[dot] Amarok's Summer of Code Review

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1190246519/

From: Seb Ruiz <>
Dept: i'll-take-two-please
Date: Wednesday 19/Sep/2007, @17:01

Amarok's Summer of Code Review
==============================

   This year, Amarok had two summer of code projects under the KDE
umbrella. Both of these projects have finished while remaining in
continued development and were extremely successful. Read on to learn
about two innovative additions to the Amarok project.


  I. IAN MONROE, MODEL/VIEW IMPLEMENTATION AND USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS
FOR THE PLAYLIST

     Amarok 2.0 is going to provide users with a new interface - one
which is more refined, intelligent and with a greater emphasis on
usability. Ian's job was to use the superior Qt 4 model-view
architecture to create an effective and efficient playlist for
listening. As a second time Summer of Code student, Ian got straight to
work on his project. Conventional playlists have always been displayed
as a typical column based list view, with a dense amount of information
in a rather unreadable format. Ian's interpretation involves a
customisable view for the display of playlist items, allowing for more
complex displays of track information. For example, displaying album
artwork for a track or groupings on an album basis could be possible. A
little more under-the-hood, Ian focused on optimising the playlist to be
capable of efficiently handling many thousands of tracks in the
playlist. This is something which was not possible in Amarok 1.x due to
technical constraints.


 II. LEO FRANCHI, WEB SERVICES INTEGRATION

     The Amarok project has always striven to provide users with the
best experience when playing music, allowing them to rediscover their
music. Leo was a first time Summer of Coder and his project was to
integrate various web related projects into Amarok. Originally, ideas
included upcoming concerts, artist trivia knowledge and more - however,
it soon became clear that there were much larger obstacles in achieving
this aim. There was simply no adequate place to display the information.
Thus, the Context View was born, a prettier, more powerful upgrade to
the Context browser seen in the Amarok 1 releases. Rightfully so, Leo
decided that the Context View was more central to the features of Amarok
2, and proceeded to import the KDE 4 Plasma workspace as the backend of
the new Context framework. After weeks of hard work, there is a
wonderful vector graphics based Context View which shows context
sensitive information relating the the currently playing song. In line
with KDE 4's Plasma, custom applets can be created as plug-ins to
display virtually any information (eg, guitar tables). There are a few
applets already implemented, such as track information and lyrics
fetching.