Just 5 months since we released 2.0 and today we can present you Amarok 2.1 “Let There Be Light” with lots of improvements and new features.
Read the release notes, download it and rediscover music!
For videos of some of Amarok 2.1’s features check AmarokStudios. (Thanks to Abby for the videos.)
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? 😛
Rock on!
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 😉
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 😀
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 🙂
Due to not so perfectly alligned release cycles, not wanting to ship a beta version and a few more good reasons Kubuntu Jaunty was released with Amarok 2.0.2. This version is still missing a few features that some users consider vital. We have made huge improvements in Amarok 2.1 beta 1, our latest release, and of course more improvements have been made since then in SVN.
Improvements and features include but are not limited to:
For more please read the 2.1 beta 1 release notes.
So for everyone who wants to have some of the most loved features back: you can upgrade to Amarok 2.1 beta 1 with packages from the kubuntu-experimental PPA. Be aware that this PPA contains very experimental stuff that can break your system from time to time so you might want to consider deactivating the repository after you installed Amarok.
Please don’t forget to report bugs you find in the beta version at bugs.kde.org so we have a chance to fix them for the final version.
Just like all the other cool KDE projects Amarok did of course also get their share of excellent students for GSoC this year.
I am sure you’ll do awesome work! I hope I can soon add the names of those who are going to take part in Season of KDE (and another super cool thingy we arranged which I can’t yet talk about) to this list.
Thanks to Google for running GSoC and making this possible.
Accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2009 have been announced and we are very very happy with the ones we have chosen to work with us this summer. Congratulations to all of you!
Just like in previous years, we have been overwhelmed by the number of very good proposals we received for KDE. Unfortunately we were not able to accept all excellent students as the number of slots is of course limited. We would, however, like to offer every student who would like to work on his project outside of GSoC the opportunity to do so. We are happy to announce Season of KDE 2009. Last year SoK students did an awesome job and some of them have even been accepted for GSoC this year. We will provide you with a mentor and we can manage to do something about the T-shirt as well!
So students: please don’t forget that not being accepted for GSoC doesn’t mean you are not qualified/cool/good enough to work with us. It most likely just means we would have loved to accept you but couldn’t.
If you feel passionate about your proposal and would like to work on it outside of GSoC with a mentor by your side please contact us at kde-soc-mentor@kde.org and we will work out the details together.
We have been working hard since the release of Amarok 2.0, building on the foundation we laid with 2.0. Now it is time to release the first beta version of Amarok 2.1. Please read the release notes and help us find and fix remaining bugs for 2.1.
We just released Amarok 2.0.2. It contains a few bugfixes while we are working very hard on Amarok 2.1. Read the release notes and start roking!
