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Surviving a week with Amarokers

I should have blogged much more from Akademy, but having hardware which insisted on frequently overheating made life a little difficult. I’m still in Belgium - in Bruges actually, blogging from my N810 courtesy of Nokia. More on that later.

I’ll start by saying that l think we had very productive week, getting lots of design and development done towards our goals for Amarok 2.0. We focused heavily on critiqueing the user interfaces of the major components in our GUI: the playlist, context view and each of our sidebar browsers. In between hacking hours, Mark, Leo and myself hosted design and release-breaking-issue sessions. These have provided valuable direction and motivation to all of our developers, so you can look forward to some exciting progress as we gear up to an imminent beta (and eventually final) release!

We also brainstormed a number of post 2.0 ideas such as interface adjustments to enhance your application experience, including, but not withstanding, mobile and embedded devices. Yes, that’s right folks, before too long (hopefully) you’ll be able to run Amarok on your favourite (maybe) small form factor device. The main use case would be for remote collections and streaming, but we’re not going to shut out users who like carrying 8GB of music on memory cards.

All this talk of small form factor devices is making me drool over my N810 as I write this. Some observations: all this very slow and awkward typing makes me much more coherent; leeching off random wireless to blog has never been easier; and, the inbuilt GPS has already proven invaluable to the Amarok crew as we used it to find our restaurant when we got lost cycling through the mid-west of Belgium. Note: never cycle 15km immediately after eating a huge meal, and never let Casey on a bicycle.

Finally, a big thanks to all that made Akademy so great: the organisers, the participants, the speakers, the boffers, the paparazzi, and all the people that were responsible for either brewing, frying or coating things in sugar.

Posted in tech, travels | 3 Comments »

Akademy social event

Last night I managed to have nearly 100 people sign Lydia’s little black notebook at the Akademy beer-event. It was fun and a perfect example of how beer can give you a reason to do practically anything.

Coming up: Amarok talk. Must write notes.

Posted in random, tech | 1 Comment »

France Recap

Haven’t had much internet connection lately thanks to a wonderful time in France. Here’s a short recap:

- Paris has more museums than you could poke a stick at, all of which are sensational (Louvre, d’Orsay, Rodin etc etc)
- Stayed in the beautiful Hotel de Ville suburb, and went out to the Sacre Cour for two excellent evenings with the rest of Paris for evenings of music and singing
- Bought a museum pass which meant I saw a whole lot more than I would have otherwise seen, such as Saint Chapelle and the Concergerie. Saint Chapelle has all of Genesis, Exodus etc in tiled stained glass windows, which we could even figure out from the pictorials.
- It was easy to fool the French and extend the validity of the museum pass simply by scribbling a new date on the card.
- Have eaten a baguette every day, without fail. Need more fibre.
- Then discovered that croissants were actually invented in Bulgaria when it was under siege by the Turks in the 1600s. The shape of the pastry is meant to represent the cresent on the Turkish flag.
- The high speed train is very high speed.
- Have stayed in “hotels” with neon signs flooding the room, stained carpets and crazies shouting at our window for the price of a stay in a small castle.
- French people don’t understand any English unless you insert a dragged ‘le’ before every other word.
- Every meal seemed better than the one before it, it’s a gastronomical wonderland!
- Spent 5 extremely scorching days in Nice, went diving and visited Cannes and Monte Carlo
- Saw more Ferarris in Monaco than I’ve seen in my entire life

Currently in Belgium at Akademy where I’ve already had my fair share of Belgian fries, waffles and beer. More updates coming soon.

Posted in travels | No Comments »

A Use for NVidia

The world has seen a significant amount of complaining about NVidia cards (the 8600 has had it’s fair share of whippings).

However, I’ve come to a great realisation:

with my exceptionally slow nvidia card I can see absolutely every draw that occurs on the screen. Great for debugging paint events, and no need to export QT_FLUSH_PAINT=1.

All you devs should go out and get one

Posted in tech | 7 Comments »

Amarok 2: Artwork is Back

My last couple of weeks has been spent focusing on getting cover art back up to scratch in Amarok 2. Cover art really adds a lot of spice and colour into the UI of the application, especially now that we are showing the artwork in the collection browser, context view and playlist. For those of you who are supremely organised, the collection scanner will now trawl through directories and try to pick up images it thinks are relevant to the songs which are being scanned. Embedded artwork is not implemented currently but it is certainly on the todo list.

Most of the relevant actions can now be executed for artwork: fetching from amazon, setting a custom image, removal and full size display. Music lovers with non English songs can now rejoice because we’ve also fixed some problems fetching artwork for album/artists that have accented characters, which Amazon seemed to have problems with. Another cool feature that we’ve experimented with is automatic cover fetching if there is an album with no artwork. Keep in mind that this is entirely tentative, as we are not sure that the false-positive rate from Amazon is low enough to justify polluting your database with random covers (although this will improve with our recent fix to non English tags). Maybe we’ll keep it, maybe we won’t, but it certainly is a cool feature which I’m loving at the moment - I am really lazy and hate having to explicitly fetch a cover, even though artwork is great to have.

Here you can see albums with artwork as well as a full size cover display

In other news, I did some more work migrating statistics from Amarok 1.4 databases to the new and improved A2 schema. Here you can see how the play count, score and first/last played date for this track. Migration of lyrics and actual cover art isn’t yet implemented but that, like everything else is also on the cards.

Oh - one more thing:
My tickets are finalised, see you in Belgium in August!

Posted in tech | 7 Comments »