9 thoughts on “Narwhal!”

  1. I tried yesterday Amarok2 on Windows, still need working but that was not the problem at all (the beta version). But it did not fit the desktop at all. So I started to search what is the state of the skinning possiblities for Amarok2 and what information I only found? That Amarok2 does not support skins because Amarok developers believe that skinning will confuse user…. yes… Confuse users…

    So please, say that is not true! Say that we can have skins for Amarok and move those play buttons, get rid of the context area (plasma)….

  2. @Fri13: It is a little more complicated than you make it appear to be. Yes we do not support skins. What we do is adept to the color scheme of the desktop. Which is a lot better in our opinion. Also be aware that Amarok on Windows and Mac still has more problems than Amarok on Linux. One of them is that it doesn’t integrate very well visually. This will change as we improve it during the 2.x cycle. So please give us some time to improve all this. You have no idea how much work already went into Amarok 2 so far and still we have ages of work ahead of us. Bear with us while we get there 😉

  3. I don’t know why you’re underrepresenting amaroK, Lydia =)

    amaroK 2 does support skins by replacing the SVGs in the amarok system dir.
    Whether you’ll employ common sense and expose that in the UI, however, i cannot know =)

  4. @Fri13, though we’re at a RC candidate, 2.0.0 will remain “beta” for Windows and Mac. Hopefully the release will attract more developer attention from those worlds. Mac and Windows platforms have a couple devs each, but still dwarfed by all us devs working on Linux. 🙂

    Its odd that you bring up skinning, since the impact of skinning is to make the application look less native. It hardly makes sense as a way to make it look more native – the default should just be that.

  5. @Stefan: It is Amarok 😉
    And I hope you agree that this is nothing we expect a user to do 😉 Of course it is free software. So everyone is free to change the code as much as they like. And that includes the SVGs.

  6. @Ian, I did not mean to support skinning as much as Xine-UI or Mplayer-UI (or Winamp etc) but having different background, backward/forward/play/stop buttons and move them to different place like middle or change their size etc. The color schema thing is good but it… is not just enough 😉

    Amarok devels has done great job but by my opinion, same time it they has forgotten that they are making a application using KDE technologies, where users should have configuration options. In this area, even Dolphin has more features because you can move, resize, rearrage etc panels and hide menu (what is very important!) etc.

    I know that Amarok for Windows will stay as “beta” when comparing to Linux version, but hopefully Amarok gets help from Win32 developers and a new configuration possiblities after 2.0 is released.

  7. Will Amarok 2.0 support gapless playback? In 1.x I didn’t manage to get it working with ogg/vorbis files (which was not so good since my whole music collection is encoded in vorbis).

    Kind regards,
    Jan

  8. Lydia,
    Sure users won’t touch the code but they _will_ replace the svgs in the system dir once themes become available on the internet.
    The difference being, it doesn’t require recompilation

    Again, since the code is written to support that sort of flexibility, you should expose SVG skinning in the UI (GHNS etc) or you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot ;\

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