GSoC weekly report - issue 6
I come a little bit late since the last post because real life got in the middle.
This week we’ve got brand new zooming animations. Took me quite some time to figure out how to deal with Plasma animators but once you learn how to deal with it it’s quite simple. It was a little bit difficult to center the scene to the current containment while zooming in/out. The animation is set to 30 frames per second, it would look more smooth with higher fps but I wonder how it would behave on slow machines, so we still need some testing. I can’t show you this improvement since I still need to learn how to do screencasts.
And now, the long awaited new current track applet mandatory screenshots.
current track applet new look
Now it’s possible to rate songs in the current track. As you can see it’s pretty much like the mockups we had except for the rating stars that I had some problems trying to set a custom one. But hey, the default looks good too. By the way, I’m using Nepomuk’s KRatingPainter and an adapted version to my needs of KRatingWidget. It’s a shame that I wasn’t on time to include the rating widget for the alpha release. Haven’t I told you? We’ve got an alpha release, please digg it.
This is it for now, I hope you like it.
July 10, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Congratz mate!
Probably people will find it hard to do their work playing amarok in background, as they will mostly end up staring the beautiful applets in amarok
Rating applet rocks!
July 10, 2008 at 1:51 pm
That’s the beauty of plasma. Once they get plasma in kdelibs I am pretty sure they could make an amarok plasma containment that you can put on your desktop and can hold amarok applets, or even put amarok applets directly on the desktop (having a containment with play, pause, skip, etc buttons would be better, though). I don’t think there is any reason these applets would have to be limited to only being used inside amarok. I don’t think it is possible right now since last I heard amarok is running its own implementation of plasma, but I think it should be down the road once plasma is available to all applications.
July 10, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Nice.
Amarok 2 is looking sooo bright and shiny! The stars… maybe use the ones that are for the cursor pointer marker when you press META-CTRL in KDE4 
Also, try qt-RecordMyDesktop for screencasts. It works great.
July 10, 2008 at 2:48 pm
2TheBlackCat: all of this will not be possible.
July 10, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Alexei: why will it not be possible? That’s a shame…
July 10, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Hi, I’m loving this amarok2 alpha, and this current track applet is sweeet
But don’t you think it looks a bit foreign with the rest of amarok look? I mean, all amarok in gray tones and the current track in black?
Well, I’m sure this will be updated
Oh, and now on alpha can we report bugs? My albums artwork are all messed! And i cant group by album.. the collection gets all messed
But, there are only small issues, Amarok2 is goind to rock!! Thank you all devs
July 10, 2008 at 4:57 pm
@fish: the Amarok plasmoids aren’t out of process, they are part of ‘amarok’. A plasmoid on the desktop would have to be in the ‘plasma’ process and could only communicate to Amarok via D-Bus.
It probably wouldn’t be terribly hard to part them to be out-of-process, but its not something for free.
July 10, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Erm I meant: “terribly hard to *port them” of course.
July 10, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Looks great! I hope that menu can be hided (ctrl+M) so it is possible to get polished outlook for it
July 10, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Great job. I’m looking forward to get amarok 2!
And you have a fantastic music collection. Interpol The kooks, kaiser chiefs, the postal service
July 10, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Plasma’s Animator is smart and only takes the time you allot it to for animations. That means on slower machines, frames will be skipped (so your animations get choppy, but won’t take ages).
Technically, it goes like this:
- You start a timer (happens in animator)
- Every frame that is painted, you ask the timer for the current progress (it keeps the time)
- You paint using the progress value
The beauty here is that no matter when you paint, since you interpolate time and progress, you can paint whenever you want, it doesn’t destroy the animation (as long as you have enough frames to see an animation at all of course).
July 10, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Thanks for the explanation sebas. I think I can make some things more wisely knowing that.