Summer of Code: Draft of Playdar Proposal

[Bart Cerneels]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 18:06, Andy Coder <andrew.coder at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>    Integrating Playdar into Amarok struck me as a great idea, so I've
> been studying up, talking to Leo a bit, lurking on IRC, and working on
> a draft proposal.  It's become fairly long, so I posted it as a public
> document on the GSoC site:
> http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/user/andy_coder/draftofamarokproposal
>
>   If anyone would like to do take time to read it, I'd certainly
> appreciate any feedback, (like if it's too long).
>
>  - Andy Coder

Hey Andy, your draft proposal reads very nice. I really enjoyed the
goal section :)

On the technical side I like to comment though:
You list a few custom GUI's required to use playdar in amarok. I
suggest you try to do without custom user interface elements for
playdar, except of course configuration, which will very likely be
required.

Also, because of the query based nature of playdar I think it will be
perfectly suited to be shown in the collection browser. The service
browser ("Internet" item in Media Sources) is sort of our "dumping
ground" for collections that for technical reasons can't have a proper
QueryMaker. Or need a custom GUI, last.fm for instance. Or are just
clearly internet sourced and don't "belong" to the user, like the
music stores.
Playdar can arguably be both internet sourced and local media
depending on the setup of the server. I think the latter will be more
common though, like in your radiostation example. So it's similar to
the DAAP share integration, which is displayed under "Local Music".

It should be possible to use the filter field of the collection
browser as playdar search input. After all it's passed to the
QueryMaker eventually and content is displayed when the QueryMaker
finds a match.
I don't know how this will work in the general browsing case. It could
very well be collection like usage is impossible with some way to
support all content available. The Collection/QM experts can enlighten
us.

To get around the lack of a browse feature in playdar, perhaps you can
show results of recent searches that are still resolvable.

Bart