GSoC project: New meta-applets for the Context View

[Leonardo Franchi]

On Friday 27 March 2009 13:30:24 Kevin Funk wrote:
> Hi Amarokers,

Hi krf :)

> my name is Kevin Funk, I'm a Applied Computer Science student at the
> University of Applied Sciences in Zweibrücken (Germany) in my third
> semester now. Some people may already know me from #amarok (Freenode)
> and/or working on Amarok in general (bug fixing, etc.).
>
> So here is my application for the "New meta-applets for the Context View"
> project for GSoC.
>
> Motivation for Proposal / Goal:
> Some people may already know that I am not really comfortable with Amarok's
> current visual appearance and I am trying to fix that issue whereever I
> can. And I think improving the Context View is a major step into this
> direction.
>
> Implementation Details:
> I really like the mockup of that guy here [1] and I think its a good start
> to describe what my idea looks like. The right picture in [2] shows the
> Meta applet I'd like to implement.
> I know that this means also a refactor of the Context View which I'm going
> to do aswell as a part of this project (I don't really think the current
> 3-panes- view is _that_ useful aswell, for different reasons, sorry).

Well, this is not really an application or a proposal. It's  more of a 
statement of interest, it seems to me. You need to be clear on what you want 
to do---and how you are thinking of doing it. 

The meta-applet project (which is sort of my baby) relies heavily on the 
visual aspect---in a lot of ways, that is the central component o the project. 
So it is very important to have a visual goal in mind as a part of the 
proposal, which will of course be iteratively improved after discussions with 
artists and usability people. However, I don't think it's really enough to 
just point to that mockup, so please be specific wrt. how you want the meta-
applets to look. Also, just 1 applet is not a lot of work for 12 weeks, so you 
should consider various sets of information that could be grouped together 
into an applet. I would think 2 or 3 would be a good number to focus on here. 

The proposal also needs to show that you have spent some time looking at the 
implementation details---obviously, you're familiar with parts of the amarok 
source, but the CV is quite different from the rest and has it's  own 
considerations.

Finally, you also need a timeline that breaks down the parts of your project 
into more manageable pieces. Doing this will force you to be very clear about 
what needs to be done, and also provides a blueprint for your progress as the 
summer progresses.

Take a look at the samples from last year (xevix and casey's) here: 
http://tinyurl.com/socsample and http://tinyurl.com/socsample2

cheers,
leo

> Feedback welcome
>
> --
> Kevin
>
> [1] http://www.kde-
> look.org/content/show.php/A+Media+Player+for+KDE4?content=94472
> [2] http://www.kde-
> look.org/content/preview.php?preview=2&id=94472&file1=94472-1.jpg&file2=944
>72-2.jpg&file3=94472-3.jpg&name=A+Media+Player+for+KDE4
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lfranchi at kde.org		Tufts  University 2010
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu                The KDE Project