It was some time since my last post. GSoC ended and then I had to take care of my real life for a while. But now I’m trying to get back and help Amarok developers by solving some easy bugs and polishing a little bit the context view.

Today I come with some nice stuff I’ve done recently. The first one is a nice user feedback by highlighting the context pages under the mouse in zoom out mode. Easy to implement and nice to have.

Context highlighting

The other nice stuff is the current track showing the last tracks played when in stopped state.

Last played tracks

It’s a little update but helps me to get back to work.

Here I am again, this time from aKademy 2008 in Belgium. It is my first akademy and as an experience it was awesome. The best part was meeting the people behind the nicknames. The community is great and it’s huge. Over 300 people came to the event, what is overwhelming. I’ve learnt many things, talked to many experienced people who really knows what they are talking about.

The organization of the event was perfect, there were many interesting talks, it’s a shame I’ve had to miss some of them. The social event sponsored by Nokia and the boat trip today were really really awesome (free beer, free food, what else could you ask?).

The only bad thing was that it was not really very productive in terms of code but it was really helpful to meet some of the plasma guys who were really kind to me and helped me a lot.

What was also very cool was the n810 that Nokia gave to some of us (a lot of us). It has become the favorite toy arround akademy. It would be really nice to have amarok playing on one of those with an adapted UI for the touch screen. Maybe someday, who knows ?

As for the Summer of Code program, well, it’s coming to an end and I still have lots of things to do, what is making me feel a little bit worried. I’ll have keep coding after deadline (18th august) to go as further as I can.

No snapshots this week, sorry

I can’t believe how fast time has passed these last weeks. Today  I come with fresh snapshots of the new toolbox menu I’ve been developing the last week. It still has some bugs but I can already show it to the public:

Toolbox menu

Toolbox

The menu appears after clicking in the plus icon in the toolbox. If you click in one of the entries of the menu it adds the applet to the current containment or, if the applet was already added, it takes you to the containment where the applet is. There isn’t the possibility of removing an applet from this menu but it’s something that I’m not sure that we want/need from this menu, I wanted to keep it simple so we will see what happens.

I’ve also changed the toolbox look a little bit, added some animations here and there and did some refactoring and a lot of changes in the code. Oh, and you may also have noticed that there has been a lot of visual changes in the application. This is because we have Nuno Pinheiro collaborating as an artist. Thanks to Pinheiro we now have our new own plasma theme as you may have noticed in the Context View. The current track applet doesn’t look so well now and we will probably need to redesign the applet to fit with the new theme.

In a few hours I’m taking a plane to Belgium to attend to aKademy. It will be a week of hacking that I hope will be very productive. See you soon.

This week I can finally deliver and show what has kept me busy a long time (more than desired, as always).

I delayed the post publication a few days to have it a little bit more polished and to prepare markey’s birthday present. The present comes a little bit late but I know you’ll like it markey:

New ContextView toolbox and markey's birthday present

I hope you like. Sorry for the short post, more updates and snapshots after the weekend.

Two weeks have passed since the last update mostly because I haven’t anything exciting to tell you.

Last week I did start implementing a new toolbox for the context view but many things got in the middle so I decided to dedicate time to fix pending issues. Some small issues, others not so small and in the end everything gets very complicated and I find myself dedicating a lot more time than I expected.

Everything might look somehow the same but it’s in the little differences that you can perceive some improvements. One thing you may notice now is that the context view status is saved on exit and restored back on start up with all the applets you had added. Also now the applets try to resize occupying all the available space in the context view area. We also have now the current track applet added on top of the first containment.

It’s a little bit late but I have finally everything set up so I can finally say:

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.

Five weeks have passed and now is when I’ve just started to tame Plasma. Let’s start with the snapshots.

Now when an applet doesn’t fit in the current containment it’s sent to the next availiable one. I’ve also added a header on top of the containments with a label which will allow users to name the containments.

Applets in a column are now hidden when the Context View widget is resized and there is not enough space to paint them in a usable way. They are shown again when there is enough space for them.

What I’m currently missing is a way to highlight the current selected containment. I’m thinking of using a glowing border on the containment to accomplish that.

Next week I’ll be working in redesign the Current Track applet and in a different approach to add applets to the Context View.

The applet browser approach to add applets might not be the better way in our case so I’ve been thinking of something like this:

I hope I can get some artwork help. These are early mockups but (I hope) they do not need much explanation.

In the redesign of the Current Track applet I’ve asked a friend with actual artistic skills to do a mockup and he did an excellent job IMHO. This is what he did.

Thanks Jacobo

For those who never heard about me before I’m the SoC student working with Amarok’s Context View. This is already my 4th week report during GSoC but until now I was only sending it by e-mail to my mentor Leo Franchi. This week he had asked me to set up a blog and post about the project progress.

During this week I’ve been fighting against QGraphicsGridLayout. The new grid layout is working just fine after some sizing issues. Also when an applet is removed the remaining applets are rearranged to occupy the space left. This is pretty simple but also very cool, and would look great with animations.

I’ve started to add multiple containments to the Context View and enabled zooming (ctrl + wheel). The idea is that applets are added by columns first. If there isn’t space left to insert an applet in a new column then it would be sent to another containment and the focus would be set to this containment (animations would be great here too, like zooming out from the current containment and zooming in to the new one). Again sizing issues have risen and although you can zoom in and out you can’t add applets to the others containments. I have to figure out what’s happening to the signals and the events of the contaiments.

Here are some snapshots showing the zooming:

As you can see in the images the wikipedia applet is working again. It is using Plasma::WebContent which allows us to set a transparent palette. The only problem is that scrolling in it is extremely slow. If no one else fixes it I’ll have to take a look myself, but for now I’ll wait since I have other issues to fix first.