Amarok Blog - leinir

Ceiling Cat is watching you tag!

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:03:27 -0400

In the beginning, the benevolent Ceiling Cat saw that Amarok 2 required tagging abilities, and He saw that it was sorely lacking in both quality and scope. And lo! a solution was presented, in the form of our very own Summer of KDE student Teo, who will be joining the Amarok squad and create the tagging solutions for Amarok 2!

My name is Teo Mrnjavac and I study computer science at the University of Trieste, Italy. My initial proposal was to implement mass tagging in Amarok 2, but givent the current state of things I will have to do a bit of porting to implement basic tagging support as well. While keeping as much as possible of Amarok's existing interface intact, the goal is to implement an unobtrusive and simple, yet powerful interface with the underlying algorithms to mass process the tags and file names consistently on top of the collection browser and to download track information from a remote database.

The key to simplifying the usually clunky rename-from-tags or extract-tags-from-filenames functionality would be a visual layout bar with movable items representing the elements of the filename's syntax. Ultimately, every user, regardless of his tech savvy, should be able to have a consistently and cleanly tagged collection with only a few clicks.

Greetings

Teo

In short, Teo: Welcome!

I can has bling-bling?

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:46:17 -0400

Some people might be aware of one of our competitors attempts at making something which looks all swish with all those high quality CD covers that people have for the albums in their collections. Now, we long ago decided that while eyecandy is all good and stuff, we really don't want eyecandy without a reason behind it. So when people started asking repeatedly "Hai, I can has coverflow?" on #amarok, we started thinking how something like that could be kicked into some form of usefulness.

And, so, when Summer of Code came around, we decided that it would make good sense to throw up an idea on the page for exactly that - our thoughts on what might make a useful bling. Many came forward with proposals for taking up this idea, but unfortunately, though in fact several of them were really good, in the end we had to not accept them as there were some that were more important for Amarok 2's release. However, luckily, one student came forward with a refined proposal for the CD Stack after the accepted projects had been presented. In stead of talking more here, i will let nottheones tell it himself:

My name is Nicholas Lovell, and I study computer engineering at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. This summer I will be providing a new collection view. My idea is to provide a 3D list of albums that can be browsed much like a physical CD collection. Think of it as how CoverFlow should have originally been implemented. Rather than simply allowing selection of an album (or simply displaying the album currently playing), it will also allow selection of individual tracks from a selected album. Selecting a CD from the stack will display the front of the CD and the tracks from the album underneath it.

So, ladies, gentlemen and everybody else - forget the CoverBling widget from early Amarok 2 code - real niftiness is coming up!

Plasma handles

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:07:56 -0500

As you might have noticed, Plasma now has control handles on each plasmoid. This has been a long way under way, and i am very happy to see them arrive Being a non-codey type person, though, i was then reminded that at Akademy this year, i did a sketch of what handles might look like for Plasma. And well... they look very different to the ones in Plasma right now, and i have a feeling that they would feel more natural to the user. So here, with no further ado, the mockup:

Click for full size

Playlist mockup, part deux

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:28:59 -0400

After Nikolaj's brilliant work on the new playlist, people have started making lots of thinky thoughts and such, which is a brilliant thing - the problem is, of course, that we have been making those exact thinky thoughts ourselves(*), and as such, here i am blogging the mockup i've already referred to in Nikolaj's entry a few times. So, with no further ado, here's a link to my little mockup, done while bored in a lecture, but after considerable amounts of prior thought and suchlikes

A slight further explanation from a comment in Nikolaj's entry. To understand how the tracks in this playlist works, imagine the following logic:

Take any track in the playlist:

If the track before this one is an album header, show this track without shared information (but with album cover replaced with total album group duration (length of all tracks from said album in the current group))

If the track before this one is in stead the second track (above) or a similar track to this, do not show shared information and also not album group duration.

(*) Just to make sure this is not taken as snotty-nosed-ness - Really just saying this so that people's well-tuned mental energy can be spent thinking thoughts that haven't been thought already And, of course, in the name of openness, something i'm not so good at doing like this (i normally just talk in channel rather than sit here and blog, as i am sure can be told from my... style, shall we say )

The Rules of IRC Support

nospam@example.com (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 16:18:00 -0400

After finally getting my act together, I have written down the rules for IRC support that I've been playing around with for so long While they exist on my website, I was told that it would be a good topic for my first blog entry So, here you go:

1 Ask, don't ask to ask

You are on IRC, and we are here to help eachother. You are always allowed to ask a question, so asking for permission to ask a question is entirely silly, and will only increase the time between your wishing an answer to a question and getting the actual answer. Introductions are good, but don't wait for a response before asking your question.

2 Be exhaustive

To be able to give a good answer, the question must also be a good one. Make sure when you construct your inquiry that you are exhaustive when describing the problem. This could be the version of the program, the versions of any libraries that might be interesting, which operating system and version you are running the program on, or indeed any other relevant information. In short, give people information to work with. Saying that the program doesn't work is hardly enough information to be able to give you a proper solution to remedying that situation.

3 Wait

IRC may be instant communication, however a concept exists on IRC called idling, something which means that while people's names might appear in the list of names of the people in an IRC channel, they may not actually be physically present at the computer. Sometimes they may have gone off for a longer while, maybe even to work or elsewhere that might take hours until they return. What this means is that, while the person with the answer to your question may be present in the user list, they might not be able to answer your question before a while later, sometimes even hours.
So, remember to wait. Asking a question and then only waiting a few minutes before quitting is not helpful, neither to you or the person who might be able to help you out. They are there to help you, they would in all probability not be there otherwise, but if you won't wait around and let them help you, you are not letting them help you.

4 Help yourself

If the answer to a question is for example "Read the FAQ", it means that you are in no way the first person to ask the question, and that an answer is already available elsewhere. So, remember to try helping yourself first, before asking others to do it for you. Documents were written to help you, by people who want to help you, they were not written to take up space on a website.

5 Give back to others

After you have received your help, remember that you are now in possession of information that could help someone else with the same problem. You are now in a position where you can help others. Just as people have helped you, others might now benefit greatly from your help.

6 Remember yourself

When presenting others with help, remember that you were in this position yourself once. These people are not stupid, they have simply not yet received the knowledge you possess.