Two weeks have passed since I announced round 2 and I am very happy with the result. The Amarok page improved a lot and is ready for the release of Amarok 2.1. Many thanks go to Karthikp, the winner of round 2! Awesome work! You definitely get a beer when we meet.
So who is next? Plasma! A few days ago the Plasma page on UserBase was a sorry little copy of the Plasma FAQ. Einar moved the FAQ already and was kind enough to start the new Plasma page. Now it needs more people to fill the missing spots. This is where you come in! Go to UserBase, get an account (non-OpenID login now possible as well thanks to danimo \o/) and start on either the main Plasma page or updating the FAQ where needed. This is a good way to get started with contributing to KDE and at the same time helping fellow users. As in previous rounds a beer (or similar drink of your choosing) is waiting for the winner at Akademy or another event.
If you have questions please join us on IRC in #plasma on freenode.
I will announce the winner in 2 weeks as well as the next project to get some love. Which one would you like to work on next?
Weeeeeee! One more beta closer to Amarok 2.1!
Read the release notes, download it, give it lots of testing and help us get 2.1 out the door soon. Enjoy!
Two weeks ago we announced the first round of our competition for UserBase. We are happy to announce the winner: Nikita Lyalin! Congratulations and thank you for helping improve UserBase.
As we will be releasing Amarok 2.1 soon the next two weeks will be all about improving the Amarok page on UserBase to make it ready for the next release. It currently does not contain up-to-date information and should be updated to actually reflect the state of Amarok 2.1 and not mix in Amarok 1.4 features. The winner gets a beer at Akademy or another event where we meet. Everyone is welcome to help. If you have questions please ask in #amarok on freenode or on our mailinglist amarok@kde.org.
Oh and here two more pictures by Leo from the Amarok developer sprint at KDAB:
Who can spot the 4 bad-ass KDE developers on the first photo?
Aren’t we a clever and good looking bunch? 😛
The Amarok developer sprint in Berlin is at full speed and the Amarokers are having an awesome time
Tuesday started with me being late for my ride to Stuttgart due to a meeting. Finally at 4am on Friday Frederik, Sven and I arrived in Berlin. We had a nice chat with Nuno, Leo and Gerard. Czessi of kubuntu-de organized a really nice flat for us with comfy beds to fall asleep in.
Friday morning we went to the KDAB office in Kreuzberg and where greeted with lots of music and generally everyone having a great day. May 1st is starting as a rather nice street festival here. After playing a first round of table football (note to self: need one at home! need one at home!) we split into two groups, one doing API review of the Amarok codebase and the other one planning the PR part of our world domination plans and talking promo, website and artwork. Todos for everyone 😀 In between being all serious and making Amarok rock even more we went out to get food at a Moroccan restaurant next door (everysone visiting KDAB: get food there – it’s delicious!) and enjoyed the atmosphere. We left Kreuzberg later in the evening right before police closed the U-Bahn station. Fun being in Berlin on May 1st 😉
Amarok developer sprint (by Frederik)
Saturday was all about discussing ways to make Amarok’s user interface better. We had everything from “awesome but totally un-doable” to “yea this is pretty cool and might work”. Stay tuned for what will come out of this. Leinir and I did some card sorting to improve the context menu that pops up when right-clicking on a track in the playlist. It currently contains 11 items most of which are not the way they should be. Sebas was able to convince Frederik to join him in hacking on the networkmanager applet. We had delicious food around the corner again, Vietnamese and Indian this time. And of course we had a few good table football matches again 😀
Leo, Nuno, Max and Gerard having fun (by Frederik)
Today started with making action items out of the discussions of the previous days, discussing bigger short and long-term plans and going through critical bug reports. After some really good Persian food, Leinir and I evaluated the data we got yesterday and came up with a very nice new context menu for the playlist. Others worked on implementing some of the action items we agreed on earlier like making it possible to remove the context view with a command line option (no option for now as we are in string-freeze). Night ended with a serious table foodball match which Leo, Sebas and Nuno totally rocked 😛
Conclusion: Berlin around the KDAB office and the office itself is the awesome. Thanks to KDAB for providing us with a great location and hosting. Thanks also to KDE eV for helping with funding. Stay tuned for some cool stuff 🙂
