This Friday and Saturday I attended the "new" danish open source conference Opensourcedays.dk. It is not really new, as it is actually a continuation of the Linuxforum.dk conference that has been happening fr the last 10 years, but it has changed its name and venue.

I had been invited to give a talk about Amarok 2, and we has an Amarok booth on Saturday, which is the community day ( Friday is more business oriented ). To help me man the both, Dan ( Leinir ) had come in from Aalborg, and Teo and his girlfriend Stephanie had flown in all the way from Croatia. I had invited everyone to crash at my place for a few days, so my apartment has been quite full over the weekend

My talk went well, and was fairly well visited, even though it was in one of the smaller rooms. A video should be available on their site at some point.

Unfortunately, all the community project booths was located on the second floor, and it was my impression that not that many people actually made their way up there, which was kind of disappointing, but never the less, we had some very interested visitors come ask us a lot of questions.

The following picture shows Teo and Dan busy explaining the intricacies of Amarok 2 to a few visitors:


The venue itself, the IT University of Copenhagen, is quite an interesting building, as can be seen in the following picture:


A final thing of note, and I am not really sure why this is, is that every conference in Denmark apparently have to have a model racetrack for people to play with. This one was no exception ( in fact, there were 2):


All in all it was a nice conference and I hope to return next year, even though I hope we can have our booth in the main floor instead of the second floor balcony, as that would likely attract more visitors. Also, it could have been fun to bring Mike

The wolf has once again descended on Akademy. Last year there were 6 of us, this year that has more than doubled. Come the hacking marathon on monday, this will hopefully lead to a great amount of code, technical discussions, bugfixes and general coolness.


( there are a few people missing from this picture )

Tonight was the social event, with great food and great ( and strong... ) Belgian beer. As should be evident from the above picture, the Amarok'ers were making the most of this and having a great time ( I am sure some of them are still going strong as I am typing this... )

An event like this is, as Aaron illustrated, also the perfect place to ponder the needed steps for KDE to achieve ultimate and inevitable goal of total world domination.

About 4 days ago, the Amarok team released the first Alpha of Amarok 2. For an alpha, it actually seems to run very well, but of course it still has crashes, bugs and lots of rough edges.

Since this release, the pace of development has been absolutely astounding. In those 4 days, we have so far had well over 150 commits, including 13 bugs closed. We have not been moving forwards this fast since the very first few days when we started porting Amarok to Qt4 and KDE4, and I am not even sure that sprint quite matched this one.

One of the main causes for this speedup is, in my opinion, the constructive feedback we have received on the alpha release. So I would like to extend a big Thank You to all the people taking the time to test our alpha release and offering feedback and bug reports.

And just to give you something to look at, here is a post alpha screenshot from today. Even though most of the fixes we have done are below the surface, there are still a few visible changes. And yeah, the new applets need to blend with the system colors, which they currently do not at all



As a reminder for those wanting to try out the very latest version, or who are tracking the status of a particular bug, there is always the excellent Project Neon

Thanks to Casey Link, my GSoC student ( whose blog unfortunately is not on planetkde yet ), it is now possible to upload your tracks directly from Amarok 2 to your personal Mp3Tunes.com locker. How cool is that?

Much more info and screenshots at Casey's Blog

This summer, I am mentoring Google summer of Code student Casey Link ( aka Ramblurr on IRC ). Casey is working on improving the Mp3Tunes service in Amarok 2, updating it to use Mp3Tunes brand new GPL C lib instead of using their REST API directly, allowing up and download of music, and finally complete automatic synchronization of content.

Casey has been blogging a weekly progress report detailing the work he has done. As his blog is ( not yet ) on planetkde, I thought I would post the links to his first 3 reports here:

GSoC Report - Week 1
GSoC Report Week 2: libmp3tunes goodness
GSoC Report Week 3: Tanstaafl

Overall I am very pleased with Casey's progress. He has approached his project with great enthusiasm and has already committed a lot of working code. I just hope he does not end up completely reversing his daily rhythm because he has a European mentor in a very different time zone!