Leo Franchi

So as Nikolaj has been blogging about his cool new features that he has in store for Amarok 2.1, I feel obligated to reply. Can't let him steal all the thunder and PR!

Amarok 2 introduced many new features, and undoubtedly one of the most controversial ones was the context view. All of a sudden this large area was smack dab in the middle of Amarok, sticking its nose where some users didn't think it belonged. Mostly, this was because it was not always as easy or efficient to display data the data that users wanted, or it was clunky and hard to use. As the context view evolved alongside libplasma, some of the constructs that were used became outdated as well. All in all, the CV was not, in my opinion, living up to its potential and was very much one of the weaker spots of Amarok 2.0.

What is to be done? Improve it, of course! Or, in this case, rethink the basic foundation of how the user interacts with the context view. There are two fundamental things that will be changing in the Context View that you will see in Amarok 2.1:

1) The Layout itself

No longer will there be an idea of "containments, or "activities" (in plasma-speak). This idea, while quite nifty, didn't really work out great in practice, making it hard to manage a large number of applets and move them around. The new CV has a toolbar, almost a bit like the task manager applet for your KDE desktop. This will allow the user to visually see all the applets that are in the contextview, and instantly switch to any applet that he/she wishes to see.

Basic screenshot:



Clicking on any of the applets in the toolbar instantly switches that applet to be the top-most applet. The applets after it are laid out directly underneath each consecutive applet. The little wrench icon that is visible switches between "edit mode" and normal mode. This is the edit mode:



Here the user can add new applets in any location, as well as remove applets. The user can also re-arrange the order of applets by dragging and dropping the toolbar representations.

2) The applets

The fragmentation of data among the different applets provides for a lot of flexibility but not a lot of visual coherence. I personally envision a few select "meta-applets", that take up the whole CV at a time, but integrate data from multiple sources and lay it out in a coherent, simple, and space-efficient manner. So, a "web info" meta-applet would have wiki information, last.fm artist bios, lyrics, upcoming events for the artist, and maybe more.

I do want to point out that these are very preliminary ideas that are still being fleshed out, and have not been fully reviewed nor accepted yet by the Amarok team. But with some luck Amarok 2.1 will have an awesomely solid CV that will be able to display much more information in a much saner form.

so the amarok 2 experience has been getting better and better in the last few weeks. one of the major issues that i've always had with using the amarok natively is simply that most kde apps look very out of place on os x. really, rather than out of place quite a few look *really bad*. this is not anyone's fault, oxygen by default just doesn't fit well with the os x interface, and all the subtle grey gradients and boderless elements just turn into a big white empty space. example:



The playlist browser on the left is especially horrendous, not only does it not fit into a reasonable amount of size and get truncated, but it also seems to contain arbitrary squiggles to delineate the different possible tabs, all swimming in a sea of monochromatic grey-ish. now, i had been trying change style for a while, but when someone helpfully pointed out i can set the style in kdeglobals (i don't have systemsettings or kcmshell4 on os x), i was finally able to play around. lo and behold, with the tweaked QtMac style (which illogic-al tells me is oxygen tweaked for os x), amarok already looks a lot prettier!:



it is hard to see in the screenshot above, but the overall color is darker, and feels less empty. there is much more definition around elements, and in general it seems like a half-decent UI. all i know is that i would no longer feel ashamed to show this to a non-techie friend of mine when the ask what i spend all my time doing.

now, amarok is still not a beautiful os x application. it is still mostly grey, with different shades used to distinguish and delineate elements. this was a conscious design decision in the amarok development process, and although we are in the midst of talking about tweaking the UI for future releases (2.0 is finalized), this is how amarok 2.0 is going to look. I think in the long term we need to look at how to tweak the different ports of amarok---for example, in my pipe dream i'm seeing amarok using qt/cocoa and getting native toolbars and sidebars---think itunes or mail or safari or last.fm player type header with the control buttons init. of course, currently qt/cocoa doesn't include qt3support hence it is a little more complicated for kde, but nevertheless, i think one day we'll get there.

meanwhile, we continue to quash mac os x amarok bugs, and you can now resize your window like normal! (who would have thought you need to manually add a QSizeGrip to get a size grip in amarok's main window?).

Ever since I switched to the dark side and bought a macbook pro this spring, I've had slight trouble developing (and using) Amarok 2 and KDE4. Imagine my frustration as I spent a week cycling through all possible permutations of {VirtualBox, Fusion, Parallels} and {Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva} trying to get a development environment that didn't make my eyes bleed (or my computer choke).

Anyway, after approximately 7 months, I have been able to finally use Amarok as it was meant to be used: native on OS X!

How did I do this, you ask?

The KDE Mac Site

However, if you want to be able to build a collection (as I have in the screenshot above), you'll need to compile/install mysql manually (following instructions for MySqlE). But just out of the box, I got perfect audio, low CPU/memory usage.. and in general awesomeness.

In other news, I have locally switched Amarok from using our old last.fm code to a brand new snapshot that will provide much more long-term stability. This should resolve the various last.fm bugs that have been around the Amarok code for quite a while. and you can see the result here:


Finally, if you are still wondering what other crazy stuff you can do with amarok, look no further:


let me give my huge thanks to our very own illogic-al, who has dedicated more brain cells to packaging amarok/kde on os x than i would like to count, and who is officially awesome.