sebruiz.net » hacking

ifp – it’s in!

Seb — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 09:16:25 +0000

I would like to present the latest feature available in the development version of amaroK – iRiver ifp support in the media browser (image). Transfer your favourite tracks to your device without the hassle of finding out where they are and how to transfer them! You will need to have an ifp device in Manager mode (not UMS), and you are well on your way to rocking out on the street!

In other news, we have a revamped Tag Dialog, which shows, amongst other things – lyrics (which are editable), as well as support for external sqlite versions higher than 3.2.4.

Holidays, Fundraising, Live CDs & more

Seb — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 03:18:54 +0000

It’s been a hectic two weeks. University got the better of me, then I forgot about it and went down to Melbourne for 10 days. The best thing I have done in a while – to get out and forget about everything which was bombarding my world.

It’s now a public holiday in Sydney, 31°C and beautiful weather. I’m planning on going down to the beach soon.

In the world of amaroK, we have launched a fundraising campaign to aide us in reaching a couple of goals – developer meetings, web hosting (amarok.kde.org currently uses over 50Gb of traffic a month – thats not cheap. Thanks to http://pwsp.net), and maybe even some hardware. We are aiming to reach US$5000 before November, so if you would like to give a hand, we would be very appreciative.

Additionally, the amaroK 1.3 live CD has just about gone live. Excuse the pun . With 26 wicked tracks to listen to, the best of KDE and the ability to remaster and create your own CD with your own music, what’s not to love about the CD?

Queue Manager

Seb — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:44:40 +0000

Firstly, for those of you wondering where the amaroK website has gone, blame the people responsible for DNS transition.

I took it upon myself to be productive this week, and I wrote a small Queue Manager for amaroK. It has been one of the more requested features, and I was happy to implement it as a light weight tool. It is simply a lightweight dialog which allows the user to drag and drop tracks from the playlist, allows resorting, and thats about it. I didn’t want to include auto remove from the dialog (eg, when the track progresses and the manager is open) – since this would be fiddly, introduce quirks in usability etc. Damn, I hate Qt drag and drop. May it die a painful death.

On another note, reducing the size of the dynamic mode config is a challenging prospect. I managed to get rid of the ‘playlist selector’, and integrate this straight out in the playlist browser. It seems to work well, but I will have to work on usability substantially. Remember, usability is not the necessarily bad if it has a relatively high learning curve – but the converse can be true.