Verdict: totally awesome.

Pros:
– Very fast, reliable stitching of images together
– Excellent colour and exposure correction, even if you don’t lock your exposures
– Supports HDR imaging! Create panoramas out of raw format files and then use tone mapping software like Qtpfsgui
– Excellent barrel distortion compensation on wide angled shots
– Qt4! (and cross platform)

Cons:
– It’s not free software
– Expensive
– User interface could use some work

Example:
Panorama created out of 8 individual raw images, then tone-mapped with Qtpfsgui. I can’t get a larger version because Qtpfsgui runs out of memory – the resultant panoramic raw image is over 130MB!

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.

But there is one thing which has been bothering me, and I don’t know the answer. I’ll be specific. amaroK has the ability to write cds if k3b is installed. There is always a burn menu in the context menus, which is menu entry is disabled if k3b was not found during compilation.

Is it better to remove entries which can never be used by the user, or to keep them disabled, and hence alert the user that such features are available?

I’m strongly leaning to the former, and remove anything that can’t be directly used. After all, the user would need to recompile/install the application to gain advantage and be able to use the this feature.

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?

Having a peek at the Qt changelog:

- QDom
The default constructor for QDocDocument now creates an empty document that can be used to create elements.

Matthieu Bedouet alerts us that appendChild will not work on empty documents, and it is necessary to import the child.

For example,


podcastB.setAttribute( "product", "amaroK" );
podcastB.setAttribute( "version", APP_VERSION );
podcastB.setAttribute( "formatversion", "1.1" );
doc.appendChild( podcastB );


Should become:


podcastB.setAttribute( "product", "amaroK" );
podcastB.setAttribute( "version", APP_VERSION );
podcastB.setAttribute( "formatversion", "1.1"" );
QDomNode podcastNode = doc.importNode(podcastB, true);
doc.appendChild ( podcastNode );


<rant>

Lately I’ve been subject to a number of users making requests which I don’t think are necessary. I’m sure anybody developer that reads this can say the same. Unfortunately, what’s really grinding my gears is when users believe they are the epitome of correctness.

Don’t get me wrong, I love, encourage & and enthused by user feedback and ideas, but using an application is not like eating at a restaurant.

Most of us work for free on projects. Some people are luckier and are able to support themselves from such activities.

Quoting wikipedia:

The open source movement is a large movement of programmers and other computer users that advocates unrestricted access to the source code of software.

What’s this got to do with anything? Well I’m fed up of users telling us what to do. You must implement this, because it will “<insert reasoning here>”. Unfortunately for you, developers get the final say on what goes into an application.

I implore you, please, don’t abuse the developers who try their best to give time and energy to improving the software world. If you don’t like an answer, either try and provide better information to convince us or piss off.

</rant>

Thanks for listening – but remember folks, its just those few people out there that irritate me!