GSoC Proposal First Draft: Media Device Feature Completion in Amarok 2

[Leo Franchi]

> On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 3:27 AM, Alejandro Wainzinger
> <aikawarazuni at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello all.  Here is the first draft of my application related to  
>> media
>> devices support enhancement for Amarok 2.  It should look very  
>> similar
>> to the one last year in format, since I used that as a template.
>> Please offer any suggestions on what I should add/remove/touch up.
>> Thanks, and here's a link to a pdf version just in case:
>>
>> http://people.ucsc.edu/~awainzin/ 
>> AW_amarok_mediadevices_SoC_app_09.pdf
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Until June 11, I will be in school and so can dedicate time only to
>> planning, but after that I am free to work 20-30 hours per week on
>> Amarok.  As for mentoring, I am used to the time difference between
>> California and Western Europe so it will be not be a problem.  I'm
>> comfortable with e-mail and chat, as they are often more effective at
>> helping to stay on task, even if meetings in person allow for rapid
>> and accurate exchange of ideas.  That said, if time and money permit,
>> I would prefer to meet with my mentor at some point.
>
> While the proposal itself sounds fine to me, I personally find it a
> higher priority to make progress with media devices support for the
> Windows and OSX versions. They are lagging far behind the Linux
> version in this regard.
>
> Alejandro has explained to me on IRC that this would require working
> on Solid (a different KDE project), rather than Amarok. For OSX there
> is already a Solid backend being created by QtSoftware, but for
> Windows this is still missing, as far as I know.
>
> At any rate, I'm concerned about our alternative platforms lagging
> behind the Linux version, and I think we should make it a priority to
> reach feature parity with them. So I would personally prefer to see
> Alejandro working on that, rather than what he is currently proposing.
>

I agree except for the fact that the media device support on linux  
itself is quite shitty (apologies for the euphimism), especially how  
we do not support UMS at all. Nor do we support syncing podcasts to  
ipods *in any way*. I'm all for equalizing the mac and windows  
platforms, but given the choice between well-implemented media device  
support on linux and none on win/mac, and half working/functional  
implementations on all 3, i would choose the former. it just makes us  
look bad.

leo

---
Leo Franchi				(650) 704 3680
Tufts University 2010

lfranchi at kde.org
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu