a graphical and searchable timeline of your activities on various social media sites.

As part of our idea, we need feedback from people comfortable with using multiple different social media, a description that fits much of the Amarok and KDE community. If the idea sounds interesting, you can help us out by taking our 2 minute survey (where there is also a more detailed description of the idea)

Thanks!

It has been brought to my attention that recently, I have not blogging enough about cool new features in future versions (as in, not the upcoming version, but a later one) of Amarok.

So to make some kind of amends, here is a little something I hacked together yesterday. It needs a lot of polish still, but it does work (mostly).



Yes, that is the beginning of full .cue file support for Amaroks local collection

For the last 2½ years I have been working full time as a developer for Magnatune.com. While I have enjoyed this work very much, within the next few months, Magnatune wishes to transition me to a part time position instead.

This means that I will either have to find some more clients for my small one man consultancy business or find something else to do altogether.

So, if anyone is interested in working with a skilled developer with a passion for Free Software and Free Culture and a proven record of making stuff work (whatever unconventional solutions it takes) I am putting myself up for grabs. I am very skilled in C++/Qt/KDE through several years of contributing to Amarok and I can work with pretty much whatever technology is needed to make a given project work (at Magnatune I have done mainly PHP and TCL and in previous jobs I have worked with Java, Perl, Lua, Delphi, C and host of other things)

Alternatively, if anyone out there wants to sponsor a particular feature for Amarok, now would also be a perfect time. I wrote the integrated Magnatune service and the framework behind the services in Amarok 2 (as well as many of the other services as well) so anything that aims to integrate an online source of music I am particularly good at.

If you have any interesting proposals, ideas, questions or just want a full CV, please mail me a nhn@kde.org

Last year I was invited to speak at the FSCONS conference in Göteborg, Sweden. FSCONS describes itself as "a meeting place for social change, focused on the future of free software and free society" and brings together many interesting speakers involved in Free Software, Free Culture and beyond.

After the conference, a number of the people who had given talks at the conference decided that if each of us wrote a text somehow related to what we had given a talk about, there might just be enough interesting material to self-publish a book with this material. The form of the text was left up to each speaker, it just had to somehow relate to the talk without just repeating what was already presented at the conference.

I pretty quickly wrote a short essay based on the idea that the same kind of creativity that made me spend my childhood building fantastic projects with Lego bricks, is what motivates me and many others to participate in the development of Free/Open source Software, and many other similar activities and that the role of consumer is not a natural fit for many people. I called it "From Consumer to Creator - The Lego Generation in the Digital Age"

Then nothing happened for a long time and I sort of forgot about the whole thing...

And then in a mad dash of activity to get the project finished before this years FSCONS conference, all of a sudden the editing was completed and version 1.0 of "Free Beer" was published. (The name makes sense when you look at some of the contents). My essay made it in as the very first chapter, and serves quite well as an opener in my own humble only-ever-so-sightly-totally-biased opinion

The book homepage is at freebeer.fscons.org Here is also the bug-tracker so that when enough bugs have been squashed we can release version 1.1. The book can be downloaded freely as a PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence, version 2.5. It is also possible to buy a hard-copy.

Thanks to all the other people who wrote a piece for the book, and especially to Stian Rødven Eide for editing, getting all the practical stuff done and not least, keeping the project alive.

Also, thanks to Amaroks very own Lydia Pintscher for reading through my early versions of the essay and giving feedback.

Last year was started what we hope will become a long running tradition when an Amarok user known as linkmaster03 sent us this picture of his amazing Amarok pumpkin carving.

This year, Jessy Ouellette dropped by our IRC channel with this picture of his pumpkin masterpiece, which absolutely blew our minds!



So happy Halloween to everyone and a big thanks to Jessy for letting us blog this picture!

The upcoming Amarok 2.2.1 release is turning out to be quite an impressive one, especially considering how short of a release cycle we have put ourselves on. The changelog is full of good stuff already!

True to form though, I am going to do a little "2.2.1 is going to be great, but checkout what we have in store for 2.2.2" post!

So here goes:



If you are recoiling in horror at all those random colors, fear not, you will not see them at all. If however you have a ton of moodbar files lying around for your collection and liked this feature in Amarok 1.4.x, you are in luck! Showing the moodbar (if available) in the progress slider is configurable, and moodbars have been added to the playlist layout editor so you can add it to your favorite playlist alyout in any way you choose. Even the 4 different moodbar "styles" (normal, angry, frozen and happy) have been ported over.

The moodbar generator itself seems to work still, even though it could really use some love and a porting to Phonon (or even to qtscript so it could be easily integrated into Amarok and, for instance, run on demand when playing a track or process the entire local collection in one go).

The sun is setting on the development of Amarok 2.2.0. With todays release of Amarok 2.2 rc1, we are preparing to release 2.2.0 very soon and end this significant chapter in the history of Amarok.

This rc contains a number of important bugfixes compared to Beta2 and also adds a few much needed features and improvements to the podcast support. See the release announcement for a full list of changes and please help us by reporting bugs.

As with any sunset, tomorrow is a new day. And once 2.2.0 has been released, we can start over, improving on Amarok 2.2 and slowly start thinking about 2.3 and how to make it even better.

One of the features from Amarok 1 that has so far been missing from Amarok 2, is the ability to edit track metadata directly in the playlist. While it might sound surprising that such a seemingly simple and oft requested feature should take so long to implement, the extremely flexible nature of the Amarok 2 playlist made it quite tricky to get right.

Recently I decided to have a go at it, and after a few false starts, I think I finally finally made it work. So as of today, cliking on an already selected item in the playlist makes it go into "edit mode" where (some of) the visible fields can be edited (subject to a few rules about which pieces of metadata it makes sense to manually edit).

The hard part here was to generate editors that fits whatever layout the playlist is setup to use. Below are screenshots of inline editing with 2 different layouts. The look of the edit boxes could possibly do with a little tweaking, but the functionality is pretty solid.





As the attentive reader will note, this also allows changing track ratings directly in the playlist.

Look for this to arrive in an Amarok 2.2 near you.

Today I want to write a bit about some of the stuff that is made possible by me working on both Magnatune.com and Amarok.

On Magnatune.com, we have recently added a number of features to make the memberships more attractive. One of these features (which has actually been around for a while now) is a personal list of favorite albums for each member. On each album page, there is a small button that adds the album to the list of favorites



Clicking this button adds the album to the favorites page (and in a nifty little trick, the button gives feedback and changes to a link to the favorites page). The favorite page look something like this:



Besides some basic editing (removing albums form the list) it also provides direct download links (for download members) and an option to start a flash player containing all these albums. Based on the data we now have about peoples favorites, I just pushed our latest feature live this morning. This new page provides personal recommendations based on what a member has in their list of favorites, as well as any previous downloads.



As one of the main complaints that I often hear about Magnatune.com is that it is hard to discover new music based on what you already like, hopefully this will help a little. The feature is currently only available for paying members, but that might change in the future.

So, that is the Magnatune.com side of things, and how, you ask does all this relate to Amarok?

If we go back to the release of Amarok 2.1.0, one of the things I had been working on was something called Amarok URLs. These are basically URLs that Amarok triggers on and that can cause Amarok to do any number of different things. While their use in 2.1 was quite limited, one of the main ideas behind them was to make it possible to integrate html pages, possibly generated elsewhere, that can make Amarok perform certain actions.

Using such urls, the Magnatune service in Amarok 2.2 will fully support the membership favorites and recommendations features. I could spend the next few pages describing how exactly this works from a user perspective, but I think I will just throw a video your way!

As always, note that this is very new code and there may be obvious bugs shown in the video. The most obvious is that it needs to be simple to get back the the Magnatune service "front page", but I am working on a solution for that one.


direct link if aggregations breaks the embedded vid (or if you prefer to watch in higher quality)

So this is what I have implemented so far. In essence it is pretty basic stuff, but it shows of what is possible when integrating online content into Amarok 2.

Last Friday, trunk was opened for features and changes intended for Amarok 2.2. In the scope of a few hours more than 250 commits had been made as people were frantically committing their local git repos.

Today, less than one week later, I though it was worth posting a little update and a video showing how all of this new stuff fits within Amarok. While most of the stuff that is shown in this video has already been blogged about before its kind of interesting to see it all in Amarok at once after having only been able to run them separately for a while.

The features shown in the video are (roughly in order of appearance)

- New browser navigation interface
- Wikipedia applet mkII.
- Videoclip applet showing matches for current track and playing a youtube video.
- Videoclip applet playing a video podcast.
- Dockable interface elements


Direct link

Since so much stuff in trunk has changed in such a short time, there are plenty of small bugs and visual issues present in the video, but there is plenty of time to work on these before even getting close to a 2.2 release. Considering just how many changes have been made, I am surprised that trunk is currently working as well as it does

Also there are many features currently being worked on that are still not in any state to show of.

In a previous blog post I showed an experimental prototype that aimed to do away with the vertical tab bar along the left edge of Amarok. The many replies to this post was about 50/50 for and against this idea. In the post, I mentioned that I wanted to add some kind of "breadcrumb" navigation bar to make navigation easier and also to always show the user where he "is", something that the tabs, admittedly, quite nicely accomplished, at least for the lowest level (which browser is active).

Since I had some time off last week, I decided to see how I could improve the original idea and add the breadcrumb interface. I quickly realized that the big vertical, kickoff style, back button was not very pretty, so as you will see, the latest version does away with that completely. It also turned out that when you have a nice breadcrumb bar, having each "category" show its own name, as all the services have been doing so far, really does not make much sense, so this is something that I could remove as well. Finally, this new interface finally gave me the chance to display some extended info about each category, before selecting it, something I have been planning to do for a long time for the services and which now makes sense for all categories. The info that is currently shown is just a placeholder until we figure out the real text/image for each item, so don't place too much importance on the actual info just yet!

I guess you think that I have been writing enough and you want to see the video already, so here it is:

Video on youtube

(note that this vid is available in HD)

I think that overall this works much better than the initial version I blogged about (even though I already liked that a lot) and I am confident enough that I can work out the final issues, that I am going to commit this to trunk as soon as 2.2 opens up for development.

Yesterdays blog entry about a prototype QDockWidget based Amarok 2 interface got a nearly overwhelming amount of positive feedback. So let me start out by saying thank you to everyone who commented.

It did make us think about some things though. Since the vast majority of comments would very much like to see this feature included in Amarok, you guys must have some kind of idea what you would actually use this flexibility for, and what kind of layout you want to create. So today we are going to try to do a little experiment based on all this feedback.

What we would greatly appreciate is if you would do a small simple mockup of what kind of layout you think you would create using this feature and post it to imagebin.ca or somewhere similar and then link it in the comments below, if possible with a very short description text. We are not talking about spending hours in the Gimp making a pretty picture, a simple pencil-on-the-back-of-a-napkin type sketch will do just fine. All it should show is how you would, based only on the possibilities show in the video, arrange the main interface elements, which ones would be placed where, hidden completely, or stacked together using tabs. A very important note is that this is not a free form chance to dream up an entirely new interface, but only about what you would change if this new feature became available. To keep things simple, please post each new mockup as a separate top level reply.

We know that the results of this will be quite biased, as what seems like a really good layout in theory might not work when you actually try it out in the real world. So ideally this experiment should really be done after this feature has made it into Amarok, but since there is currently no timeline for that, we are going to do this as best we can anyway!

The really interesting thing to see here is whether everyone has their own personal ideas about what would be a good interface layout, or if many of the suggestions gravitate towards something similar.

If we get enough feedback on this, we will follow up later with another blog post about the result and any lessons learned.

If any of you needs to revisit the video, here is the direct link.

Seeing how Leo refuses to give up in our little "battle of the blogs", blogging cool new feature after cool new feature, its time for me to fire the next salvo

Disclaimer 1: What I am going to show you here is a personal prototype, made to facilitate discussions. It is currently not planned for inclusion in any version of Amarok. In fact there is no guarantee it ever will appear in a released version as it is quite a controversial topic among the Developers.

Disclaimer 2: The observant among you will notice many small bugs and glitches in the video, such as album covers in the playlist doing weird things, double borders around some elements and likely many others. This is par for the course when creating a quick prototype like this...

That being said, I would really like to hear the opinions of the wider community on this one, so let me know what you think: Want? Don't Want? Wonderful? Horrible? ... Or should I just try to get some more sleep instead of hacking up all this crazy stuff?

Now for the actual video. Due to its rather large size, this one is hosted on youtube to avoid killing our server:



And here is a direct link (which also gives you the video in better quality) in case syndications kills the embedded video.