Category: PlanetKDE

Amarok Developer Sprint

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
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)
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 🙂

Amarok 2 in Kubuntu Jaunty

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:

  • improved context view
  • customizable playlist
  • replaygain support
  • improved podcasting support
  • and more

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.

UserBase Competition

UserBase, the KDE user wiki, is really growing nicely but certain areas are still lacking quality content. To get those into shape we decided to start a little competition. We will announce a certain part of the wiki that needs love every two weeks and then start working on it together. The top contributors will get a beer at Akademy (or another drink of their choosing at an event they attend). This is a perfect way for you to get involved in KDE and a lot of people will be thankful to find the information prepared for them in the wiki.

KOffice will be the first project for our competition. What needs to be done? Easy! These blogposts need to be transfered to the Hints, Tips and Tutorials section of the Krita page on UserBase. Of course if you feel like giving the rest of the KOffice pages some attention that is appreciated as well.

Don’t forget to log in when editing pages so we know who gets to drink the beer 😉
Any more questions? Ask away in #kde-www on freenode or send an email to community-wg@kde.org.

Oh and of course I already have the next project lined up but I’ll keep that one to myself for now and will announce it together with the winners of the first round 😉 Let me know if you have a project you’d like to see in round 3!

Amarok projects for GSoC 2009

Just like all the other cool KDE projects Amarok did of course also get their share of excellent students for GSoC this year.

  • Teo Mrnjavac will make the playlist rock after having worked on tagging during last year’s Season of KDE.
  • Sven Krohlas will give us some unit testing goodness to find all those nasty bugs before a user gets to see them.
  • Alejandro Wainzinger will make sure our media device support will make people happy.

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.

Announcing Season of KDE 2009

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.

Tell me all the ways you rock!

KDE 4.2 has been released and there is neat stuff all over the place.

The thing I think rocks most? Definitely automatic translation and image fetching in Parley. Typing all those vocabulary by hand can be a pain. Thanks to scripting support in Parley you now can let Parley fetch those translations for you. And while we are at it: Why not also get a nice image on top of it? 😉

Parley automatic vocabulary fetching
Parley automatic vocabulary fetching

So now tell me: Which feature do you think is the best? Got a small feature that risks getting unnoticed? Or a feature that makes your live 10 times easier? Tell us about it in the comments and your blog!

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