Feedback / Suggestions

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

Hi Simon

> Following the development of amarok since quite a long time now, i would
> like to thanks all of you for your great work!
> So far amarok 2 beta 2 is looking very good and really is daily usable now !

Thank you. We are working where hard on it. Often when we should be
working/sleeping/studying/... :-D

> - The new context view rocks, and with the on-going plasma development, the
> potential is really huge ! I hope it will become somewhat similar with the
> "mashTapes" plugin of songbird (plus plasma bling bling of course :))
> gathering all sort of media information in a fancy way. Right now the video
> applet crash everything when i want to use it. Adding the possibility to
> watch a live on youtube from the same artist directly in the context view
> will be awesome, Totem youtube plugin is a good exemple

The context view is very much still a work in progress. The version
you see now is likely close to what will be released in 2.0.0, but
after that we can really start to experiment with using it in
interesting ways.

> - The wikipedia applet background in white doesn't look very integrated,
> shouldn't it be in grey ? Same for the links color.

The idea is to make the text heavy (wikipedia, lyrics, service info )
applets use a background better suited for text reading.

> - We should be able to queue some track in the playlist directly from the
> album applet. Because when you listen to some random track, and then after
> listening to one you want the whole album in your ear, it's annoying to
> parse the collection... (or maybe i didn't find the correct option/way to do
> this)

Already done in trunk! Keep an eye out for the next beta or grab one
of our nightly builds.


> - I can't load a m3u playlist using "add a media" menu, is this normal ?

This is a know bug that has already been reported to bugzilla.

>
> - The collection scanner and parsing is much faster with mysqle, good choice
> for me (190 Go database) and handling the same library is much faster than
> the 1.4.X series (loading, song switching, everything)

Cool! added speed is actually only one of the cool things about this
switch. Mostly it is about speeding up development by us not having to
maintain 3 different versions of Sql backends.

>
> - A full neponumuk integration will be a good point, shared rating and
> comment, with a krunner interface

There is already a working Nepomuk collection backend done by a Google
Summer of code Student. This will be improved upon in the future and
_may_ eventually become the default. Until then, it runs quite happily
along side the Mysql collection.

> - The internet service part is just perfect.

Thank you _very_ much. That is my personal baby and something I have
poured many 100 hours into :-)

> - I miss the queue manager, and some small fonctionnality but it may be only
> a matter of time.

Some of this stuff has been added already, and much of it will come
back in future releases.

>
> That's pretty much all, everything else is very pleasant, innovative, smooth
> and well integrated, special mention for the biased playlist and the magic
> drag'n drop, hope we will see much more of this kind of interaction in the
> future.

:-D

> Where can we find some exemple of scripting for amarok 2.0, and will it be
> possible to interact with the new context view with some script ?

There is a work in progress scripting guide available at:
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/Scripting_HowTo_2.0. This does
not cover everything though. It should be possible to interact with
the context view using scripts, and eventually it should also be
possible to write new applets. It might be a little while before its
in a release though.


> Tthanks for raising the level of opensource application, keep going.

We try! And thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

> PS sorry for the frenglish and for this non structured mail.

No problem!

Cheers!

Nikolaj