Entries by Lydia Pintscher

Amarok finally switched to git today after many weeks of discussion and preparation. Our part of KDE SVN has been made read-only and commits should be made to the repository at http://gitorious.org/+kde-developers/amarok/amarok from now on.

We can hopefully work out all the problems soon so the rest of KDE (except translations) can follow asap.

Please report problems you encounter and help us get documentation up to date.

Oh btw: Perfect birthday present, KDE :D  One millionth commit and move to git on my birthday rocks!

Jeff, Leo, Ian and I are happy to announce that all of KDE’s GSoC students passed the midterm evaluation. That is awesome news. Congratulations to them and their mentors.

You rock! Keep up the great work for the rest of GSoC and beyond.

Can I hear some YAY for them, please?

Have you ever noticed that some people check their IRC backlog and answer every ping while others couldn’t care less about who tried to contact them while they were away? Are there people around you who answer emails within a day (most of the time much less though) while you can wait a week for your uncle to answer that email asking for photos of your latest family reunion?

The people around us communicate very differently on the web for various reasons.  Let’s simplify it by separating them into 4 groups:

• communication ninjas


• selective communicator


• part-time communicator


• communication abstainers

Communication ninjas are those who you can always reach, no matter where. They read their emails regularly, check IRC backlogs, follow what is happening on Twitter/Identi.ca, know who broke up with whom on Facebook and have a huge contact list for different networks in their instant messenger of choise.

Selective communicators are reachable on a few selected mediums. They might check emails regularly and Jabber. Or follow Identi.ca and IRC. They have chosen one or a few mediums and stick to it. You can rely on reaching them there but don’t bet on reaching them anywhere else.

Part-time communicators are on top of things when they are “online” but nearly completely drop off the earth from time to time. They are probably the trickiest of them all because you can’t always rely on their communication pattern.

Communication abstainers… Well, don’t rely on them getting any information. They don’t like communicating online or simply don’t have the time for it. You will have to spent some extra effort on them.

So you might ask yourself why this is important for you. It is very important if you want to get a message to a person or a group of people. Unfortunately in the Free Software community we forget about it too often or are not aware of its implications while relying so heavily on communication every single day.

Say you have a part-time communicator who does IRC and reads backlog. There is little sense in sending him a simple “ping”. He’ll read it 5 hours later due to time-zone difference between you two and “pong” you. This ping pong can go on for days without ever any of you two getting the message to the other. (Yes I’ve see it happen multiple times. Don’t ask.) “ping - I need you to do X” would have been so much more effective in this case.

Other example: You have a communication abstainer and need to contact him quickly. You could send an email and wait days to get a reply. Or you could ask around in his network and get his cellphone number and call him quickly. Or ask his collegues at work to tell him you need him to do X or know about Y.

Another example: You have a part-time communicator who can’t use IRC at work but you need something dealt with quickly. Contact him on Jabber which he uses at work.

Things to take away:

• Find out which category people around you fit in and then adjust accordingly if you want to get your message across successfully.


• Spread important messages to the communication ninjas in your network and ask them to spread it. They are often also the multipliers in your network who reach the most people most effectively.


• Take into consideration what kind of a communicator people in your team are. Do some of them feel excluded because they can’t or don’t want to keep up with IRC/mail/Identi.ca/Facebook all the time? Are they loosing out on valuable information? Are they kept out of important decisions?


• Not all of us are communication ninjas. Don’t rely on it!


• Where do you fit in?

As others on PlanetKDE already wrote we had a really great time in Berlin last week. The KDE/Kubuntu/Amarok booth was well staffed with my favorite gearheads and new KDE people now to be added to the former group It was nice to meet you folks! One of the best things about this year’s Linuxtag: We finally managed to get our booths (KDE, Kubuntu, Amarok, QtSoftware and KDAB) together as close as possible No more running from one side of the exhibition to the other like in previous years \o/

Thursday was probably the busiest day for me. Ingo interviewed me about Amarok for RadioTux. (Excellent job as always, Ingo! ) The recording of it is available at RadioTux. Shortly after that I had to rush off to join Alexandra in giving an introduction to community management in free software projects in our “Community Management 101″ workshop that was well received.

The other days were filled with meetings and lots of talking to visitors and other projects. It is nice to see the shift in attitude towards KDE 4 compared to Linuxtag last year. A lot of people came to our booth to let us know they use and like KDE 4 now. This really rocks! Those who were not happy with KDE 4 yet mostly had very minor problems which we fixed in a few minutes; like showing them how to add applets to their taskbar or what the places bar in Dolphin is capable of. Oh and I was surprised how many people first didn’t believe I was running a stock KDE 4.2.4 on Kubuntu on my 7′ EeePC. So once again: The tiny thing does indeed run KDE 4 Special thanks for that to the Plasma and KWin team. Plasma and KWin on the EeePC are quite an eye catcher at events like Linuxtag.

Kreuzberg surprised a small group of us on Saturday with CSD. Definitely not what I would have expected for that evening but it was awesome! And let me tell you: Marge’s outfit was great but it wasn’t the best one by far. That one goes to someone dressed as Hellboy shouting “KDE! Awesome!” after seeing Frederik’s KDE shirt. This was my second time in Kreuzberg and the second time there was a party on the streets. Rock! (Way less police than on May 1st though )

Sunday and Monday Frank, Cornelius, Thorsten, Danimo, Dominik, Milian and I met at the QtSoftware office to talk about the future of KDE’s wikis. It was quite productive and results will be visible soon.

Thanks go to KDE e.V. and Amarok for funding and of course the Linuxtag team for another great event.

Oh and btw: I of course signed the FLA as well. (I think I got number 10 - nice round number.)

Everyone going to Gran Canaria: Have a nice time and lots of fun and make sure to blog/dent/tweet a lot for those left behind at home. I want to see lots of photos

While the Amarok team has been working on a lot of cool new stuff for 2.2 we havn’t forgotten about 2.1. It’s time for 2.1.1, the first (and likely last) maintenance release of the 2.1 series. Enjoy!

We will also be at Linuxtag next week in Berlin with the rest of KDE and the Kubuntu crowd. If you are around say hello. We have a few free tickets left.

<public service announcement>

Heya folks

I will open Amarok trunk for 2.2 development in a few hours (not yet!). As people have a lot of awesome stuff to merge that they have been working on, trunk will be (semi-)broken for a few days and might eat your kittens. So if you compile from trunk you might want to wait a few days unless you want to help us stabilize things, which would of course be greatly appreciated.

Let the breakage begin! (in a few hours)

Cheers

Lydia

</public service announcement>

Just 5 months since we released 2.0 and today we can present you Amarok 2.1 “Let There Be Light” with lots of improvements and new features.

Read the release notes, download it and rediscover music!

For videos of Amarok 2.1’s features check AmarokStudios. (Thanks to Abby for the videos.)

Two weeks have passed since I announced round 2 and I am very happy with the result. The Amarok page improved a lot and is ready for the release of Amarok 2.1. Many thanks go to Karthikp, the winner of round 2! Awesome work! You definitely get a beer when we meet.

So who is next? Plasma! A few days ago the Plasma page on UserBase was a sorry little copy of the Plasma FAQ. Einar moved the FAQ already and was kind enough to start the new Plasma page. Now it needs more people to fill the missing spots. This is where you come in! Go to UserBase, get an account (non-OpenID login now possible as well thanks to danimo \o/) and start on either the main Plasma page or updating the FAQ where needed. This is a good way to get started with contributing to KDE and at the same time helping fellow users. As in previous rounds a beer (or similar drink of your choosing) is waiting for the winner at Akademy or another event.

If you have questions please join us on IRC in #plasma on freenode.

Weeeeeee! One more beta closer to Amarok 2.1!

Read the release notes, download it, give it lots of testing and help us get 2.1 out the door soon. Enjoy!

Two weeks ago we announced the first round of our competition for UserBase. We are happy to announce the winner: Nikita Lyalin! Congratulations and thank you for helping improve UserBase.

As we will be releasing Amarok 2.1 soon the next two weeks will be all about improving the Amarok page on UserBase to make it ready for the next release. It currently does not contain up-to-date information and should be updated to actually reflect the state of Amarok 2.1 and not mix in Amarok 1.4 features. The winner gets a beer at Akademy or another event where we meet. Everyone is welcome to help. If you have questions please ask in #amarok on freenode or on our mailinglist amarok@kde.org.

Oh and here two more pictures by Leo from the Amarok developer sprint at KDAB:

Who can spot the 4 bad-ass KDE developers on the first photo?





Aren’t we a clever and good looking bunch?

Rock on!

The Amarok developer sprint in Berlin is at full speed and the Amarokers are having an awesome time

Tuesday started with me being late for my ride to Stuttgart due to a meeting. Finally at 4am on Friday Frederik, Sven and I arrived in Berlin. We had a nice chat with Nuno, Leo and Gerard. Czessi of kubuntu-de organized a really nice flat for us with comfy beds to fall asleep in.

Friday morning we went to the KDAB office in Kreuzberg and where greeted with lots of music and generally everyone having a great day. May 1st is starting as a rather nice street festival here. After playing a first round of table football (note to self: need one at home! need one at home!) we split into two groups, one doing API review of the Amarok codebase and the other one planning the PR part of our world domination plans and talking promo, website and artwork. Todos for everyone In between being all serious and making Amarok rock even more we went out to get food at a Moroccan restaurant next door (everysone visiting KDAB: get food there - it’s delicious!) and enjoyed the atmosphere. We left Kreuzberg later in the evening right before police closed the U-Bahn station. Fun being in Berlin on May 1st

Amarok developer sprint (by Frederik)

Saturday was all about discussing ways to make Amarok’s user interface better. We had everything from “awesome but totally un-doable” to “yea this is pretty cool and might work”. Stay tuned for what will come out of this. Leinir and I did some card sorting to improve the context menu that pops up when right-clicking on a track in the playlist. It currently contains 11 items most of which are not the way they should be. Sebas was able to convince Frederik to join him in hacking on the networkmanager applet. We had delicious food around the corner again, Vietnamese and Indian this time. And of course we had a few good table football matches again

Leo, Nuno, Max and Gerard having fun (by Frederik)

Today started with making action items out of the discussions of the previous days, discussing bigger short and long-term plans and going through critical bug reports. After some really good Persian food, Leinir and I evaluated the data we got yesterday and came up with a very nice new context menu for the playlist. Others worked on implementing some of the action items we agreed on earlier like making it possible to remove the context view with a command line option (no option for now as we are in string-freeze). Night ended with a serious table foodball match which Leo, Sebas and Nuno totally rocked

Conclusion: Berlin around the KDAB office and the office itself is the awesome. Thanks to KDAB for providing us with a great location and hosting. Thanks also to KDE eV for helping with funding. Stay tuned for some cool stuff

Due to not so perfectly alligned release cycles, not wanting to ship a beta version and a few more good reasons Kubuntu Jaunty was released with Amarok 2.0.2. This version is still missing a few features that some users consider vital. We have made huge improvements in Amarok 2.1 beta 1, our latest release, and of course more improvements have been made since then in SVN.

Improvements and features include but are not limited to:

• improved context view


• customizable playlist


• replaygain support


• improved podcasting support


• and more

For more please read the 2.1 beta 1 release notes.

So for everyone who wants to have some of the most loved features back: you can upgrade to Amarok 2.1 beta 1 with packages from the kubuntu-experimental PPA. Be aware that this PPA contains very experimental stuff that can break your system from time to time so you might want to consider deactivating the repository after you installed Amarok.

Please don’t forget to report bugs you find in the beta version at bugs.kde.org so we have a chance to fix them for the final version.

UserBase, the KDE user wiki, is really growing nicely but certain areas are still lacking quality content. To get those into shape we decided to start a little competition. We will announce a certain part of the wiki that needs love every two weeks and then start working on it together. The top contributors will get a beer at Akademy (or another drink of their choosing at an event they attend). This is a perfect way for you to get involved in KDE and a lot of people will be thankful to find the information prepared for them in the wiki.

KOffice will be the first project for our competition. What needs to be done? Easy! These blogposts need to be transfered to the Hints, Tips and Tutorials section of the Krita page on UserBase. Of course if you feel like giving the rest of the KOffice pages some attention that is appreciated as well.

Don’t forget to log in when editing pages so we know who gets to drink the beer

Any more questions? Ask away in #kde-www on freenode or send an email to community-wg@kde.org.

Oh and of course I already have the next project lined up but I’ll keep that one to myself for now and will announce it together with the winners of the first round Let me know if you have a project you’d like to see in round 3!