A breath of fresh air to the desktop – KDE 4.2 released


TEAMWORK, originally uploaded by snowriderguy.

KDE 4.2 has been released. One year after the start of the KDE 4 series we have achieved amazing things and made great ideas reality. Let’s celebrate and spread the word!
Read the release announcement and the visual guide for a tour to all the goodies KDE 4.2 brings to your desktop.

KDE 4.2

Amarok 2.0 released!

We are happy to finally get our baby out of the door. Read the release announcement here: http://amarok.kde.org/en/releases/2.0, check abby’s screenshot tour and help us spread the word on digg, Twitter, your blog and wherever else you hang around 🙂   This is just the beginning of a long journey. Join us on our way and party with us!

Amarok 2.0

Grammar files for Parley please!


test many circles, originally uploaded by jared.

Frederik has been working on a nifty feature for Parley. (Expect some more Parley posts from me highlighting some of the cool new stuff in trunk as soon as I find the time.)
When creating a new vocabulary file you are asked to fill in a few things about the languages you are going to practice. This includes stuff like personal pronouns and tenses for example. Now we are all lazy, right? Everyone filling in those details over and over again doesn’t sound very clever, does it?
New nifty feature to the rescue! It allows Parley to automatically fetch this stuff from the internet. Sweet!

And this is where you can help. We need those definitions for a lot of languages or at least the most common ones to get it started. We already have files for English, German, Spanish, French and Latin. Help us make this rock by following these simple steps:

  1. install Parley from trunk and open it
  2. create a new document from the welcome screen
  3. fill in the details in the properties dialog that pops up, add the language you want to provide as the first language and keep the “Setup Grammar Details” checkbox checked
  4. klick ok
  5. fill in all the needed details for the first language paying special attention to personal pronouns*
  6. klick ok
  7. save it
  8. send it to me by email (lydia at kde.org)
  9. get yourself a cookie 😉

If you don’t have Parley from trunk but want to help you can also provide me with the needed info and I will create the file for you.

* Real world testing has shown that the dialog has usability issues. We are working on a fix. The short version: Only check the “Male/female have different conjugations” and “A neutral conjugation form exists” checkboxes if verb conjugation differs between male, female and neutral in the third person. If they are the same like in English write them into the first box (like this: he/she/it) and do not check the checkboxes.

LibriVox – take 2

Some time ago I wrote about the LibriVox script in Amarok. It has been ported now and works like a charm.
For those who don’t know how the script came to be: Hanno Svoboda reported a bug on bugs.kde.org saying that he would like to have LibriVox integrated in Amarok. We asked if there is a nice API we can use and Hanno got in touch with the LibriVox developers to find out. After some emails and chats everything we needed was provided and Nikolaj sat down to code the script for the service in a very short time and it is now one of our nicest scripted services. All of this was just a matter of a few days and getting the right people to work together.
Hanno has been so kind to do a short video. Please enjoy and thanks to Hanno for the video and for bringing this wonderful service to our attention in the first place.

LibriVox

This should show you two things:
1) Is is really easy to integrate a service into Amarok 2.
2) If you have great ideas and help us realize them amazing things can happen.

SeeqPod and LibriVox


Be seeing you, originally uploaded by Olivander.

Amarok 2 has two scripted services that are really cool. For one SeeqPod, that lets you search for any kind of music on the web and listen to it in Amarok. And the other one is LibriVox, that integrates the LibriVox service. LibriVox offers free audiobooks of public domain books. Both services are great and definitely deserve to be in Amarok 2.0.

The problem is that they were written a few weeks ago in Ruby. Now they need to be ported to QtScript as that is the only scripting language we allow for internal scripts to reduce the headache of script dependencies especially keeping the Windows and Mac releases in mind.

Among all the stuff that needs to be done before the release of Amarok 2.0 those two scripts were kinda forgotten until now and really need some love. If you want to help us get those two scripts back please let me know. Free cookies and hugs included 😉