Amarok Blog - freespirit

Desperately seeking graphical/interactive designer

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:10:49 +0000

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

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

So what do we offer?

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

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

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

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

Job opening: make libgpod work nicely on Windows and OS X

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:09:46 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Startup Weekend, survey

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:18:47 +0000

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

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

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

Thanks!

Something for Amarok 2.3.1+

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:32:13 +0000

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

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

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

Finding something else to do, aka "does anyone want to hire me?"

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:55:13 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Free Beer - The Book

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:55:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Howlin' Halloween

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:58:32 +0000

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!

Post Amarok 2.2.1: Adding some color to your life!

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:33:37 +0000

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).

Sunset

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:33:08 +0000

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.

Inline metadata editing in the playlist

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:43:38 +0000

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.

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

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:08:31 +0000

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.

Amarok 2.2 development, one week in

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:36:51 +0000

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

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

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

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

Direct link

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

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

From the Post 2.1.0 Git Vaults, Part 4: No more vertical tabs, revisited

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:24:25 +0000

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

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

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

Video on youtube

(note that this vid is available in HD)

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

Amarok Dockwidgets - The Followup

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Wed, 20 May 2009 07:21:14 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Post 2.1.0 Git Vaults, Part 3: Something really far out

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:12:35 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Post 2.1.0 Git Vaults, Part 2: No more vertical tabs

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Fri, 15 May 2009 06:55:13 +0000

I thought my last post about the upcoming audio cd collection was pretty cool, but since Leo and I are having a bit of a contest about who has the greater number of cool features ready for 2.2 and he just had to outdo me with his post about the amazingly cool last.fm based dynamic playlist biases I thought it was time to strike back!

A while back, Seb added some cool new headers to the collections in the collection browser. This code was based on the elements in the service browser. Since Seb's versions actually looked much nicer than the ones in the service browser, I decided to "backport" the changes, and make the elements in the service browser look consistent with the collection headers.

Having done this made everything a bit more consistent, but it also highlighted some other huge inconsistencies in the way the browsers look and work. Currently there are basically 3 different navigations methods in place. For selecting the browser we have the oft criticized vertical tab bar, for selecting a service there is the service browser which is a type of dig-down interface, and for selecting playlist categories, we use a stacked toolbox approach. Obviously this is not good for usability, and it does not look good either.

So, in an attempt to standardize the navigation across these different browsers and the navigation between browsers themselves, we started discussing the options at the recent developer sprint in Berlin. We concluded that the interface currently used in the service browser was by far the most flexible and that it might be worth using this for all the browser navigation.

So skipping a few days of extracting, generalizing and putting this code to new use, we now have this:

And since a still image really does not really explaint he concept very well, here is a small vid to show the new interface in action.

This is in a pretty early state of development, and there are many cases where the interface of the different browsers/categories need to be made more consistent. Also, the current plan is to add a kind of "breadcrumb" bar as known from Dolphin to the top of the browsers, making navigation simpler and making it more clear what "page" you are actually on at any given time.

All in all, this cuts down our 3 competing ways of navigating through the browsers down to one, and finally gets rid of the vertical tabs completely.

From the Post 2.1.0 Git Vaults, Part I: Cd Collection

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:46:07 +0000

I think it is safe to say that I don't cope too well with feature freezes. In order to stay motivated I have to have a few forward looking projects. These usually take the form of interesting git branches on my laptop that I hack on while way from civilization (Much of my most interesting code has been written in my parents small cabin in the woods where my wife and I often go to get away from it all a bit. While she reads I hack

In any case, back when we were getting ready to release Amarok 2.0.0, I ran a small series of blogs about some of the stuff I was working on for later releases. I decided that now was the time to continue with this.

Quite a few users have expressed that they would like the ability to play audio CD's back in Amarok 2. The reason that it was not initially ported was that none of the core developers use CD's much and also because CD playback in Amarok 1.4.x was sort of a hack, both with regards to the actual code, but also the way it was integrated into the user interface. recently, while discussing a possible Google Summer of Code project, which was unfortunately not accepted, I started thinking about the "right" way to do CD playback. And as I had a little time on my hands, I could not help myself but create a prototype. So here is what is currently possible on my laptop:

First off we start off Amarok. Notice the cool new collection headers that Seb have created:

Inserting a CD into the drive, Amarok automatically detects it and uses the audiocd:/ KIO slave to get info if possible. These tracks can then be added to the Playlist like any other tracks (as the attentive reader will note there are a few issues with the track information still):

It is possible to mix these tracks and tracks from any other collection freely:

That is pretty cool I think. But wait, there is more. Since the audiocd:/ KIO slave is all about "ripping" CD's, why not add this feature to Amarok as well. But instead of using the "ripping" metaphor, lets just integrate it with the existing "copy to collection" framework. This not only avoids having a seperate gui and menu entries for this task, but also allows you to "rip" directly to media devices or other writable collections and not just the local collection:

After selecting a collection that the track should be copied to, its time to select a format ( advanced options for this can be set in the KIO slaves kcm module which is brought up by clicking on the "advanced" button:

And finally we use the target collections organize dialog to figure out where the tracks should actually go:

While this is all still at the prototype state ( It will not be in Amarok 2.1.0 ) it already works quite well. There are a few issues left with the implementation itself and some deeper issues with the audiocd:/ slave that affects this, such as audiocd:/ not always detecting when the cd has changed and keeping the CDDB data from the last CD around. Aslo, making this work required some pretty invasive changes to some core parts of Amarok, so its is something that will need a lot of testing as it can potentially break Amarok in interesting ways that are not directly related to CD playback itself. So far it does not seem that I have messed anything up too badly though

For anyone really eager to break their Amarok, and not afraid to compile it from source, you can grab a patch that should apply against current trunk here. While feedback is greatly appreciated, I will not offer support for any issues you will have with this patch, so use at your own risk!

More Goo!

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:34:45 +0000

Some people might think that we have had more than enough "OMG WORLD OF GOO IS GREAT AND RUNS NATIVELY ON LINUX!!!" posts... Well, they are wrong! So here is another one!

I just bough the game, and the post-demo levels are just as crazy, inventive and plain fun as the levels in the demo. So go buy the game already. Lets prove that there is a viable marked for high quality games on Linux: http://2dboy.com/

And while you are at it, grab the free soundtrack as well: http://kylegabler.com/WorldOfGooSoundtrack/

Now back to playing Wo... uhm.... Working! yeah, Working, thats it..

Playlist Layout Editor

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:56:00 +0000

Woho! I finally have a new toy in Amarok worth blogging about!

Today I want to introduce the first draft of the Playlist Layout Editor for Amarok 2.1. In an earlier post, I discussed the new customizable playlist rendering engine and the underlying configuration system. I also hinted that there would be a simple and easy way of customizing your playlist layout. This is exactly what I have been working on for a little while now. And while the results are still mainly at the prototype stage, I think it is far enough along that it is worth giving a sneak peak at.

So lets get some screenshots on the table!

Building on the "Token Dragging" code crated by our GSoC student Teo Mrnjavac we now have an easy to use editor where the layout of a playlist item can be created and modified using drag and drop and a simple config menu. Currently saving these layouts back to xml (loading from xml into the editor works fine ) is not implemented yet, but it is possible to apply a modified layout to the playlist by pressing the "preview" button.

As can be seen, a playlist layout basically consists of 3 configs, one for each major element in the playlist. Album Heads, Album Body, and Single Tracks. The editor has a tab for each of these, but the way they are edited and created are exactly the same. In the last screenshot can be seen how an illusion of ungrouped tracks can be obtained by making the Album Head item have 0 rows and making the Album Body and Single Track items have the same layout.

Enough for now, I had better get back to playing with... uhm... working on this thing!

From the Post 2.0.0 Git Vaults, Part 2, "The Playlist - Evolved"

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:34:36 +0000

Back in part 1 I showed a few of the things that will make it into Amarok 2 at some point ( likely for 2.1.0 ).

Today I want to show you another thing that I only recently started working on. Its another somewhat controversial part of Amarok 2, namely the playlist.

Since we first started showing screenshots of where Amarok 2 development was heading, some people have been unhappy with our idea of a new and improved playlist ( and have been extremely vocal about their displeasure ). We have tried reassuring them that the playlist would, in time, come to encompass many of the things from Amarok 2 that they were missing as well as a whole lot more, but it is always hard to communicate such ideas with no screenshots to back them up.

So, since I just today got something running that finally demonstrates some of these ideas, I rush to blog it! Please note that this code is still at a very early state and that there are a few rendering inconsistencies visible that will get sorted out before this ever makes it into trunk.

What this new code does, is basically make the way each item in the playlist is rendered completely configurable. how any rows there should be, what elements ( title, album, artist, score, ... ) should be shown in each row, how much space each element should be given and so on is all fully configurable. (Configurable from a code point of view, the ui for actually configuring it does not exist yet... ). So for instance, configured to mimic the current playlist layout, it might look like this:

That looks a lot like the current playlist, only slightly uglier because of some of the rendering issues I mentioned earlier. Messing a bit with the ( for now, hard coded ) config for the playlist and adding a few elements to some playlist item types we can create something like this:

Here we have added the score to all body item ( tracks in an album group ) and given the title its own line for single track items. Finally, as the grand finale, for people who prefer the Amarok 1 playlist, it is possible to do something like this by making all items have just one line ( and the album header none, thus making it invisible ) and use the same config for body and single track items:

For dramatic effect I have also hidden the context view! Add to this some decent sorting controls, and basically all the functionality from the 1.4.x playlist can be brought back. And yes, some of the items are "jumping a bit", this is one of the rendering issues I mentioned.

I think this playlist will end up being much more configurable and powefull than the 1.4.x one ever was, even if this was not immediately visible in the Amarok 2.0.0 release. But as we have said many times, Amarok 2.0.0 was just the beginning. Now comes the hard part, creating a sane ui for letting the user configure the playlist layout. Luckily, Dan has the concept of how this will work well under control.

Amarok 2 playlist searching

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:46:00 +0000

First of all, just to get the terminology straight. In this post, I define a filter as something that limits what you actually see in a view, and a search as something that selects items in the view without affecting other elements.

Amarok 1 style playlist filtering.

Since Amarok 2.0.0 was released, one of the frequently mentioned Most Missed Features (MMF) is the Amarok 1.4.x style playlist filtering.

The filtering in Amarok 1.4.x is indeed very powerful, but it also suffers from a number of usability problems and is actually sort of a weirdly placed feature as the collection is where advanced filtering is meant to take place as it will always haver more powerful mechanisms for advanced filtering.

That said, we are very aware that there needs to be a simple way of locating content in large playlists and perhaps even limit the playback of tracks to a subset of what is in the playlist in a non destructive way. Inspired by the progressive searching in apps like Firefox (and indeed many of the KDE 4 applications) we decided to try this out instead. So, hidden away in a small cabin in the very dark woods, far away from streetlights and traffic, I decided to have a go at this.

Amarok 2 style playlist searching.

This morning I committed the initial version of a rather advanced playlist search feature. At its very core, it is just a progressive, as you type, search. This means that as you type, the first track that match the current search term will be selected (and the playlist scrolls to it). Next and previous buttons then allows you to jump around in the tracks matching the search (These really need to get some keyboard shortcuts... Working on that one). The search edit gives immediate feedback on whether there are any matches or not, in the same way that, for instance, the KDE 4 version of Konsole does. By turning the search edit a different color and disabling the next and previous buttons. Now by itself, this is useful, but not super powerful, but this playlist search has a few additional tricks up its sleeve. It is possible to specify which fields should be matched against when typing a query. This is changed by clicking off the fields in a small drop down menu.

Currently it is possible to search any combination of track name, album name, artist name, genre name, composer name or year, and I have a few more ideas for properties to search that i am going to add. It is also possible to "lock" the track progression to only play tracks that matches the current search term. This is toggled using the same small drop down menu. It provides a very convenient way of just playing a particular artist from your all time favorites playlist or any number of similar use cases. Currently this only works when using "standard" or "random track" playback modes however, and I am still pondering whether it actually makes sense for any of the other progressions modes, such as "random album". All the options from this drop down menu are of course stored in the config so the options are persistent across sessions.

We are aware that some people will still miss the old style filtering and that this is not the same thing. We do believe however that a search makes more sense in the playlist than a filter, and that this satisfies many, although not all, of the use cases that the old filter did. Going forward, it might also be possible to add other features to the search, such as selecting all matching tracks, or exporting matches to a new playlist, if there are use cases that support these additions.

One thing I am still pondering is if the filter bar should be visible at all times, making the feature very easily discoverable, or if it should only appear when the search keyboard shortcut is activated....

As mentioned, I committed this code this morning, and baring any major issues turning up, it will be appearing in Amarok 2.0.1 which should be released shortly after new year if all goes well. If you cannot wait that long, it should be appearing in the nightly builds shortly, and failing that, there is always building straight from svn!

Drive-by Mockups

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:20:00 +0000

Yesterday, after nearly 2 years of hard work, blood sweat and tear, we finally released Amarok 2.0.0. Reactions so far have been mixed, but this was no worse than we had expected. We are drastically reworking an application that many people are very fond of, and taking it in a very different direction, and for some people this will not be the direction that they had preferred. Also, some of the features that some people depend on in the 1.4.x series are not yet in Amarok 2, and while we have tried being very upfront about this, apparently it is still a big shock to some.

One of the things that has been most controversial so far, is the new look. This has spawned a number of mockups from people who have ideas for way to improve Amarok. Some of these are really good! See these pages for some examples:

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/A+Media+Player+for+KDE4?content=94472
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Amarok2+Look+and+Feel?content=93854

From the comments on some of these mockups, its is quite clear however that we face somewhat of an issue of understanding. Comments like

I like your mock =)
It looks 100 times better then current amarok which has usability = 0.

BUT
I can almost guarantee that this will never happen...
Amarok developers are quite "strange" people... It's their way or the highway.
Hey if they were not then amarok 2 would not bad as it does today. =/

and

Amarok already has chosen a look and at best changes now are going to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

besides being quite degrading to all the people who have worked very hard on Amarok 2.0.0, to me indicates a profound lack of understanding of the amount of work it takes to actually turn a good mockup into a working look for an application, especially from the artist.

So while we get really nice mockups from time to time that we would love to implement, few of the artists so far has been willing to stick with us to do the actual hard, boring and repetitive work required to actually make it happen. Hence the term "Drive-by Mockups".

So is there a point to this rant? I am not sure. I certainly dont want people to stop making mockups as some of these contain really good ideas, but I would ask people to not attribute to malice or stupidity from our side what is simply caused by few artist having the time and being willing to follow up on their mockups.

From the Post 2.0.0 Git Vaults, Amarok Urls and Bookmarks

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:15:24 +0000

Amarok 2.0.0 has been tagged! Short of any really bad bugs showing up the release will be upon us shortly, just as soon as the packagers from the different distros have had a chance to do their thing! This release has been nearly 2 years in the making, and all of us developers have shed blood, sweat and tears trying to make Amarok 2 live up to the vision that has driven us all along. Overall, I am very pleased with the result. Some people will initially miss their favorite feature from 1.4.x but Amarok brings so many new thing to the table, that at least for me personally, it is a far superior player to 1.4.x already.

But this blog post is really not about Amarok 2.0.0 at all. You can be sure that his will be covered in great detail, reviewed, tested, loved, hated, praised, FUD'ed, criticized (both constructively and not so...) and all that in the weeks to come. What I will try to do here is give you a small glimpse into the future, the great big world beyond 2.0.0.

You would think that having worked on Amarok 2 for 2 years, we would need a break. But actually, it seems that nearly all developers have big projects that they are ready to start on as soon as the feature freeze is lifted, or are already happily hacking along on new stuff in Git branches. I currently have 3 such branches containing post 2.0.0 features in different states of completion, and in this blog I will show some of the stuff I am working on in one of them. Remember that all this stuff is fresh raw and untested from my own git branch and may change in any number of ways before it ever gets near a release

Amarok Urls

The idea behind Amarok urls is to give amarok a concise way of referring to different "views" within the application and allow these views to be easily passed around, shared and stored. An Amarok url is simply a url with the protocol "amarok" followed by a command and a series of arguments encoded as a url. For instance "amarok://navigate/service/Magnatune.com" is an Amarok url that will cause the Magnatune service to be shown ( if enabled ). In my git branch, the "navigate" command has been fully implemented, and you can navigate in all the browsers. Amarok also installs a protocol handler, so clicking the link above will startup Amarok ( if not already running ), and make it show the Magnatune service. Actually the navigate command supports additional arguments, so a more complex url could be constructed that would not only show the Magnatune.com service, but also set the sorting mode and filter. So If I wanted to direct you to one of my favorite Magnatune.com artist, "Brad Sucks", I could write a url like this: "amarok://navigate/service/Magnatune.com/artist-album/artist:"Brad Sucks"". In this form, these urls are already useful. For instance, they provide a very easy way for context apples to provide "guided searching" in the browsers where clicking on an album cover in the context view actually browses to this album in the browser. Additionally they could be used if you want to blog about a cool new artist in one of the services, as you could simply provide a link similar to the one above, or online services could provide a "browse in Amarok" link for their content. There are many possibilities! But the concept can be taken further by expanding it into

Bookmarks

A bookmark in my git branch is actually exactly the same as an Amarok Url, but the context in which it is used is different. A url is most often something that comes from an external source, whereas a url that is used internally to store a favorite view is what I call a bookmark ( I am very open for suggestions for a better terminology ). So without further ado we have the first screenshot of the evening, the (very much work in progress) "Bookmark Manager" applet:

This applet allows you to grap the url of whatever state the browser is currently in. So browsing somewhere, setting a view mode and entering a filter, and then pressing the "Get Current" button will generate the corresponding url. The manager allows basic operations such as saving, renaming, deleting and of course applying (activating) bookmarks. I have not quite gotten drag and drop organization working, but that will be possible as well. This is also nice if you want to share a cool view with someone, as you don't have to think about how to manually construct the url, but can simply press "Get Current". Oh as i am sure some people will ask why I made this an applet and not a browser, the reason is simply that since these bookmarks actually "work on" the browser, it makes sense to be able to play around with the bookmarks without the manager getting hidden as soon as you activate a bookmark as it navigates somewhere else in the browsers.

Then someone came up with a use for this that I had not considered. A wish list item on our bugzilla asked for a way of bookmarking content for later. The example given was the user finding a cool Magnatune.com album, but not having time to actually purchase it right now. While the bookmark manager can certainly be used for this, the fact that you have to manually type in the query to isolate the album or artist that you are interested in is less than optimal. So today, during a very long train ride, I came up with this:

Now all albums and artist in all collections (using a nice system I actually implemented to allow the last.fm service to add the "Play Similar Artists from Last.fm" action to all Artists in all collections with out hard-coding anything) have an option to bookmark them. This system does not work in all cases for all services yet (mainly because filtering does not work exactly the same way in all services), but for the local collection, Magnatune and Jamendo, it works perfectly already

This will likely make it into Amarok 2.1.0, so even though Amarok 2.0.0 is, in my opinion, already a great player already, development is in no way slowing down, and we have 100's of really cool ideas that we will work on implementing in future versions.

I have other git branches with post 2.0.0 features lying around, so depending on the response to this post, I might blog about those later

Localized Content

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:22:56 +0000

In my last blog entry I talked a bit about how cool it is to have such a strong lineup of services ready for the launch of Amarok 2.0.0.

Since then, something else has started happening in a big way. Scripts containing localized content has started to appear. Peter was first with his Chinese Radio Service, and then all of a sudden yesterday, things started to move fast. In quick succession we got service scripts for Radio France and Bulgarian Radio Stations and this inspired me to put together a Danish Radio Streams script that was released a few hours ago.

While each of these service scripts are very simple and have an audience that is limited by language or region, I think that together they represent a very powerful aspect of Amarok 2 as they make Amarok feel 'native' to people who do not have English as their first language. I know that personally, for me to be able to present a nice list of readily available Danish radio stations, will be a huge plus when showing Amarok 2 to friends and family who are not overly technically inclined (read: non geeks).

I hope (and fully expect) to see a virtual flood of scripts of this type, and while I an most others will each only use a few of them, I am very exited that they are appearing!

"If we have 2 or 3 good services at launch I will be happy"

nospam@example.com (Nikolaj Hald Nielsen) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:38:26 +0000

With Amarok 2.0.0 rc1 right around the corner, now is a good time to reflect on where Amarok 2 comes from and where it is going. So I felt like writing a bit about the journey of the idea of "services" in Amarok 2, as that has been my main focus, even though I have managed to get my hands dirty all over the place it seems!

Just over 2 years ago, Amarok 1.4.4 was released with a cool new feature, which also happens to be my first contribution to Amarok, the integrated Magnatune.com store. ( Here is a cool page that Magnatune did to document some of the responses ). The overall response to this was quite good, and Magnatune started selling quite a few albums through Amarok, and eventually ended up hiring me, and I still work for them.

Something else started happening as well. People saw the integrated Magnatune store and started asking if there was any chance that their favorite store could get a similar integration. Most of the Amarokers agreed that this could be cool, but there were several obstacles. For one, the way the original Magnatune store required a huge amount of custom code to do simple stuff like adding tracks to the playlist ( and as many will likely know ) the metadata representation of these are not perfect. Also, The Magnatune store had its very own tab on the left side of Amarok, and it was clear that we could not just add an arbitrary number of these as we started to add more stores. Finally, the Magnatune store in the 1.4.x series of Amarok is tied very closely to the rest of Amarok, meaning that it cannot easily be removed, and that people are more or less forced to load part of this code, whether they use the store or not. Luckily for me, after a time, something big happened in Amarok-land, the 1.4.x series was put on maintenance mode and the work on Amarok 2 was started. Since I was only responsible for porting over the Magnatune store and had almost no other code in Amarok, I decided that this would be a good time to try to tackle some of the issues mentioned above, and prepare Amarok for further stores or other services to be integrated.

To make a long story short, we now, after a year and a half of work, have a framework in place that allows services to be implemented as plugins and loaded/unloaded on demand, a service browser to show them in and overall much better integration into Amarok overall, basically solving all the issues that needed to be solved before we could add more services.

My original plan was to port at least the Magnatune store to this new framework, and as the title of this post shows, when I started this work, I would be very happy to have 2 or 3 working services to show up when 2.0.0 was launched. As the image on the left shows, this is not quite what happened.

This image shows the services that are currently available, either included with Amarok 2 itself, or via download from kde-apps.org ( easily installable from within Amarok 2 using the "Get Hot New Stuff" system ). Some of these services are coded using the C++ framework, and some are scripts that run on top of the "Scriptable Service" framework, which is itself an extension of the underlying service framework. I have done a number of them myself, but more and more services are added or maintained by others. There are 13 of them. This is way more than I had ever hoped we would have available anytime soon, and really shows off the power of the framework well. Especially the scripted service framework, that lets people relatively easily add content from an online source ( although in a somewhat limited way compared to a full C++ plugin ) has received a lot of interest lately, and these scripts seem to be pouring in at the moment.

Looking at the picture of all these services, one does start to appreciate how useful it is to be able to only load the services that are interesting to you, and not having to have them all in the list all the time!

So what will the future bring? For starters, I have realized that I might need to extend the API used by service scripts a bit, since these seem to really be taking off in a big way, and requests for new features are already coming in ( and some have already been implemented ). Beyond that, I know of quite a few services that are being worked on, or are in the planing phase, both scripts and very advanced full plugins, so as with the rest of Amarok 2, this is not the end result, it is merely the beginning, and cool things will happen over the next many years, as we fully realize the potential of the new codebase!