Amarok Blog

What People Are (Really) Saying About Windows 7

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:53:03 -0500

Remember my Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects? Skreech was so kind to point me to a really great un-example site: Microsoft’s social media page for Windows 7, where they show what people are saying about it. Go take a look.

Now there are a few interesting things to mention about this page.

Quite fast, huh? Lots of people talking about it. Are those messages real-time? Nope. The page is just made to give you the impression they are. I picked a few random ones and got pretty much everything between 3 hours and 8 days old. See the slider at the top? Yea you can slow it down to actually be able to read it unlike the default.

If you feel like it just watch it for a few minutes and watch the same messages appear again. It started to loop after about 10 minutes here.

Now let’s take a look at the actual content of the messages shown. Windows 7 must be the most awesome operating system out there. In the 30 minutes or so I watched the stream there were 2 messages with a slightly negative touch. Every single other message praised it. Every single one. Now call me biased but I don’t believe it. So I had a look at the actual Twitter search page for Windows 7 and Win7. And indeed you find tweets, that are less positive, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. They do however have little stabs at Linux and Apple in their selected tweets (”I though Apple had it together but with Win7 out of the door they better get moving.” and similar.). This page seems to indicate that they do indeed filter for family friendliness and so on. Fair enough. But it also says that they do not filter out the negative stuff. Uhhhhm yes you do.

The Facebook messages are taken from the Windows fan page on Facebook. Now my guess is that the audience of said fan page is slightly biased but I’ll let that one slide as there aren’t a lot of good ways to get such messages out of Facebook.

There is probably more but those are the things that immediately jumped into my eye. Please leave comments if you find other gems.

Now the sad thing is: From my quick check of Twitter and Co it seems that Windows 7 is indeed good according to quite a few people. There are indeed a lot of people tweeting about it. There would have been no need to hide behind filtering and sneaky web-apps trying to create an illusion of a lot of communication. This would have been a great opportunity to show what people really think about it and gain credibility. But it failed. It failed to be honest and instead took the secure way. If you want to take the secure way stay away from social media!

Wanna learn how to do it right? Get in touch with me and have a look at buzz.kde.org (which is indeed live and unfiltered and could use some coding help – ping me if you want to help).

Phonon Bugday, join the fun!

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:58:00 -0500

Hello goodpeople,

this is a quickreminder for all kdefriendly bug triagers and otherfolks. Ok, I'll stop with the strangetalk now...

We are going to have a Phonon Bugday on the 8th of November, which is really quite soon, if you think about it. Phonon is a very central component of KDE and Qt, but like all software it does contain a number of bugs. It doesn't have to stay this way though

Come join us at our Bugday. Developers, triagers, normal users - you can all be helpful. I'm pretty much convinced that many of Phonon's issues are fairly low hanging fruits that could be fixed rather easily, if we all help out a bit. Also, Phonon's new maintainer Martin Sandsmark is pretty awesome, and I'm confident that with him at the helm we will be able to make a real difference.

Join us!

PS: The event is not actually happening in Buğday, but rather on irc.freenode.net, channel #phonon. Bringing Kebab is totally fine though.

Californication

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:45:32 -0500

Group Photo, originally uploaded by warthog9.

Leo and I went to Southern California for the GSoC mentor summit to talk to lots of other mentors and admins about Summer of Code and whatever else was on our mind. In short: absolutely awesome and definitely worth the travel (which included lots of hours in airplanes and airports for me including an unplanned 6 hour stay in Salt Lake City – thank you very much border control).

The energy you get when you put that many geeks together is amazing. And at the same time it is quite different from conferences where you only have one project present like Akademy. It shows you that people working on competing projects are actually pretty cool people when sitting in a hot-tub with them *g*. (If course I knew that one before but it feels good to be reassured about it.) It shows you a lot of white spots on your personal open source map. Any idea what the Boost community looks like? Any idea how huge the Apache Software Foundation is? Now I do. It has definitely been interesting for me to see how different communities are managing their day-to-day business and especially GSoC. And the most surprising thing for me: Even pretty dysfunctional communities can release decent software I also learned that you can indeed have a session on minorities in free software and actually get useful results everyone can apply in their communities instead of getting derailed and discussing colors of random bike sheds. (They should all be blue and have pink doors of course.)

Check out the session notes (not 100% complete at the time of this post but hopefully soon), the one thing people learned at the summit and pics.

Thanks a lot to Google and everyone who attended the summit for making this happen. It has been 2 intense days and a great experience.

After the summit I stayed another 2 days with Alejandro to check out the area. Thanks so much for offering a place to crash. We went to San Francisco – what a great city – and met up with Gary and blauzahl who were great hosts. (Sorry I wasn’t more talkative that night folks but the previous days really drained my energy.) And it again showed me one of the best things about our community: No matter where I go on this world, friends are never far. I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.

I’ll definitely have to return – not just for the massage chairs and hot-tub.

Post Amarok 2.2.1: Adding some color to your life!

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:33:37 -0400

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).

Amarok joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:52:00 -0500

Do you like Amarok? If so, we have some good news for you:

The Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. This move allows donors to give tax-deductible donations, and it increases the transparency in the spending of Amarok's funds. This greatly helps us to be more efficient, and focus on what we really do best: Creating kick-ass software. At the same time, we stay fully committed to the KDE project! Amarok is, and will always stay, a fully committed project under the KDE umbrella. We have coordinated this move with the KDE e.V. board, who approves of our endeavors.

If you want to help us making Amarok even better, head over to our official announcement, and support our fund drive

Our development speed is faster than ever before, and we are highly motivated to deliver you the best music player possible. The upcoming Amarok 2.2.1 release will bring our users features that many of you have been waiting for, and we constantly aim to improve our quality too. I guarantee you that with my (hopefully) good name.

Thanks for supporting us in advance.

Mark Kretschmann,
Amarok project founder and developer.

A Howlin' Halloween

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:58:32 -0400

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!

Chromium: It really shines

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:14:00 -0400

Have you tried it yet? I'm running the Chromium "Daily Builds" on Kubuntu 9.10. At first, not very long ago, I was quite skeptical about Chromium. It looked unfamiliar, it seemed to lack features. Then, about a week ago, I gave it another try. And boy, has it improved!

To give you some back story on my personal history of browser usage, I'm a die hard Opera fan. I've been using Opera since about 10 years, and nothing ever came close to its performance, usability, and elegance. In fact Opera used to be the last remaining non-free software that I used on a daily basis. While I'm a huge supporter of Free Software, I didn't feel bad about using it, as it was just so damn good. Still, I would have preferred a good free alternative, but nothing else did it for me (including Firefox).

Now, what makes Chromium so great? Let me just list a few things that I love about it:

Incredibly fast.

Based on WebKit, which is based on KDE's KHTML. Proves how great KDE technology is.

Rapid development process, fully transparent, using Git for version control.

Ingenious multi-process system. Forget about memory leaks, plugins crashing the whole browser, etc.

Simple user interface. Doesn't overwhelm me with obscure options.

Free Software (not just as in beer).

Where there is light, there is also shadow, and there is one thing about Chromium that I find a bit sad: Why did they not use Qt from the beginning? Qt would have provided a perfect foundation for a cross-platform application. Google probably had its reasons for doing it differently (I assume it's simply time-to-market, they made a pure Windows version first), but that's still one aspect that they could have done better. Anyway, Chromium's GUI is rather simplistic, so the choice of toolkit doesn't make a very big difference to the user.

Gluon Sprint - Day 4

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:06:46 -0400

The final day of the sprint, the room in which i slept awoke quarter of an hour late - which would have been a problem with our rather tight morning schedule, had it not been for the fact that Harald also ended up getting in late. His excuse was the same as ours the previous day - problems with trams and the U-bahn - so we all, of course, understood.

As we are settling in after arriving at the office, a few more KDE people show up to hang out with us for the day, while waiting for the welcome reception at Qt Developer Days that night. The first to arrive was Patrick Spendrin, and a little later Frederik Gladhorn and Frank Karlitschek showed up.

Kim and Morten began restructuring all of KCL, something they decided to do the previous day, starting out by scribbling a whole lot on one of the large sheets of paper from the flip board. After a while they ended up with something that they could work with, and began coding. In short: They decided to reimplement the entirety of KCL, while keeping the API intact in as much as it was possible to do so.

Just before lunch, Sandro and Sacha showed off their work on embedding QWidgets in KGL - something which of course will make it very easy for developers to create UIs for games. Something which did not come up while this was going on, but rather happened during one of the keynotes at Developer Days (this blog was, of course, not written at the time, but rather the day after, from notes taken at the time) was that this will enable us to use the declarative UI system that is under development, because the way this is used in normal applications is to use a QFXWidget, which then shows the declarative UI.

Lunch happened at the caffeteria in a near-by office building - i must say i'd have never guessed there was a caffeteria in that building, but it really was clearly visible from the outside... Odd design, but pretty neat anyway - very minimalist and modern looking. In general the food there was entirely acceptable and respectably priced. Lunch, plus a large drink, plus a desert at less than ten euros isn't really that bad. Also: Strawberries with mascarpone cream is very, very yummy.

Immediately following lunch we decided to do the group photo, but since some people needed to get out some money and such, one group went with Harald to the shopping centre, while the rest of us went back to the office. Now, of course, German weather is as efficiently timed as everything else in Germany, and as such it decided that the perfect time to start raining was to wait until the first group got back to the office and the second had just left the shopping centre. As such, when they returned they were all quite wet. Luckily, though, it was not so much as to make it impossible to do the group shot. But, as a bonus, try and spot the wet people on the group picture (the group shot will be put up on the Dot when the wrap-up article is released later, still needs to be written)

At a bit to five, everybody moved into two of the smaller room in the office, since someone else needed the big room (the room in which pizza was consumed the previous day and the wii room without a projector for the wii). Just when we've moved in there and settled down a bit, Albert mentioned that we were on the list of most active teams on Gitorious - screenshot on the left.

After a good bunch of further coding we finally reached six o'clock. Arjen for example put together the first bits of Gluon Creator by adapting his GDLExample application (more information will come later on the concrete results of the sprint). Everybody then packed up their laptops and snacks and left for the Hilton to take part in the welcome reception at Qt Developer Days 2009, an entry about which is forthcoming (decided to split it out into a single, separate entry).

This officially ended the first, and hopefully not last, Gluon Developer Sprint and i would like to take this opportunity to personally thank all the many people who made it possible - Knut, Harald, Alexandra and everybody on the Gluon team (including honorary members from the larger KDE Games project, you guys rock!). Hope to see you all again soon, it was an absolute blast!

Game concept of the day: Lost - The Game! Getting lost in new and exciting locations, all over the world! Munich Edition!
Final point: Geeks have an uncanny ability to pick out identical t-shirts

Amarok 2.2.1 - We're getting there!

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:18:13 -0400

Here's a little teaser article, showing off some of the work we're doing for the upcoming Amarok 2.2.1. As some of you may know (or maybe not), we have decided to turn the 2.2 "Sunjammer" series into a longer lasting series, similar to the 1.4.x "Fast Forward" cycle. This means, we're not branching to 2.3 immediately, but instead we will make new releases about every six weeks, each including a number of new features and bug fixes.

This style of working was partly made possible by our migration to the Git version control system. I can only say, for us the migration was fully worth it. Our development speed has skyrocketed, as we are now able to develop new features in different branches, test them safely, and then merge them into our master branch. Also, the number of third-party contributions has increased dramatically, thanks to Git and Gitorious. You can find our Git repository online here:

http://gitorious.org/amarok

These are some of the improvements in 2.2.1 so far:

Optional support for KNotify.

New toolbar with nicer looks (you will also be able to select a "slim" version for small screens).

"Jump To" feature for quick playlist navigation.

Better Podcast support.

Enhanced playlist inline editor.

Full screen mode toggle, allowing to show Amarok without window decorations.

Much improved collection scanner (see Jeff's blog).

Many many (many) bug fixes.

Words are one thing. We want screenshots! So here goes - please remember, it's a preview snapshot:

Click to show full size

Qt Developer Days 2009

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:06:00 -0400

Before i start, i would like to appologise for the lack of pictures in the following blog entry. Please accept it as a testament to the extreme level of niftiness of DevDays that i completely forgot to take pictures

The 2009 edition of the Qt Developer Days started out in great style with a really nice, if decidedly business-ish (not really my style, but understandable considering the target audience of the conference and such), party at the Hilton Munich Park. More or less standard reception style, and sponsored by Tieto, which is a huge company, i'd never heard of before - but now i have! Apparently a good 16000 employees spread out over the entire world. Funny how large the world is that things like that can be entirely unknown to you. The party had lots of finger food, and beer, wine and soft drinks on tickets, and lots of pleasant people and similarly reception-styled (i.e. relatively short lived but lively) conversations with people such as Jean-Baptiste of VLC fame. The Gluon contingent left party at around ten, to prepare for the next day, the start of which was planned to be half an hour earlier than normal during the sprint due to needing to get to DevDays and get registered.

The following day started nice and early with breakfast and getting to DevDays again, where it was much fun finding out where i should be registering. Because of my full name being Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, it took a while to figure out that i should be in the T queue. So, not the last surname, and not the first surname... but rather the second one. That's logic for you Oh well, if that is the only gripe about a convention, then there isn't much to gripe about - and this is the case here, so wooh!

After registering we all went for the keynotes, which were spectacularly good - a well rounded and very different set, all the way from the very marketing-heavy "We are so great, and our greatness is only exceeded by the greatness of our greatness!" styled presentation of Sebastian Nyström (please take this in the most positive manner - it was a really great pep-talk in exactly the right place and time), to the rather technical presentation (including code and everything) by Mattias Ettrich.

After lunch i and Jure hooked up with Knut Yrvin, with whom we spent most of the beginning of the afternoon. The reason for us doing this rather than attending talks for example was that Knut and i had to put together the outline for an article he had to write about the Gluon developers' sprint. So, we sat in the lobby for a couple of hours writing some of this, and then ended up having a long talk which somehow went from open source politics and ended up in world war II... without me noticing any real transition happening. At any rate, it then later became time to stop talking - plus Knut had to go and have a nap, to get ready for his presentation later on that day.

That meant it was time to go back to the con proper. In my case it meant actually attending some talks. First one was the Qt on Maemo talk, in which was shown how well Qt integrates into Maemo 5. Spectacularly well as it turns out! The menubar is automatically turned into a proper Maemo 5 style menu and the widgets all look native. Very swish! Afterwards it was time for Nokia, Qt and the Internet, in which the Common Web Runtime was presented. Now, this is something i'm a little weary of. My problem with it is that it seems like something a web developer has thought up. To my eyes at least, it seems... Somewhat displeasurable. i'm sure it has it's place, but i'm not particularly impressed. However, the presentation itself was well paced, and even with a little techy friendly code demo, so it wasn't all bad.

After this i went onto the balcony where i ran into Bart from the Amarok team, who had been up all night and was hanging out with the Forum Nokia people. He was showing off Amarok 2 to them and we all got to talking about the visions for how Amarok would fit on Maemo, such as an entirely new UI based on Qt's new declarative UI system, while keeping most of the backend intact, which will be possible due to the strongly decoupled backend). While i was there, i took the time to also shortly mention Gluon's vision of creating a distribution system for games which would work amongst other things on Maemo 5 and ahead (e.g. anything that has Qt and OpenGL or OpenGL ES). More on that, of course, will come later - the vision document is being prepared, and will be presented to the world in a more official manner once it's in a state of relative readiness.

Two very important traditions at DevDays are the Troll Happy Hour and Troll Dinner. The first is a rather straight forward drinks type party - standing of course, to encourage moving around and networking, proper corporate style and though executed in a very professional manner by the Hilton personnel also very pleasant and get-togetherish. The second is an entirely more involved matter. A proper sit-down dinner, with lots of different dishes plus desert,during which also took part one of the more important events, named The Annual Fact & Crap Showdown. This is a competition in which the table has to answer a number of questions - this year 24 - of varying difficulty about Troll related items. This year's price was an N900 for every person at the table - a worthy price for any competition! Unfortunately we didn't win. However, we made a good, solid attempt! 19 correct answers out of 24 asked. So, while we went home from the party N900-less, it was still really funny and a great experience in general. Also: Tasty food and good company makes all winners

The day after started directly into an explosion of activity. Having talked with a few of the others about possibly attending the Qt Essentials exam the day before, we talked with someone, who i honestly cannot remember who was (please tell me if you remember ), who suggested that we should try talking with Knut or Alexandra about possibly getting sponsored tickets. So, Dirk and i went around trying to locate them, and ended up upstairs with the certification people, who told us that no, they didn't know. But they did know where Vladimir Minenko, the man at Qt responsible for the certification programme, was - in fact, he walked into the room immediately i asked. So, i was introduced to him, and my query presented to him. He asked me to hang around for a bit and meet him downstairs after a little.

When he came there about five minutes later, he told me to round up every KDE person i could find, and that they were all getting a full, 100% discount on the at-DevDays exam. Suffice to say, Dirk and i went into activity overdrive, running around to find every KDE person we knew, and asking them to pass on the word. Half an hour later we'd found fifteen people, roughly, and we gathered upstairs to register for it. Over the course of the next couple of hours, until around three o'clock, we all went through the exam, and we are now waiting for the email with the results along with everybody else.

One of the extra little perks that went along with the exam was the chance to win one of two N900s, and the first of them was drawn live in the big aula area just before the final presentation. Another couple of competitions were drawn there as well: A beagleboard by KDAB, an iPod Touch by Tieto, and a t-shirt by Nokia for filling out the Qt Ambassador programme survey. During this we were all taught about a small known effect of statistics called the Birthday Effect: Sandro from the Gluon team won both an N900 and the t-shirt. He was so surprised at winning the first time that he didn't even realise that he'd got the second until someone told him

In general, there was much talking about the Gluon distribution system, and eventually it was suggested that i should approach Nokia, Qt Developer Frameworks in a more official capacity, suggesting them possibilities for cooperation on the topic. So, while waiting for the information i've asked the Gluon sprint participants to send to me to roll in, another important thing to work on is a more formal description of the process, specifically a vision document.

Game concept of the day: I Qt Coffee - Make sure there's enough coffee and warm cocoa for all the Qt developers
Final point: Make sure to ask Sandro for lottery numbers!

Gluon Sprint - Day 3

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:10:07 -0400

On the third day, the developers all rose from their beds to meet up in the lobby of the hostel and then proceed to breakfast. Here, Sacha could tell us that he had just recieved an email from our final sprint participant. As it turns out, poor Eugene was so unfortunate as to miss his plane and thus be unable to show up. So, with heavy heart we decided that there was nothing to be done about that, accepted it, and continued on to go forth into the new day. Of course, it continued in the same vein, as the tram we were supposed to catch decided to be a no-show Luckily Munich has so many public transport options that it wasn't a problem - there was a five minute walk to the nearest S-bahn station, so everything soon found its way back on track.

The first thing that happened when we got to the office was, interestingly, that it was discovered that some of my code was causing horrible crashes all over the place. So... that needed instant fixing - which Albert was so nice as to provide While that was going on, Arjen began working on a small example showing how to actually use the Definition Language handler, and later on he worked on creating a Qt Model (the Model/View sort) which represents a GameObject hierarchy - during process, of course, a large number of bugs in my untested code was found, and for the most part fixed. There are still some left, which will be worked on tomorrow.

All the while that was going on Sacha, Sandro and Jure worked hard on Blok, the first Gluon game which was included with the tech preview last week, and the Blok Editor. Kim and Morten continued their work on KCL's MacOS X support, and towards the end of the day reached a point at where they realised that KCL in its current form does not function well in a cross-platform environment. So, they are planning on restructuring the entire library over the course of Monday.

Just before lunch the manager of all things not actually programming in Qt joined us, and he hung out with us for lunch (pizza sponsored by Nokia) and according to Knut his managerial roles included the pizza we were eating - so, much applause happened there Other than that, over lunch was discussed the visions for the project, and what sort of things Gluon would actually have on existing solutions. This, of course, is something which would be very interesting to have as a document - for example on the wiki - stating the goals of the project, and its unique selling points (to use a term which sounds a lot like marketing... which of course is what it is ).

After lunch, people go back to the room - after finding out that someone has borrowed the projector so that Wii Tennis is not possible - and return to working at their respective tasks. One highlight of this: At 15.45 Harald exclaims: "Good news - Gluon builds and runs on Maemo5. Bad news - It uses the wrong style. Good news - 50 fps. Bad news - doesn't render anything." At 18:28:41 he posts the following on IRC: "gluon on Mac OS X (native 64-bit Cocoa application): http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/Block.tiff"

In between Harald's two statements the team decided to do some brainstorming on the user interface of Gluon Creator. As can be seen on the image to the left, a lot of investigation was performed on what other similar projects have done - in this case you see a search for Game Maker. Other projects looked at were the already mentioned Unity3D, Blender Game Engine and Virtools. As an experiment, the mocking up was done in two places at once: Leinir did the mocking up on the flip-board, and Sacha did mocking up in Qt Designer simultaneously, shown on the wall with the projector (sorry, no image of this, but you can see the flip-board on the picture to the right ).

Having learned on Saturday that going out for dinner late is a really bad idea in Germany, we left the Nokia offices at around eight. We headed for a restaurant recommended by Harald named Hacker-Pschorr and arrived there in good time - there were almost noone else in the positively enormous restaurant (as it turns out, the huge hall we were in, with surely enough room for at least three hundred seated guests, probably more, was only one of two of such halls) and ordered ourselves some food and beer. Of course, since this is a Bavariant themed restaurant, when you order a large beer... You get what you ask for. The picture to the left shows just how big those beers really were Even better yet, the beer (their house brew) was absolutely stunning - wonderfully smooth and very tasty - and the food was just as good. Brilliant food and drink, coupled with good company, equalling a very pleasant evening of dining out with the team. Afterwards, we all walked home (the restaurant was well within walking distance of our hostel) and went straight to bed. So, all in all, a really great day at the Gluon Developers' Sprint!

Game concept of the day: Knitting Hero (multi-touch, with two styluses)

Final point: i need a new camera... hey, is that an N900?

SmartPointerList

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:41:12 -0400

Here's a little class that we developed for Amarok, and I thought it might be interesting for some of you as well (maybe KDElibs?). What it does is the following:

Assume that you have a list of pointers to objects (they must be QObject subclasses). Sometimes such lists are used to cache pointers in multiple places, but the objects they contain (as pointers) might be destroyed at some point. In Amarok we had this problem with QAction: Many classes stored lists of pointers to actions, but sometimes actions were destroyed (e.g. on track change), and the lists got out of sync. You could probably see this as a design flaw, but we came up with a simple solution:

SmartPointerList is a QList for pointers which automatically removes a pointer when the object it refererences is destroyed. A simple idea (by myself), implemented with help from Ian Monroe and Max Howell (of Amarok/FileLight/DragonPlayer/Last.fm fame). In our case, it solved many ugly crashes that were pretty hard to debug.

If you feel the class could be useful to you, have a look here:

http://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok/blobs/master/src/SmartPointerList.h
http://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok/blobs/master/src/SmartPointerList.cpp

Enjoy

Gluon Sprint - Day 2

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:46:58 -0400

Starting the day with a hearty breakfast is very important, and for the people at the Gluon developers' sprint this is of course no different - anything but, in fact, as the sprint is quite intensive. And so, the day started out with having breakfast in the hostel's cafeteria, which served a quite straight forward continental style breakfast service with cereal, bread, cheese, meats and all that's included. Oh yes, and cocoa milk.

After the breakfast, Harald Fernengel picked us up. For those of you who don't know, this is the guy who made sure that we had hacking space at the Nokia offices in Munich. He is, as his name implies, an angel. Well, technically he's a troll, but you get the idea. But we already knew that trolls are, in essense, just angels without wings So, he picked us up, and had even been so good as to buy us tickets for the duration of the sprint. We then got on the tram, and en ruite Harald informed us of the interesting points - one of the best beer gardens in Munich is right next door to us, there are beautiful churches, and the shopping street was where we changed to the U-bahn.

Finally we got to the office, which is in the business area - a surprisingly green area all things considered - on the fifth floor of an office building. Very nicely laid out offices, where had been arranged coffee and soft drinks for us - news of course received by the team with sounds of glee and much joy. After setting up the laptops and checking our mail and news and such after a couple of days, it was time to start the first topics which, as it turns out, ended up taking most of the day.

Just before the first point, Knut Yrvin (for those who don't know, he's the community managet for Qt Nokia) showed up to hang out with us. In the tradition of such things, he brought along a toy for us to play with, namely an N900. Now, of course, everybody wants one (even more than they already did ).

Kim then started his presentation, in which he described what Unity3D's workflow is like, and some of the base concepts in it. One thing that i personally got out of this refresher is how scripted Components are handled. They are not handled in any magical way, like i thought i remembered. In stead, they are handled very simply by a Script Handling Component, which has a script Asset attached. The component then analyses the script, and exposes the public fields in the script as properties. This means that the concept is much cleaner as well - scripts are no longer a special case, they are simply assets. Furthermore, it meant that everybody in the team now has an at least superficial understanding of how Unity3D works, and what sort of workflows we are working towards supporting.

Afterwards, Sacha requested i describe the GameObject hierachy in some more deep detail by describing what you would do to create Pong using this method. After a bit of talking about the GameObjects and how you add Components to them, and the fact that a Prefab is really just an instance of a GameObject that you can change a few values in, but which stay the same as the prefab, we eventually came up with a layout with two instances of a Paddle Prefab (which is just a GameObject with a sprite renderer, a box collider, a mouse input component and a small scripted component which reacts to the mouse input), one GameObject named ball with most of the actual game logic inside it (a motion handler which simply moves the ball in a set direction at a set speed per frame, and a collission handler which simply checks whether the ball has collided with something, and reacts accordingly (hit one of the end walls the person owning that wall looses one point, hit one of the paddles or one of the side walls the ball bounces), and a sound emitter which the collission handler tells to make a sound at appropriate times) and four bits of wall with a box collider (made of by a sprite renderer and a box collider). The end result of this is visible in the picture to the right. Coding on your feet is fun!

Around two in the afternoon, a little later than originally planned, and after people had spent some time hacking around, working on the different parts of Gluon, it was decided that it was time to grab something to eat. So, we all got ready to go out, and as we gathered in the social area of the office, Harald handed out meal tickets to everybody and we went down to the mall next to the offices. The problem with this plan, as it turned out, was that in Munich, a lot of places are closed on Saturday. So, we ended up going to the super market, where Harald bought lots of food type things (bread, toppings and the like), and instructed the rest of us to buy random other things (i.e. snacks). So, we all ended up buying all kinds of silly things, like bisquits, crisps and so on. This mishap ended up turning out quite well, since what happened when we got back to the office was that we all gathered around the social area, where we talked much about open source in general.

After lunch was completed it was time for the final run of presentations. So, after poking around with remote desktop a lot (since Rune had also forgotten his VGA converter, and had a laptop which was not compatible with the other converter) we ended up able to see him showing off the Blender Game Engine. Two important things came out of this: We saw how not to design user interfaces -around half way in, Rune mentioned that what people couldn't see too easily was that on his netbook's screen, sitting beside his laptop, he had the keyboard reference open - basically every key makes Blender do something, and they have decided to focus so much on effectiveness that learnability has gone completely out the window. As such, they have created the 3D modelling equivalent of the Vi editor. Extremely effective, but with a learning curve greatly resembling a mirrored version of the Debian logo. The other important thing which came out of this presentation was an introduction to the interaction management system in the Blender Gane Engine. Short short version is that in Blender, any object in the game world can have three types of game related data added to them: Sensors, Controllers and Actuators. A Sensor is something such as for example mouse input, a keyboard button or a magic 'always' sensor which is simply always true. A Controller is a piece of logic which can define a number of outputs associated with the sensor's values, and an Actuator acts on the game world (for example moving an object around, setting colour values and so on). So, most things can be scripted in this manner without writing any code. Afterwards Virtools was discussed, which has a similar graphical scripting system, which was described by someone as "Horrible for programmers, but amazing for game designers and graphics people".

After this Kim, Morten and i gave a short introduction to our university project about Behavior Trees, which will be implemented as a component for Gluon. A short explanation was given of what a behavior tree is, something i won't bother you the reader with (if you are interested, keep an eye on this blog as you can be sure there'll be something about it at a later date, when we're closer to project end), but the really interesting part here was the properties editor that is found inside the behavior tree editing tool. For those interested in the code to this thing, it can be found on gitorious: http://gitorious.org/gluon-bt/gluon-bt/blobs/master/src/gluon-bt-editor/btpropertywidget.h and http://gitorious.org/gluon-bt/gluon-bt/blobs/master/src/gluon-bt-editor/btpropertywidgetitem.h (plus their accompanying cpp files, of course). What this allows us is to basically just grab this code, do very few changes to it and have it work on GluonObjects, which are the generic objects that make up a GameObject hierarchy (GameObjects, Assets, Prefabs and Components are all GluonObjects). Much more on this later - when we've actually got something to say properly on Gluon Creator (hopefully tomorrow).

The final large-scale discussion that happened was regarding the Gluon Project concept described on the wiki. What came out of that discussion was a more or less straight forward resolution that building Gluon Creator on top of KDevPlatform might well make sense - the reasoning behind this being that this already has functionality for version control and handling projects, and that what we would need would be to implement a project management plugin for it, and then create a UI based around it. Whether or not we will be using Sublime is entirely up in the air, and it may be overkill for what we need, but KDevPlatform does seem like the logical choice. It would also mean that any scripting languages we would support needs some simple coding assistance. To implement this we could either do something simple ourselves, or we can create language support for it in KDevPlatform. The KDE way, it seems to us, would be the second option. Any help with this endeavour would be greatly appreciated! (as, of course, any help with any part of Gluon ).

At six, the larger discussions finally ended and people started to work on coding more heavily. People all started playing around with their respective parts - much pair-programming or group-programming happened, with a number of small teams gathering around one or two machines, working hard on getting this or that piece working (especially KCL on MacOS X and KGL in general is getting much love, as is the Definition Language handler, plus its assisting classes).

Finally at eight it was time for dinner... But people were so busy that we ended up working way past that, not leaving the office until an hour and a half later, when Knut stood up and exclaimed that we had to leave now or face the possibility of having nowhere to eat. This meant that when we got to a restaurant which was open, we went in there and were instructed that the kitchen was almost closed. However, a quick decision later, and everybody has beer on the table, and a few minutes later food starts getting served. Fastest service ever for twelve people, i'm sure! Kudos to the kitchen team at Weisses Brauhaus for providing us with such brilliant service - especially considering the waitress didn't understand a word of English, and still seemed very happy (stressed out though she was by the sudden influx). After dinner, which of course included the mandatory discussions of open source politics and general life stories, we decided that it was time for ice cream. In the words of the ice cream gurus: Pleasure is the path to joy!. We managed to find our way home at around 0100, and all went straight to bed.

All in all, a really nice day!

Game Concept of the day: Hungry Hungry Hakcers - keep your hackers fed, or they get angry and you lose the game!

Final point: We can do better!

Gluon Sprint - Day 1

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 04:15:52 -0400

Friday, everybody's arriving. After driving for 12 hours, the 4 person Danish contingent arrived in Munich safe and sound, and found two people already at the hostel, Arjen Hiemstra and Dirk Leifeld, both sitting in the lobby, where we joined them.

As most people were slowly trickling into the hostel, we all hung around the lobby while the rooms were made ready for us. Much random talking happened, and around four the room keys were finally handed to us, and everybody put their stuff in the rooms and such.

After this we all went out for a meal at a nice little restaurant down in town, where we were introduced to a mix of beer and soda named Radler - since only one person in the group is German (Dirk Leifeld), he was our interpreter. However, as it turned out, this was not really needed - everybody at the restaurant spoke English, so we could all order. One of the guys, of course, forgot to tell us that he is a vegetarian before we actually started ordering, so much fun ensued attempting to find a vegetarian dish in a place whose specialty is grilled foods

However, everybody was fed, and again much talking happened. One thing which was discussed around the table was the sound systems available to us for creating games. As we know already, Phonon is not really geared for such things as it is currently, and we do not know of QtMM is useful for it either. However, in Gluon there exists a library named KAL, which currently knows of two things: Playing sound effects and playing music.

Furthermore was quickly discussed input systems. Qt currently lacks an input handling system powerful enough for use in games - there's keyboard, but it is not entirely fast enough, there is mouse support, which is fine for point-and-click things, but not so good for e.g. first person shooters, however there is no handling of joysticks and the like. In Gluon we're working around this by having KCL, which is already extremely powerful - the problem it has is that it needs a new backend for each new operating system. The backend on Linux is the very powerful evdev, but on MacOS X we have one person who through the last couple of weeks has been ripping his hair out trying to get input out of the system itself, and on Windows there's nothing so far (though the idea of using DirectInput has been tossed around).

So, discussion points for Saturday now also include sound and input, on top of scripting and showing off Blender Game Engine and Unity3D which was already on the agenda. So, much to be done!

After the meal, we went back to the hostel - which has really nice rooms, with en-suite bathrooms and plenty of room for the four people sleeping in each room - and people went straight to sleep. Personally, i went to sleep after sitting in the lobby for a while, not managing to stay awake. As i later find out, around half an hour later, two more of our team scheduled to show up Friday showed up (saw the texts on my phone this morning, telling me they had luckily found their way into their room), but at time of writing i have yet to hear from the final member (Sanro Andrade) coming in from Brazil. Hopefully he will be ok - i will find out when we meet up for breakfast in a few minutes.

So, the first day went quite well, all things considered - people were tired after a long day of travelling (for most anyway, Leifeld only had three hours in a train, and others a couple of hours in a plane, bah! ) - a really good day, with much talking both shop-talk and non-shop talk, which of course is at least as important at this type of thing. Getting to know how people work is just one of those things that's difficult to pick up through email only. So, good stuff all 'round! Looking forward to this sprint

P.S.: Yeah, i know - this entry isn't tl;dr compliant, and contains no pictures. Sorry, i shall endeavour to do better tomorrow when i'm not tired!

Guess who?s the owner :D

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:06:57 -0400

Sunjammer

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:05:27 -0400

In the last 14 weeks the Amarok team has been working hard to get Amarok 2.2 ready for prime-time. We’ve worked in dark cellars, in a nice living room in front of a warm fire, at the beach, at airports, in cabins in the wood, on the train – yea you get it – pretty much everywhere.

Today we can finally present you the result. Amarok 2.2 is out in the wild and brings lots of goodies people have been waiting for. Check out the release announcement.

With that I say bye bye and run off to a very sunny island with my fellow rokers – oh wait, no – we gotta prepare 2.2.1. Stay tuned

More serious though: I’m getting ready for the GSoC mentor summit. Soooo excited.

KDE

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:35:30 -0400

I finally got around to writing the GSoC wrap-up for the dot with a short intro to what all our students achieved during this summer. 37 successful projects out of 38 is awesome. It was great to work with this year’s mentors and students alike. Thanks to every one of them for making the admin team’s life as easy as it gets.

I think our new selection process had the biggest impact on this year’s great results (besides a lot of very awesome students and dedicated mentors of course). For those not familiar with it: In previous years we had one big IRC meeting with all KDE mentors and a few more people to select the best projects and students for KDE out of over 200 proposals. As GSoC slots are very limited and everyone wanted to get a few for their sub-project this was quite chaotic and not always fair especially to smaller sub-projects that didn’t have the power to make themselves heard in those meetings. But given the time constraints and size of KDE this was what we had to deal with.

Last year bigger sub-projects like KOffice and Amarok got a fixed amount of slots and were asked to select their students themselves. This improved things a lot for the big projects as they got the projects they really needed and wanted without other sub-projects messing with the selection. But the smaller ones were probably even worse off than in previous years.

This year Jeff, Leo, Ian and I decided to change this and make it better for everyone. Our goal was to make it fair for all involved and at the same time give more power to the sub-projects in selecting their students because in the end only they really know what they want and need. No use in me deciding if KDE Games needs someone working on KGolf more than someone working on KPatience. Oh and of course we wanted to get rid of that hated hour-long IRC meeting.

So we started a big spreadsheet on Google Docs with a sheet for every sub-project as well as one for proposals which don’t fit in any of the sub-projects. Then we sent an invite to our mentor mailinglist and asked all mentors to add the proposals for their sub-project with a possible mentor and backup mentor as well as if the student already got in contact with our community somehow to work on improving the proposal. Then we asked them to rank their proposals, why they think this particular proposal is important for KDE as a whole and which projects they definitely need and which ones they would rather not have. Armed with this huge spreadsheet and some keeping in mind of the proposals no-one was fighting for because they didn’t belong to any sub-project the admin team sat down and created a list of the students KDE would really love to have. We ended up with a list of 60 students or so. Everyone was happy – no sub-project left behind. Everyone got the projects most important to them and no-one was going away with no student. We knew we weren’t going to get them all and we already had a few students we knew we would have to dismiss. But since they were on the maybe-list according to the previous ranking anyway that was ok. Then we got the first number from Google. We would likely get 42 slots. Ok. That meant all our maybes had to go. Tough but doable. Then the second round of slot allocations came. We got down to 35. Outsch! That would mean quite a few of our we-really-want-this projects would need to be cut. We had an emergency meeting with a few people to cut even more without having to let a sub-project go without any student at all but it was pretty much impossible. Thankfully Leslie is awesome and we got 38 slots in the end which meant we could give at least one slot to every sub-project that requested one and everyone got the projects most important to them (which turned out to also be the ones most important to KDE as a whole btw).

This crowd sourcing approach was a lot fairer because it is basically impossible for every mentor to read over 200 proposals and select the most important ones. (Though huge props to those who did!) Everyone could concentrate on their part of the proposals and really make a good judgment on whether the project is good and if the student is actually able to do it or just a poser. And I think our success rate this year speaks for itself

Claudia bought tickets for Leo and me to the mentor summit last week and I’m really excited to finally put a mark on that big white spot on my personal travel map called America

Now gearheads: Is there anything you think we can improve for GSoC next year? What did you like? What didn’t work so well? What do you want Leo and me to talk about at the mentor summit with all the other orgs?

Tune your Quassel!

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:02:29 -0400

If you would do a quick analysis on which programs I use the most you’d probably get Firefox, Quassel, Amarok and Kopete (in this order and Firefox being way ahead of everything else). Using those programs extensively of course leads to optimizing workflows.

Quassel is the fourth IRC client I use now. MIRC back on Windows. Then I learned to love Konversation when I switched to Linux. At some point I got tired of missing stuff when I was offline so I got shell access on a friends server to run irssi. It was ok and I customized the hell out of it to fit my needs pretty perfectly but I always missed Konversation’s nice GUI. I’m just not the type that really enjoys a CLI app (well except for listadmin maybe – but more about that another time). And then came Quassel, developed by a good friend of mine. I got a GUI and always-online in one app without hacks. Heaven! Well ok – close to heaven. There were a few usability issues that thankfully got fixed with help by Celeste. But one thing is still problematic: Quassel keeps all queries (private chats) in your default channel list. (Konversation had (has?) this nice feature that it closes inactive queries after a while and they are gone after a restart anyway so your channel list doesn’t grow too huge.) With a huge list of queries (not hard to achieve if you’re using IRC for a while) you easily miss new messages in Quassel. Since I noticed a few people having this problem I’ll share how I tuned my Quassel to never miss queries again.

I have 2 chat lists. One with all my channels and queries and another one with only new stuff – that means unread channels and queries. It looks like this:

Once I read and leave the queries again they are removed from the news chat list – same for the channels. A nice side effect of this is that I can easily manage a lot of channels even on the small screen on my netbook without scrolling.

To set this up go to View -> Chat Lists -> Configure Chat Lists.

Settings for my All Buffers chat list:

Settings for my news chat list:

How about a list of only new queries? Easy:

How about a chat lists with only channels with highlights? There you go:

Enjoy and never get angry looks from friends again for missing a query

How did you tune Quassel?

Sunset

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:33:08 -0400

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.

identi.ca got it right

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:39:53 -0400

Social media like Twitter, Facebook, digg and co. are all about the conversation. They are more fun and actually more useful when you have people to interact with. After all it’s called social media, right?

Now people have discussed why Twitter is better than identi.ca and the other way around. So Twitter obviously has the advantage of being comparatively big and mainstream at the moment. And this certainly has its advantages like being able to interact with a lot more people who so far have not (and maybe never will) discovered identi.ca.

Identi.ca on the other hand has the advantage of being Free Software and connecting a lot of Free Software people. However that is not the only and maybe not even the biggest advantage of it. No, actually its biggest advantage is enabling communication. Let me explain.

Twitter has @-replies. You use them to address people in the messages you send (like this: @foo I don’t agree with what you just said). Not too long ago Twitter decided to not show those @-replies your contacts send to other people in your main timeline but only when you visit their pages. So when one of the people I follow addresses someone else but me I will generally not see this. There are a few good reasons for Twitter to do this which I will not go into right now. However the problem with this is that you are missing big parts of very interesting message exchanges. The even bigger problem is however that it is close to impossible to find the @-replies someone got. Why is this a problem? Say someone asks his Twitter followers how they like a movie that just came out to decide if it is worth going to the cinema or not. You are about to go as well and would like to read what people answer him? Well tough luck. You’ll need to jump trough hoops and use the twitter search to search for his nickname and will probably get a lot of useless stuff there mixed in the useful things. Identi.ca on the other hand gives a tab to view all replies a user received so you can easily see what people replied to an interesting question or comment. Identi.ca goes even further. You get a “show in context”-link that tries to thread the whole conversation around a certain topic. It is pretty awesome and accurate. You can see who replied what to whom. Check it out!

One feature Twitter is lacking completely is groups. They are addressed with !groupname. Groups are an awesome way to communicate with a larger group of people you do not know but share a common interest with. There is no good way in Twitter to do this (no, hashtags don’t count). Groups can for example be used to make announcements or to get feedback from people also interested in topic X. They are probably the most powerful microblogging mechanism out there because they easily enable communication in large groups without much hassle. You simply join the group and then put !groupname in the message whenever you have something to share with the group. On Twitter (unless you are one of those people followed by a lot of people) your best chance of getting an important message read by a lot of people is to have it reposted (retweeted) by one of the influential people who are followed by a huge crowd. And then you still can’t be sure to reach the people you actually want to reach. One could say identi.ca’s groups make this whole process more democratic.

Summary: Twitter is a simple tool and being simple is a big part of the things that made it popular and successful. It however encourages communication from one to a few selected people who are following you. Identi.ca on the other hand encourages communication between a lot of people who don’t necessarily need to follow each other and thereby empowers people if they choose to use it that way. This makes it slightly more complicated for someone who starts using it though. So the question is: How does one explain groups in an easy and comprehensible way?

(In case you have no idea what this is all about check out my Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects for an introduction.)

getting closer

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:25:29 -0400

Slightly delayed due to server problems we’ve released the second beta version of Amarok 2.2.

Please read the release notes, test it, report bugs and send patches (I might give away cookies for patches ).

The Future of Game Development in KDE

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:27:58 -0400

Do you want to go to Qt Developer Days in Munich, October 12th to 14th? If so, read on!

Traditionally, game development in KDE has happened much like how you would develop any other application: You start out with an idea, then you boot up your vi/emacs/kdevelop or whichever other coding tool you use, and you start hacking together your game logic. Later on, or during this, you team up with a graphics artist, and maybe a sound artist, and you all work together to create a pretty, well sounding game. Now, we have seen in KDE 4 that this actually works.

However, there is a fly in the ointment. One of those big, blue ones that just won't go away when you swat at it.

First, of course, the graphics people and the sound people at some point have to start pestering the programmer to change their code so that their work can fit into the game better. Unless they know a little code, they have to rely on the coder to change which pieces of graphic and sound are loaded and played when and where. This makes it difficult for the sound guy to time his sounds so they fire at the right time, and for the graphics guy to time his animations so they play at the right time.

But more than that, however, you have the problem that every time you start writing a game, you as a programmer end up rewriting the same code again and again. You write an input handler, you write a simple (or not) playing field, you write your gameloop, you write a structure to manage each of the objects in your game... Why is it that this needs to happen? Why can you not simply start up a tool, and start writing your game immediately?

In other worlds, you have a number of tools to assist you in your task when you want to create a game. In the Windows and MacOS worlds you have tools like Game Maker and Unity 3D, and in our own world we have... Not a single thing. The closest thing we have is KDevelop 4 which makes some things easy for us, but even that is just a generic IDE, it is not something really geared to making games, and most importantly: You could never give a graphics artist or a sound artist KDevelop 4 without risking them curling up in a small ball and making unpleasant squeaky noises, something which is not particularly conducive to getting a game made.

So, today i offer you the potential for a brand new scene, a new world: A world in which KDE ends up taking the indie games scene with a storm.

Today, i announce: Gluon Creator.

Based on the Gluon project's heavy legwork, the powerful systems inside KDevelop 4 and an investigation into workflows, Gluon Creator is a project which will aim at creating a tool designed specifically for creating games, which is useable by all the artists that make up the team behind them: Graphics, sound, level designers, game designers, coders and all others involved in the process.

The connection this has with DevDays? Simple: Nokia has gracioucly offered to sponsor up to 15 people attending Qt Developer Days in Munich*, and in connection with this it was suggested that a developer's sprint should happen the weekend leading up to DevDays, in the style of those held for the KOffice, Amarok, KDevelop and other teams. The topic of this sprint would then, is my suggestion, be the initial creation and investigation into what would be needed for Gluon Creator to happen.

So: To attend Qt Developer Days 2009 in Munich and the sprint leading up to it, get in touch with me, either by commenting on this entry, or by emailing me directly at admin@leinir.dk - please don't hesitate! And remember, just because you are not a coder does not mean you won't be useful here!

*: Yup, there's one in San Francisco as well, however the sprint there will have a different focus, and i'm only sporadically involved with that one anyway and will not be going

it?s all clear now

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:13:26 -0400

We’re hapy to release the first beta of Amarok 2.2. It comes with many goodies like playlist sorting, UMS device support, the ability to customize the program layout to your liking and much more. For details please read the release announcement and this nice review.

Enjoy rocking

Oh and don’t forget to send feedback, bug reports and patches (and maybe some cookies and hugs?) so we can get it in perfect shape for release in about a month.

Inline metadata editing in the playlist

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:43:38 -0400

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.

social media guide for free software projects

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:17:28 -0400

Lately more and more people come to me with questions like “What does $randomsocialmediaterm mean?” or “How does $socialmediasite work?” or “How do I do this on $socialmediasite?“. It seems people start to understand that social media can be a huge thing for free software projects but don’t really know where to start or where to look for help.

So I sat down for a few hours and wrote the Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects. Download it and find out how social media can help your project stay in touch with your users and make it rock even more. Learn about digg, Twitter, identi.ca, Linked.in and more. The guide includes basic intros to different sites as well as advanced tips for how to deal with social media in general.

Enjoy and please leave feedback for the next version of the guide

amarok_forum-improve()

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:41:41 -0400

When the KDE forum team started they came to me asking what to do about the Amarok forum. It was fairly active and working ok. So we decided to keep it and just link to it from forum.kde.org so people looking there would find it. Lately the forum software was causing more and more problems though and we are low on moderators as well. Luckily since they started the KDE forum team has done an amazing job, making the KDE forum so much better than the Amarok one.

I’m happy to announce that we moved the Amarok forum to the official KDE forum at forum.kde.org to enjoy a better forum, reduce maintainance and reduce the number of needed accounts for KDE websites.

All content and account data have been migrated. Migration of attachments and avatars is still in progress. Some nicks conflicted. If you can’t log in with your nick try your email address. If you want nicks changed/merged in this case please get in touch with me or the KDE forum team in #kde-forum on freenode.

Thanks to the KDE forum team for handling migration and Jeff for helping on the Amarok side.

Now go and enjoy a much improved Amarok forum

Magnatune.com and Amarok: Integration of favorite and recommendation features

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:08:31 -0400

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.

Where is the buzz?

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:18:29 -0400

The buzz is at buzz.kde.org of course ;-) Check it out and watch what people are saying about the KDE 4.3 release on Identi.ca, Twitter, Flickr, Picasaweb and YouTube. Don’t forget to upload your own screenshots and screencasts!

(Thanks to the Ubuntu team for the code, toma for putting it into a KDE theme and Nuno for a new header image.)

AFT and MusicBrainz track identifiers

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:15:31 -0400

A heads-up: Amarok File Tracking can now use MusicBrainz track identifiers for its embedded IDs. This means people that have used Picard to tag their files but not amarok_afttagger can still get some embedded AFT goodness! It also enables an interesting "mode" because it essentially enables song tracking vs. actual file tracking (which you may or may not want, depending on your particular needs).

Full details are here.

Camp KDE 2010 Announced!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:18:06 -0400

I'm pleased as punch/as a fat cat/etc. to point you to The Dot (specifically here) to see the official announcement and some details. More details will be forthcoming soon (and especially as we get the web site in order). Start clearing your schedule and working on your presentations!

meeting up to celebrate

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:31:12 -0400

Just a quick reminder that we are having a KDE/FSFE get-together in Stuttgart on Saturday to celebrate KDE 4.3. More info in Frederik’s blog. Come and join us. Bring Konqui and Kate! Looking forward to see you all.

(Don’t forget to leave a note if you are coming so we know how many people to expect.)

Presenting the KDE network on Facebook

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:45:00 -0400

Many KDE developers are on Facebook. A while back I wondered if it would be possible to have an official KDE developers' network on Facebook -- after all, there are networks for schools, jobs, cities, and more (and for many developers, KDE is literally or figuratively a job...)

As it turned out, there was a "Kde" network -- but something was odd. To join a work network you have to have an email address affiliated with the network. KDE owns kde.com and kde.org -- so who was this? The only other "KDE" I could find that seemed like it would be legit was the Kentucky Department of Education, and I rather doubted it was them, because they would likely have used all-uppercase KDE as well. So I started an inquiry with Facebook, trying to figure out if either it was someone squatting on our name (and trademark) or whether it was some legit organization -- in which case, would they mind donating the network to us?

After several months of back-and-forth with the people at Facebook, who were very nice (if a bit slow ), I'm happy to say that we've regained the KDE network (properly capitalized) as our own. I still don't know the whole story as to who was there before, and never will due to their privacy policies, but I'll say this:

If you were in the "Kde" network before and Facebook asked if you would mind donating it to us, and you did, thanks so much!

If someone was simply squatting in the "Kde" network before, then thanks, Facebook, for kicking them out!

To join the network, go to Settings -> Networks, and enter KDE and your kde.org email address in the appropriate fields.

How to install 2.2-git in your home (an update)

nospam@example.com (Myriam Schweingruber) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:00:58 -0400

http://gitorious.org

Since Amarok switched to Gitorious, those of you running a local SVN build with markey's instructions will have to do some changes to stay up-to-date::

First, you need to install git, which is in the package repositories of your distribution.

Erase the installation you have in ~/kde/src/amarok/

In the folder ~/kde/src/, type the following command:

git clone git://gitorious.org/amarok/amarok.git -> this will drag approx. 56Mb of data

Go to your build folder in ~/kde/build/amarok/ and erase its content, as you need to do a full rebuild

Run again the cmake command:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $HOME/kde/src/amarok

Then complete with 'make install' and voilà, you have the most recent 2.2-git

For updates, you just run 'git pull' in your ~/kde/src/amarok/ folder and proceed as before with 'make install'.

As usual, don't hesitate to come to #amarok on irc.freenode.net for more questions.

DB changes -- call for benchmarkers!

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:06:00 -0400

I've done some work in trunk over the past week that may have a huge impact on many of you Amarokers. Read on, and if you can do some benchmarks for me, fantastic.

First, the schema/table changes.

We've seen some issues where people have, for whatever reason, ended up with InnoDB tables instead of MyISAM tables. This is probably the result of their DB being created long ago before we were explicitly telling the mysqle startup to skip InnoDB. This mainly causes a problem because some columns cannot be as wide as we'd like them to be when using InnoDB. So, the first thing being done is that an ALTER TABLE is being forced on every table to explicitly convert to MyISAM. In addition, ENGINE parameters are now used during table creation to be more explicit in the future.

Some of you might have seen complaints in the debug output about indexes not being able to be created due to a max key length, which by default in MySQL is 1000 (compile-time option). So, some columns have had their widths adjusted so that all indexes are now successfully created.

Now, the other changes:

As we added more features, scanning got slow. Like, really slow. You'd spend more time running SQL queries than actually scanning your files. So I've been aiming to change that.

Over the past week I've committed changes that remove, per track, anywhere from 1 to 6 SQL queries. The exact amount is highly dependent on your file set, but there is a minimum of one less SQL query per track. If you've done a lot of file moves and AFT kicks in, it'll be an even more massive speedup. I'm going to try to do some further tuning, but already results are looking positive.

Nikolaj has reported that his scan time went from 68 seconds to 18 seconds -- more than 3x faster. Mikko didn't notice a speedup, but he said that whereas scanning used to peg his CPU at 100%, it no longer does so. What I want to know is: how does this affect *you*?

If you want to help, do the following:

Backup your DB. If you're using external MySQL do a mysqldump, if you're using internal MySQLe backup the mysqle folder in the Amarok data directory.

Update to a revision from a week ago...say, 995000.

Wipe your DB.

Start Amarok -- it will do a full scan because of the empty DB. Time it as it does the scan.

Repeat steps 3 & 4, so that you can see what the time is like after caching.

Update to current trunk (at least 998470).

Repeat step 3.

Repeat steps 4 and 5.

Then leave a reply here with your values. If you watch your CPU during each of the scans, report that here too. Thanks!

Apple breaks Palm Pre compatibility. Or: an open letter to Palm

nospam@example.com (Bart Cerneels) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:52:02 -0400

Dear Palm,

When you launched the Pre everyone was very excited about the excellent job you did. Everyone except Apple that is, they don't like such strong competition.

You decided to reverse engineer the iTunes database "protocol" used in Apple products and implemented it from the device side on the Pre. This has the benefit of being able to sync the Pre with iTunes on any PC or Mac without installing extra software.
And you didn't have to invest in development of your own desktop software, which is not a differentiating feature for you. You're in the business of selling phones, not software. I don't think deciding to "outsource" this to Apple was a smart move though.

So now the bully is attacking you on their playground:

From Engadget Mobile

And then they say it's your own fault. You could go crying to the principle (or whatever you want to call court you want to file the anti-competitive lawsuit with).

But if you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the AMAROK-TEAM!

The media-player support in Amarok 2 is shaping up to be very flexible, complete and easy to implement thanks to the hard work of 2nd time GSoC student and hacker extraordinaire Alejandro.

We can quickly add support for the Palm Pre, or any other player, providing there is a way to access the database and we have documentation of the data-format. We already have iPod and MTP support and the same system is used to implement audio CD as a collection. iPhone OS 3.0 is being worked on as well as UMS (generic USB device) and OBEX (many cellphones).
We promise not to change our application to prevent users to use Amarok with your device. Not only do we care about our users, we are not a competitor to you or have any ulterior motives.
Amarok is already fully supported on all flavors of Linux and we have beta releases on Windows and Mac OSX which just need a bit of polishing and stabilization.

Serious business proposals can be send to the Amarok team at business@getamarok.com (these emails will not be publicly readable).

we?re testing testing the water for everyone

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:59:47 -0400

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.

we?re testing the water for everyone

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:59:47 -0400

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!

Pass!

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:18:00 -0400

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?

More Info on Gitorious.org

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:30:00 -0400

Today at the Akademy General Meeting, it was mentioned that Gitorious.org is being seriously looked at as a hosting solution for our Git repositories (as opposed to running an instance of Gitorious ourselves). Since I have been a major part of pushing in that direction, I feel that it would be prudent to make sure that those interested are aware of the relevant discussion and the current status. So, for those interested, read on.

Please note that this is not a post about why KDE is migrating to Git, why this is a good idea/bad idea/neutral idea, etc. This is purely discussing the hosting aspect of Git.

First, I would encourage you to read this kde-scm-interest mail, which I sent to the list on July 2nd. It goes into a good amount of depth as to why Gitorious.org could be beneficial for us, and the rest of this post will assume that you have read that email and the others in the thread, as it will simply update the information therein.

On Monday a large group of interested people, including KDE sysadmins and the guys from Shortcut AS, went to lunch to discuss the technical issues. The output from that discussion is as follows:

The vast majority of those present feel that Gitorious.org would be the best choice, with the following being the main reasons:

Shorcut could provide a SLA (Service Level Agreement) guaranteeing a minimum level of service, such as uptime and available bandwidth, providing professional hosting services and easing burden on our system administrators.

As David Faure noted, user account creation is becoming a large burden on our system administrators, which is not something that we would have to administer if using Gitorious.org.

It should be noted that the above was not a unanimous opinion.

KDE does have infrastructure and bandwidth; it could keep one read-only Subversion server available for historical reasons, and convert the rest to serve as backups or possibly load-balancers. Or to put it in a more general fashion, KDE can reduce hosting costs (which will likely be covered by sponsors) by working with Shortcut. It is not a question that this could be done, but rather what the right method would be for doing so.

The Gitorious developers have a feature branch where they have already fixed one or both of the current showstopping bugs relating to rights within the shared Git repository. They have said that this should be merged into mainline within a week (not sure if they meant a week from then, or from the end of GCDS).

The hosting could be set up in such a way that it can be accessed via git.kde.org.

Post-commit-hook functionality will be available; the Shortcut guys are currently working with us to determine how we can migrate or emulate pre-commit-hook functionality.

We have two projects that are chomping at the bit to get onto Git ASAP: Amarok and TagLib. Amarok will be converted first and will serve as the initial guinea pigs to iron out any issues. Barring any major issues being found, TagLib will be converted in short order.

I hope this gives everyone a better idea of KDE's Git-hosting plans. If you haven't checked out Gitorious.org, I encourage you to do so; it's made huge leaps and bounds in the past six months and has become quite a great tool.

Please direct any questions or feedback to the kde-scm-interest mailing list at: kde-scm-interest at kay dee eee dot ooo arr gee, not to the comments section on this blog.

Communication ninjas all around?

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:46:24 -0400

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?

Adventure: A Photo Essay

nospam@example.com (Seb Ruiz) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:02:06 -0400

Reporting not so live from GCDS.

Last night after our first day of hacking a group of intrepid developers had tapas.

We ate way too much and followed with some great ice-cream. Try the dulce de leche.

As most of our event destinations have been within walking distance, we figured we could also walk to the Collabora sponsored party.

Map: check.

GPS: check.

Location close: check.

Sugar induced enthusiasm: check.

It soon became obvious that walking to the golf course wasn’t as simple as we’d first hoped. We had to jump a few highway barriers.

And we clambered along dirt shoulders.

We played frogger with Spanish traffic, and then decided it was time to head back to find a taxi.

We made it and went straight the the bar where the fun was flowing.

Danimo and Chani in serious conversation.

And Thiago decided to recite some shakespeare to us.

And Markey was eyeing off the bar.

GCDS 2009: Photos

nospam@example.com (Seb Ruiz) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:50:24 -0400

Más fotos

AFT fixed on the Playlist

nospam@example.com (Jeff Mitchell) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:29:00 -0400

Yes, another one of my semi-habitual posts about AFT. Just a short one though.

In revision 992942, I finally fixed a bug that has kept AFT working for the playlist in certain situations (although it had previously been working for both saved user playlists and statistics). This means that if you have a track in the playlist, move it to another location, and it is then scanned in that new location (remember, kids, it uses folder mtime to determine whether to scan a folder, so when in doubt do a "touch ."), the track in the playlist should remain valid and play the song in the new location. As the playlist use case was one of the initial reasons for the development of AFT back in Amarok 1.4, you can imagine I'm happy that it's finally (seeming to be) working again in all scenarios, instead of failing in certain situations.

Berlin, we?ll meet again

nospam@example.com (Lydia Pintscher) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:26:27 -0400

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