Amarok Blog - markey

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.

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.

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

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

Amarok on Windows: Get Your Nightly Builds

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:59:42 -0400

Many users have been asking us lately for updated builds of Amarok 2.1 for Windows. Here's some good news for you folks!

Thanks to our tireless KDE-Windows crew (Patrick Spendrin and others) you can now get nightly builds for Windows right here:

http://mafia-server.net/amarok-nightly

Apparently these builds are pretty solid. Quoting a user from our forum:

"Wow the nightly build version is way different. After using it for some days I can say that it seems to be much more stable than 2.0.1. Good job."

So, give it a try