amarok 1.4

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

>
> I'm a happy Amarok 1.4 user and I'm terrified when I look at Amarok 2!
>

Then you should keep on using 1.4. We are not a proprietary developer who
can "expire" old products or make them unavailable, so Amarok 1.4.x will be
around as long as people care about it.


> How can you  turn a almost perfect program into a terrible Itunes-clone?
>

Well, one day while sitting in our secret underground lair, we decided that
we had done too much good, so to maintain the balance, we would need to
become really evil for a while. We decided that the best way to do this
would be to ue our coding skills to make the worst music player ever, stick
the "Amarok" name on it, and force people to.... oh wait... :-D

Ok, so maybe not... But on a more serious note, I actually find the
"Itunes-clone"
part funny as Amarok 2 IMO looks much less like itunes than Amarok 1.4.x
did. I also find it interesting that other people blame us for making a
windows media player clone (how we can clone both of those at once is beyond
me... ). Amarok 2 is not developed to look or act like any specific player.
We try to crate what _we_ think is the best player out there, and anny
simmilarities to other players are coincedental (You coud argue that in the
relatively narrow domain of playing music, some concepts just makes so much
sence that just by using trial and error, they will eventually show up in
most/all players even if they are not inspired by each other)


> The first thing which is really bad is this weird column in the center of
> the window, one cannot get rid of. Then there are a thousand functions
> missing.
>

This was one of the guiding concepts from the start of AMarok 2 development.
What really set Amarok 1.4 apart from the many other players out there, was
in our oppinion the context information. So with Amarok 2, we decided to try
to take this one step further. In the current version, this area does not
yet live up to its full potential, but it is improving fast and will work
much better for Amarok 2.2 (there are some really cool new applets that have
been addeed recently, and lots of other changes to it are happening). Do
note that in Amarok 2.1.1 (the latest released version) there is an option
to disable the context view completely.


> Please take into account what what Linux-users want and please don't aim at
> the dumbest users on earth as the target group for this program.
>

We aim at ourselves.

Being developers, I would say we classify as uite advanced Linux users.
However we also realized that Amarok 1 was as good as that breed of player
was going to get, so rather than loose motivation and let Amarok become just
another one of the pack of players that all look and work basically the same
way, we decided that we would rather try something new and attempt to move
forwards in a big way. Even if this means taking some big chances and
risking failure.

That said, Amarok 1.4 was a real "geeks program". The Excel style playlist
was quite flexible and could show a lot of data, but was also very scary or
many non-geeks who suffered instant "information overload" when looking at
it. In Amarok 2, we have a sipler default playlist, but hidden underneath is
the playlist editor that actually makes the playlist much more flexible than
the 1.4.x one ever was if you are a geek and want to tweak it. So in
essesne, with Amarok 2 we are aiming at a simple default interface, but we
are packing in a lot of flexibility, even more so than in 1.4.x.


> I hope there are developers out there who will continue developing "Amarok
> 1.4." AS IT IS (which definitely is a program that is a hundred thousand
> times better, more extensible and more comfortable).
>

The problem with Amarok 1.4.x is that it is written using Qt3 and kdelibs 3.
Both of these have been superseeded by Qt4 and kdelibs 4, and porting Amarok
1.4.x to this, even without making any other changes is going to be a _lot_
of work, and what you will basically end up with is a program that does not
stand out from Rhythmbox/Banshee/Songbird in any significant way. This is
exctly the reason why we deided not to go this route.

As for "a hundred thousand times better, more extensible and more
comfortable" I cannot argue better or comfortable as these are both
subjective, but Amarok 1 was never as extensible as Amarok 2, is. While
there might not be as many scripts for Amarok 2 yet as there was for Amarok
1, you can do much more powerful extensions than Amarok 1 was ever capabe
of.

- Nikolaj
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