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 πŸ™‚Β Β  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 πŸ˜‰

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.

Paros, Greece

Due to lucky coincidences I got to spend one week in Greece together with my stepsister on a lovely island named Paros. It was great! Weather was nice enough to go swimming and get a sunburn. We got to see most of the island thanks to having rented a small car. Driving through the hills looking down on the water was fun. I can only recommend going to Paros in the last week of the tourist season like we did. Most of the time we only had to share hotel, beaches and restaurants with 2 or 3 people and often we even were on our own.

at the beach

sunset

church

beach bar

Greek salad
Best salad ever. (I am still trying to recreate it.)

No butterflies!
The only bad thing about being on Paros so late in the year: You don’t get to see butterflies :/

More fotos in my flickr stream.

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger,
May you never take one single breath for granted,
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed,
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance,
I hope you dance.
— I hope you dance – Lee Ann Womack

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 πŸ˜‰

FrOSCon!

If you want to meet some KDE folks, want to see KDE 4.1 in action or if you have questions about KDE FrOSCon in St. Augustin is the place to be this weekend.

Come and say hello at the KDE/Amarok booth and in our dev-room.
We have interesting talks for everyone in our dev room:

Saturday:
11:15 KDE Edu (Frederik Gladhorn)
16:30 KDE Community – How to get involved (Alexandra Leisse and Lydia Pintscher)

Sunday:
11:15 Amarok 2 (Sven Krohlas and Lydia Pintscher)
15:15 Kubuntu – A KDE desktop (Marcus Czeslinski)
16:30 KDE Grill – Ask questions about KDE you always wanted us to answer (KDE dream team ;-))

And on Saturday 15:15 Sebastian Kügler will talk about KDE 4.1 in his talk “Don’t look back” in the main track.
Hope to see you there.

Oh btw: Last year’s social event = best social event of 2007. Let’s see if they can beat Akademy this year πŸ˜‰

Akademy / Summer of Code survey

Finally back at home. Less tired after sleeping in my own bed again. Missing everyone. Caught up on stuff. Laundry still piling up πŸ˜‰

Akademy was great. Very big THANK YOU to Wendy, Bart and their team. You did an amazing job.

Akademy was quite productive. Talked to lots of people about lots of stuff. Wait for some interesting things to happen in the next weeks and months.

I took the time to talk to some of our Google Summer of Code students about their experience. I wanted to find out where we as a community are doing very well and what we can improve in their opinion. Of course it wouldn’t be of much use if only I knew this so let me share it with you:

  • Everyone seemed to agree that KDE is a great community and that they felt welcome in our community. Akademy was seen as a great opportunity for the students to get to know people and it seriously helps in turning some of the students into contributors outside of GSoC. (Note to self: Find out how many of them are still committing code in 6 months.)
  • Documentation!!! The Amarok team seems to be doing a bad job here :(  (Not really sure about the rest of KDE.) I need to find ways to improve this. Suggestions welcome.
  • The Big Picture: This seems to be missing. Mentors should try to give an overview of the code and community and how it fits together at the beginning. Some of the students felt lost at the beginning and it took them a lot of time to get used to everything. For Amarok I created a wiki page with all the important links to websites and mailing lists for the students. Unfortunately the code overview part of it did not get finished.
  • Blogs: The Amarok students were encouraged to blog about their work every week and post it on Planet Amarok and Planet KDE. Same goes for some of the students that worked on other parts of KDE. Everyone seemed to agree that this was a good thing. The feedback they got was encouraging and helpful. They felt pushed to produce something worth blogging about at the end of the week which was seen as positive and motivating. It also showed that people are interested in the work they do and that their progress is monitored.
  • Branches: Working in a SVN or Git branch outside of trunk was seen as a problem. Code did not get reviewed and tested enough before it hit trunk. Those students worked too much in their own little world. Immediate testing and code review by other developers would have been preferred and a lot of problems would have been avoided. (I know there are reasons for branches but something needs to be done about this.)
  • Timezones: Timezone mismatches between mentor and student made students switch their sleep/wake times by several hours. I got a few complains about this but it was always seen as a minor problem. I don’t think it is too healthy though. So maybe this should be considered next year when matching students and mentors.
  • Gurus: Every single student was very thankful for having very knowlageable people in our community they could ask when reading manuals didn’t help. Even if their questions from time to time weren’t the most clever ones they got help. You rock!
  • Mentor being away: Some mentors left for a week or more on very short notice. This should be avoided or a backup mentor in place.
  • Students liked that they were mostly free to do what they want, i.e. solve problems the way they want and work on their own schedule.
  • Mentors in general seemed to have done a good job. You rock!

Thanks everyone who had a chat with me about their GSoC. If I didn’t find the time to talk to you at Akademy or if you were not there feel free to ping me on IRC. I will make sure your feedback gets heard.

I hope a lot of our students stay with KDE after GSoC. You have done an amazing job. Rock on!

PS: Thanks to everyone who signed my Moleskine at the social event. I considered doing nasty stuff to Sebr when he took it away from me but I have to reconsider this now since it is the BEST THING EVAR πŸ˜› and will be reminding me of Akademy for years to come.

*hug*