Fwd: Amarok and IUP ISI

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

Forwarded my reply to Kevin's student for reference.

Please _DO NOT_ start writing to these guys on your own at this point.

- Nikolaj


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <nhnfreespirit at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: Amarok and IUP ISI
To: Nathan Sala <sala.nathan at gmail.com>
Cc: Joffrey Clavel <joffrey.clavel at clabert.info>, Ludovic Deveaux
<deveaux.ludovic31 at gmail.com>, Oleksandr Khayrullin
<saniokh at gmail.com>


Hi guys! :-)

First of all, as I mentioned in our brief talk the other day, I think
you should really spend some time familiarizing yourself with a recent
version of Amarok as this will help you understand many of the terms
that I will use to describe different parts/functionalities of Amarok.
We just released Amarok 2.2.0 yesterday, so this might be a good place
to start. Have a look at our homepage at http://amarok.kde.org.

The ideas that we discussed with Kevin are:

 - Rework the Jamendo service support
 - New applets for the context view (incoming events, similar artists, etc.)
 - New implementation for the dynamic playlists
 - New GUI for the information about services and collections
 - Support for UPnP/DAAP

I'll give a brief description of each. Note that for many of them the
scope can really be as small or big as we feel like as even small
improvements can greatly benefit Amarok, while for some, making
something that is actually useful requires a bit more work a a new
system has to be build from the ground up.


Rework the Jamendo service support:
under the "internet" category, there is a number of services which
goal is to integrate online content directly into Amarok. one of these
is the Jamendo.com service.
While the service itself works fine for browsing and playing tracks
from Jamendo, the Jamendo.com site includes many social features such
as ratings, recommendations and so on. Brining these into Amarok as
well would make the service more valuable as it would give users a
better way of discovering what music they might like. This task can be
very large or quite small depending on how much of this social stuff we
decide to integrate, and how much of it is available through Jamendo's
API's (investigating this is part of the task)

New applets for the context view (incoming events, similar artists, etc.):
Amarok has an area we call the "Context View". Int he default layout,
this is the large central area. This is used for showing info about
what is currently playing, or what you are browsing in the content
panel. Currently it includes apples for lyrics, wikipedia info, photos
and a few others. Writing one or more new applets is a nice way to
start working on Amarok, and can bring very tangible benefits. There
are few restrictions on what is possible, but some ideas could be
using last.fm to find concert dates for the band you are currently
listening to (as well as other bands that might interest you based on
your last.fm profile), having an applet that shows statistics about
the Amarok music collection, a "similar artists" applet that shows
similar stuff from the local collection to what you are listening to
right now. These are just some ideas, many other applets are possible
as well.

New implementation for the dynamic playlists:
Amarok includes a system called "dynamic playlists" to automatically
generate a continuous list of music to play, based on user
configurable parameters (look under the "playlist" category). The
logic that drives this system currently has some issues in design and
implementation that makes the generated playlists not match the user
expectations. Fixing this is a very valuable task to Amarok, but it
will also get quite math heavy very quickly.

New GUI for the information about services and collections:
Currently there is a contex applet called "info" that shoes
information about the content you are browsing in the content panel.
For instance, when browsing artists or albums in the Magnatune
service, info about the artist or album will be shown here. This
system has recently been abstracted to be able to show info from
pretty much anywhere. Currently however, it is not optimal as it
requires that this particular applet is visible for this info to
appear. An Idea that we have tossed around for a while was perhaps
instead making a kind of huge "popup" over the context view that shows
this info when you are browsing content. We have some detailed
sketches about how this could look and work if this interests you.

Support for UPnP/DAAP:
Amarok currently does not support UPnP, a standard that is
increasingly used to "share" content between devices, in the sense
that one device can play the content stored on another device. Amarok
could potentially act both as a client (plying stuff from other
devices/apps) and a server (exporting content to other devices/apps).
If this interests you, I will get the developer who knows a lot about
this to write up a more detailed description.

I hope this gives you something to discuss.

- Nikolaj


On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Nathan Sala <sala.nathan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good evening, dear Product Owner :)
>
> As our group will gather tomorrow afternoon for the first work session on
> Amarok, we are needing a concrete basis to start.
> A few days ago, you and I could talk a little about the features we will
> work on, and you told me that they are not clearly defined, which I
> perfectly understand :)
> Anyway, we only had a few minutes presentation from Kevin Ottens about
> Amarok project, so none of us is really clear about what had been said at
> this moment.
> Moreover, he didn't give us his slides before going on holidays, so we
> really have nothing ^^
>
> Could you please write down the main ideas that you had with Kevin? So we
> will be able to use the soft and understand better what is needed. After
> this, I think we will write on the devel Mailing-list, or we can tell you by
> mail our ideas, as you prefer.
>
> Thanks in advance for your help.
>
> Best regards,
> Nathan Sala, IUP ISI Amarok team.
>