My SoC student Peter Zhou has interesting news about his progress with Amarok 2's all-new scripting system. I'm pasting his blog here, as he is not yet aggregated on Planet KDE.

Before that, let me fill you in with the details about our plans for scripting in Amarok 2:

• Amarok scripts are based on QtScript (= JavaScript)


• Scripts are running in-process, as opposed to Amarok 1's way of running them in a separate process


• The new script manager will be able to do version management, and possibly automatic upgrades


• The scripting API will be much richer and it will be possible to extend the Amarok GUI with scripting

What you can expect is something similar to Firefox's extensions. With one big difference: Amarok still aims to provide a rich feature set out of the box. We believe that an application should be usable without forcing the user to do Lego (TM) building


Peter writes:

I’ve been at home for three weeks, was with my family and had a three-weeks-leisure-break.

Finally, I am sitting here to talk about my summer of code project. I am sorry about the first three weeks break, I really do. But I did try to get familiar with the development environment and tried to hack some code. I am going back to campus in Hong Kong in two days, I can thus concentrate on my SoC project.

For a long time, I was trying to understand what is going on there. Trying to think what the other developers think. For the first month I joined the community, I was amazed that Amarok folks are so in love with what they are doing, and have so much passion on it. Different from my past projects, Amarok is a rather large project, different developers had different views on the future way.

For the first time, I am feeling myself being pulled to the bleeding edge. I compiled QT for four times in two different platforms (How many times for kdelibs and kdeRunTime? ). I realized it is sure a though learning process. Playing with the fresh new hot stuffs, I am pretty happy with this.

In the first week, I was busy with my exams, and cleaned up the existing dbus interface.

For the second and third week, I had a slight trip with my girl friend, set up a new Leopard development environment, tested the MPRIS support, and made my first commitment to KDE svn server.

I did some paper work, studied a little with scripts, and I am now quite clear with my goals for the coming busy July.

I made my mind to immigrate everything to qtscript from dbus. I would keep the MPRIS stuffs (PlayerDBusHandler, RootDBusHandler, TracklistDBusHandler) for dbus interface. And the other functions will be scriptable through qtscript. (both ruby and python need additional runtime dependencies, but not qtscript. The simpler the better )

Compare to the current functions, I will add more signals since the signal mechanism are rather easy to be achieved using slots and signals. For example, signals like trackEnd ,trackChange, SeekingTime, configurationChange and etc. would be added.

The second change I will make is the scriptable GUI. You will be able to add buttons, menus, lists using scripts.

Before my visiting to Belgium, I will make a easier use script manager which include upgrade checking, simple dependency checking (to check Amarok version and optional packages for Amarok which will be also needed by scripts).

I am so looking forward to the coming working days and nights. Hopefully, I can work out a brand new scripting interface in one and half months and thus I can start a new script project during my visit to Europe.



Peter's original blog can be found here.

With all the hype around Twitter currently, I'd like to let you know that the Amarok team is of course also tweeting happily (and has been doing so before you have even heard of Twitter :p)

Feel free to follow us:

Mark Kretschmann
Ian Monroe
Seb Ruiz
Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
Lydia Pintscher
Harald Sitter
Leo Franchi
Myriam Schweingruber
Bart Cerneels


PS: Let's hope that Twitter will fix their performance issues soon

Heya,

over the last few days I've been working on a video applet for Amarok 2, allowing you to view music videos directly in Amarok's new context view. Here comes the screenshot:




As you can see, the video is nicely integrated in our user interface, thanks to Plasma magic. This feature is especially handy for watching Youtube videos, and we're working on integrating it directly with our SeeqPod service, allowing to find and play videos from the net in the blink of an eye.

I'd like to stress though that this feature is strictly meant for watching music videos. We do not intend to turn Amarok 2 into a generic movie player! There won't be advanced features like full screen mode or DVD playback. So don't even try to convince us, I can assure you it's futile :p

So, Amarok 2 is and will stay a music player (and a very good one, we hope), but the addition of playing music videos complements our feature set nicely. Last not least I should mention that this feature is completely optional; you can enable and disable each applet separately.


Enjoy

Ahoy!

On Saturday Myriam and I visited the Ubuntu release party in Lausanne (some city in Switzerland), where I also had the pleasure of giving a talk about Amarok 2, and we enjoyed some fine beer and foods. Admittedly I get easily bored at such events, but this time I quite enjoyed myself, making some new friends and playing some Frisbee and table soccer.

Enough boring talk, here's some pics:


Me trying original "Wild Africa" liqueur, complete with safari hat


Moira and Myri


Some usual suspects (note the sweat stain on my shirt.)

I'd like to welcome Peter Zhou (peterzl on IRC), one of the Amarok SoC students for 2008. I'll let his words introduce him:


Hi my name is Peter Zhou, I am a Mainland China student pursuing bachelor degree in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

I am glad that I can now witness the growth of Amarok by involving the core development team. I will redo the scripting interface and rewrite some GUI functions in order to enable the external access to the whole Amarok GUI interface. Then the wolf would have a even more powerful inside.^_^

Good to work with all of you! This is indeed so exciting! Looking forward to seeing you guys in Akademy!

Hi All!

I'm really happy to say that I'm a new artist for the Amarok project. You might remember me as a programmer, but now we Amarok programmers also create artwork for the project.

Please check out my first contribution, a new logo:




Isn't that awesome? I've always had a talent for drawing, and I think this really shows.


Ooooooook, I realize that it's maybe not a really good idea if programmers also do artwork. But we have no choice. While we really can't complain about lack of coders in the project, we have about 0 artists left, so someone's gotta do the job.

If you are a talented SVG artist and if you like Amarok (or if you know such a person), please contact us and help making Amarok 2 a beautiful application!


Sincerely,
Mark Kretschmann, Amarok Founder (and artist from hell).

It was just a matter of time, but now I am proud to discover that the first Amarok fanfic has surfaced on the web. Here's an excerpt:


Runeclaw paused in front of the larger-than-life portal and curled back her lip. "Easy there, Amarok," she said softly while reaching down to pat the bristling fur on her wolf's neck. "I don't like the smell of this place either, but Kitahl wanted to meet here. Always one for the dramatic, he is," she continued. The sound of her own voice and the steady deep breathing of her mount helped to calm her nerves.

"Maybe we should go back and lure that dragon we saw down here as a surprise gift." Amarok flatted his ears back and chuffed stubbornly as she tried to turn him back towards The Blasted Lands. "Sissy," she chuckled affectionately.



Original can be found here. Have fun reading