[Feedback] Amarok Integration

[Leo Franchi]

On Friday 07 September 2007, Alishah Novin wrote:
> Hi Leo,
>
> Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. You actually wrote back faster
> than some of my "friends" write back to me...
>
> Anyway, my site doesn't work on songs, but on musicians. In other words,
> if you search The Beatles you'll get results, not if you search "Hard
> Days Night," Know what I mean?
>
> I wasn't quite sure how the integration happens with Wikipedia, but I
> was thinking of some kind of XML integration, say. You pass it the name
> of the artist, and it can return whatever. Another option, is to just
> display the page that's on my site, when it exists, and otherwise
> display a site offering to add the item.

You're thinking to amarok 1.x :)

Basically, in 2.0 we get something like KDE4 plasma. this means that there are 
standalone applets that are svg-based and pretty that can display 
information. the user can select which applets to load during track play, 
during stopped state, and e.g. during a webstore browse.

so what you need to is to write a data engine which hooks into the playing 
songs-that is, it gets notified when a song is started, and it fetches the 
required data from your site (using the artist) and then provides it. the 
applet, which is connected to the data engine, receieves the data and 
displays it. applets, and engines, are only loaded on demand (they are their 
own shared libraries. 

also, HTML is a bad idea :) HTML is slow. html sucks. html is bad. basically, 
the wikipedia applet is giving us a LOT of trouble in 2.0, because 
QGraphicsTextItem is a crappy HTML renderer. the whole point of removing the 
old ContextBrowser was to get rid of KHTML, which sucked too. 

so ideally, you would provide the data via a webservice (think last.fm) and 
then you could display it in a much more flexible way. bear in mind that your 
applet must be svg-themed, so that artists can bundle a svg file that control 
the look/layout of your applet to make it fit into the general theme.

leo
> What do you think?
> Alishah
>



-- 
Leo Franchi                    leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu
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