Planet Amarok

KDE accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013

Teo Mrnjavac - April 8, 2013 - 20:10

I’m happy to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2013. This is our 9th consecutive year. Congrats to all accepted organizations, and a big thanks to everyone who helped to make this happen for KDE!

This year KDE will also participate in the Free and Open Source Outreach Program for Women, an internship opportunity running almost simultaneously with Google Summer of Code, from June to September. Please note that while the Outreach Program for Women shares many goals and methods with Google Summer of Code, the two programs are not related. Unlike Google Summer of Code, the Outreach Program for Women also allows non-coding contributions. For more information about applying, see KDE’s Outreach Program for Women wiki page.

KDE will also be hosting Season of KDE 2013, with more information to come in the following weeks. Season of KDE is expected to start later in the summer, around the Google Summer of Code midterm.

Students. Now that you have a list of accepted organizations, it’s time to start working on your proposal. The KDE community maintains an ideas page which is an excellent starting point, and don’t forget to check our student guidelines. Also, last year I published an article with some tips on how to structure your proposal, you might find it useful.

You can come up with your own idea or base your proposal on something from the ideas page, but either way it’s very important that you get feedback from the team you wish to work with well before the submissions deadline. If you have general questions about getting involved with KDE as a Google Summer of Code student you’re welcome to ask on our IRC channel #kde-soc on Freenode, or join the mailing list kde-soc@kde.org. For questions about a specific idea please contact the relevant team (subproject) directly.

Finally, make sure to keep an eye on the official Google Summer of Code timeline – those deadlines are always closer than they seem spacer

Mentors. Now that we know that KDE has been accepted, it’s time to get ready to mentor some students. If you wish to be a mentor your next steps should be:

  1. subscribe to kde-soc-mentor@kde.org,
  2. sign up on www.google-melange.com and apply as a mentor for KDE,
  3. contact one of the admins to approve your requests.

For questions you can reach the admin team in #kde-soc on Freenode or at kde-soc-mentor-owner@kde.org.

And most importantly, in the following weeks you’ll be contacted by prospective students with questions and feedback requests for their proposals. It might take a bit of time and you might get questions with very obvious answers. Please be patient and keep an eye on the timeline spacer

 

Categories: Planet Amarok

The free AMZ downloader is ready / Amarok Amazon store improvements

Sven Krohlas - September 13, 2012 - 09:41

Some time has passed since I last blogged about the Amarok Amazon MP3 store integration. Much polishing has taken place since then. But during the last few days a few major features have shown up as well. And one might even kill a showstopper for Linux on the desktop for many users.

AMZ Downloader

Amazon really sucks in terms of usability. If you buy more than one music file they don't offer a package with several MP3s in it for download, but an encrypted .amz file with download instructions. Even worse: Their application to handle those is proprietary, buggy and seems to be broken on 64 bit systems. But fear no more, those dark times are over! I hereby present: AMZ Downloader, a small utility to make downloading from Amazon as easy as eating a pie.

The screenshots should tell you the rest:

Opening an .amz file is a matter of one click.
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Downloading just takes another one.
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From a technical point of view the AMZ Downloader is also quite interesting. It is a separate utility, only requiring Qt and clamz, a command line .amz downloader. So maybe we are going to see AMZ Downloader shipped with other music players than Amarok, too? We'll see.

Context view

But that's not all there is. Amarok now offers further infos about a selected item in the context view.

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And it's not just viewing, it's browsing! Click on an artist name to browse through the store and discover other stuff from the artist. Clicking on a song adds it to the playlist. And you can also add a song to your shopping cart with one click.

Amarok Amazon URLs

This is possible thanks to Amarok Amazon URLs, which have been enhanced in latest git. This one for example searches for "Cure" in your store and that one adds a great album to your shopping cart. This could be a great area for script developers to play with...

So, you want it?

Check out git master or wait for Amarok 2.7, our most awesome release ever made!

Categories: Planet Amarok

Join us at the Qt Contributors' Day

Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen - October 5, 2011 - 16:57
Back in June, an event was held in Berlin called the Qt Contributors' Summit. This was such a success that the team decided that it should not be the last time something like that happened. So, to further this success, Nokia's Qt Frameworks Division has offered KDE a whole day of unconferencing at the Qt Developer Days in Munich later this month.

If you wish to take part in furthering the collaboration between KDE and Qt, and indeed other projects, then join the Qt Contributors' Day on Monday the 24th of October at the Dolce Munich Unterschleissheim. To join in, send me an email at admin@leinir.dk to that effect spacer

You don't have a ticket to Developer Days, you say? Well, not to fret! The KDE e.V. has been given a bunch of tickets to be given out to community members. To get your hands on one of these tickets, give me an email at admin@leinir.dk to inform me of this.

Please note! If you decide that you want to join us, get in touch with me BEFORE the end of this week! (i.e. before Sunday the 9th, which is when i send off the list of people requesting tickets and the like to the e.V. board for evaluation).

So - come to the Qt Contributors' Day at Developer Days 2011 in Munich, and let's make this thing epic! Qt 5 is ahead, and with the launch of the Qt Project, we have more to say than we ever did before! spacer

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Qt Contributors' Day happens here! spacer

Categories: Planet Amarok

I'm going^W^W I went to Randa

Kevin Funk - June 9, 2011 - 18:44

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Hello World!

This is my very first *Amarok* specific blog post. Yay!

(Okay, admittedly I did not really blog at all since now. This will change now, of course!)

As you may know, I've been a rather semi-active Amarok contributer until now, hacking Amarok's codebase to improve the User Experience. My major *feature* contribution is the KNotify backend in Amarok (which of course is not the most crucial part of Amarok). Other than that I was mostly fixing bugs noone cared about or exceeded the patience of the average Amarok developer when trying to be solved. I think there's going to be more activity on this blog now, since I seem to get involved in Amarok more and more these days (which is exciting).

The past week I've been at Randa, the most important KDE Sprint this year, I guess.  To work on Amarok and KDE Multimedia in general. See community.kde.org/Sprints/Randa/2011 for hints an information about this event. The most important aspect of the meeting was the Platform 11 meeting of course, where the future of KDE with regards to Qt's Open Governance Process was discussed. This however, is not part of this blog, as I was not really involved in that discussion.

Let's talk about the work spent in Amarok land during the spring in Randa. We (mainly Mamarok and me) managed to close about 92 bugs according to her statistics. Of course most of them were duplicates or already fixed bugs by other commits. However, with a rough estimate: I think I managed to *fix* (as in: fix by committing something) about 10 more or less severe bugs and quite some other annoyances/glitches. Currently, our bug count in bugzilla (bugs.kde.org) is down to 210, an impressive good rate per LOC in open source software with a huge code base like Amarok has. This number refers to the currently open "malfunctions", e.g. no wishes or bugs marked with WAITINGFORINFO (see: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=dorem&remaction=run&namedcmd=al...).

The Randa sprint has been an adventure this time which involved meeting new friends and meeting old ones. During the event Bart and me managed to work quite focussed on some issues regarding Amarok without being too distracted by other stuff. That was a really nice opportunity.

The list of commits that went into Amarok by me during the Randa sprint is listed here (42 commits during ~7days):

* e7666c2 - Minor: Fix typo in ChangeLog (2 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* a4f56ea - Minor: Reduce header dependencies (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* f716da8 - ChangeLog++ (Browser backgrounds) (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 7a39afb - Apply background images to the various browsers (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 3df0c45 - Minor: Collections: s/Counting/Counting.../ (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 83533cb - Add scripting interface for KNotify (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* e43a711 - Use warning() for DEBUG_ASSERT (4 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 9320d5f - Pushing an example use of DEBUG_ASSERT (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 8737ace - Add another debug helper: DEBUG_ASSERT(cond, stmt) (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* c8ef564 - Reset playlist error counter after match (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* c4cceaf - Possible fix for crash in CV (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* df9ec60 - Minor: Reformat code (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 01ed71d - Fix possible crash in VideoClipEngine (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* fbbb47f - LyricsApplet: Disable scrolling when editing (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* dfbf424 - Minor: Simplify some API in Albums applet (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 9aa81ce - Fix invokeMethod call to non-existent slot (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* ed5448b - Minor: Remove annoying debug output (SqlRegistry) (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* d21bab5 - Fix playlist tooltip getting too tall (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* cb86a84 - Make equalizer keywords (dB, kHz, ..) translatable (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* fbb54ff - Remove unused (+useless) PNGs from src/data (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 8098b22 - Unbreak Equalizer presets API a bit (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 471f0ac - Minor: Prettify ChangeLog (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 1170062 - Fix regression introduced by 34163f8 (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* bb5c2f9 - Remove some outdated documents from docs/ (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 34163f8 - Make preset names translatable (5 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 66ef047 - Add script error reporting at runtime (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 34bbda9 - Minor: Improve debug output (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 82d102b - Fix "Happy" moodbar theme (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* fcc420c - Fix crash by invalid scripts during stop phase (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 3157057 - Minor: Header/include cleanup (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 0406303 - Remove leftovers from a5628ac (6 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 6d93167 - Fix collection context menu items ordering (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* f6799cd - Header cleanup starting from CollectionTreeView (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* e902c44 - Minor: Rename hintlineedit(cpp|h) to HintLineEdit (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 76e9be8 - Fix strings in status bar (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 5eb2862 - Move the playlist length info into the playlist (7 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* cae9d5a - Minor: Rearrange some code (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 8879afd - Remove outdated handbook/ directory (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 36ca680 - Remove stale OXYGEN file (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* 48023de - Remove unused class ExpandingControlsWidget (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* f524292 - Replace some other "LastFM" strings (8 days ago) <Kevin Funk>
* b72b933 - Fix crash when accessing The::statusBar() (9 days ago) <Kevin Funk>

 

PS: We (Team Amarok) also managed to win the Randa foosball cup 2011, by rocking all the other teams. Team Amarok consisted of Bart and me. Evidence can be found in the picture attached picture!

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PPS: A nice picture collection of the event in Randa can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/valorie.zimmerman/RandaSwitzerlandKDESprint - Thanks to valorie for sharing and commenting all the pictures!

AttachmentSize Randa_2011_foosball_scoring_board.jpg839.59 KB Banner_NilsFurrer_went_to.png31.46 KB
Categories: Planet Amarok

January 1, 1970 - 00:00
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