Amarok Blog - markey

KDE - Amarok - Birthday Party in Ulm

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 20:09:12 +0000

I'm happy to announce that we will have a KDE 4.7 Release Party, combined with the Amarok 2.4.2 Release and My Birthday in Ulm / Germany. Location is Mark's and Myriam's apartment.

We will have food, drinks, music, and we can discuss the latest KDE and Amarok releases. If you are in the Southern Germany area, please make sure to join us and sign up here:

KDE 4.7 Release Party @ Ulm

Also joining will be Ian Monroe (KDE/Amarok) and his wife Sherry, Christian "Muesli" Muehlhaeuser, and Manuel "Sput" Nickschas (Quassel IRC). Plus some work mates from Nokia.

Paaaaaady! (Image by Julio Martinez)

Update: The event is on July 30, one week from now.

Fear and Loathing in Ulm

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 13:42:48 +0000

I felt like it was a good idea to give you a little update on what I have been up to lately. So here we go

First of all I should point out why I have been so quiet lately (unusual for me). Roughly six months ago I started working for Nokia, which required relocation to Germany. I am now living in Ulm, which is mostly known for the Ulm Minster, the tallest cathedral in the world:

The first three months I had been living in a hotel, which is cool for about two weeks but then gets boring quickly. I'm now living in a nice apartment with Myriam, in a 500 years old house in the city center. Unlike most Nokians in KDE I'm not working on Qt, but rather on a new project as Senior Software Engineer in "UI Design and Implementation". Also, unlike many of my fellow friends from KDE, I happen to believe that Stephen Elop is a good CEO, and I am happy with Nokia's new direction. I am in the lucky position to work with famous developers like Matthias Ettrich and Lars Knoll, and I succeeded in bringing veteran Amarok hackers Christian "Muesli" Muehlhaeuser and Ian Monroe into our team. Working with Chris and Ian is a joy, and I would be happy to bring more talented FOSS people in the project (drop me a note if you are interested).

After my prolonged absence in KDE, I'm eager to start contributing again, and especially to work on Amarok. It's great to see that Amarok is still doing fine, and that our team has made some very nice progress, with the latest achievement being the release of Amarok 2.4.2 Beta 1. We have some nice plans for Amarok, like a port to Qt Quick, which will also help getting our plans for Amarok Mobile on track.

My latest obsession is Google+, we often hang out there with nerds like Harald Sitter and Paul Adams, doing community work like trying to teach some German to Ian Monroe (it's hopeless...) Find me here: Mark @ Google+

Last not least, I will be attending the Desktop Summit and Qt Developer Days 2011. Meet me there for sharing a line of beer or injecting some Coca Cola (at DS we could also laugh derisively at gnome devs).

Technological Singularity - We're heading right into it

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:36:20 +0000

There is a thought that just struck me, during a conversation on IRC. I'm not sure if the idea is new, or an old hat, but I think it might have merit to discuss it.

You have probably all heard about the Technological Singularity, which is a very controversial topic. Some scientists say, it will clearly happen, the question is just, when will it happen? Others say, it's complete nonsense, it will never happen. Myself I am assuming that the theory is correct. But it might happen in a very different way than it was assumed before.

The classical assumption is, at some point computers and AIs will get so smart, that they will be able to improve themselves. When that happens, noone can predict what the result will be, hence the term Singularity. Our lives might continue as normal, or the world might completely change forever. Noone knows this. Recently there has been a lot of talk about crowd sourcing, collective intelligence, and distributed cognition. I am starting to think that we are heading right into the Singularity, right now, without even noticing! But the Singularity is not some sort of "Super AI", a computer that is incredibly advanced. The Singularity is our minds, connected over the Internet. We are the Singularity.

Think about all the incredible things that have happened lately, among them the WikiLeaks phenomenon, whole governments crumbling because of Internet activists, the wonderful TED talks, encouraging Free Thinking, and about giant Free Software projects like KDE. Think about the rapid advances humanity has recently made, in many areas of science.

There is no need to wait for this mythical AI that becomes the Singularity. Folks, we are already in the middle of it happening. Think about it, and I would love to read your thoughts on this.

Thanks for reading, and please comment

About Friendship

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 22:29:34 +0000

The inspiration for this article stemmed from a recent discussion with a bunch of friends. The core of our topic was: "Does friendship differ from love?" Now, love can mean a lot of things. Initially, in this discussion, it meant the classical romantic love between life partners. Which is of course a special thing. However, my argument was (controversial as always): "True friendship is the same thing as romantic love, if you have the guts to leave out the romantic crap." Please let me explain, what true friendship means to me:

Being there for each other. Especially when the friend is in need of that (sickness, financial troubles).

No need for being dishonest. A real friendship implies that secret topics can be discussed. They will stay secret.

Surviving arguments. True friends will value each other's opinion, whether they agree with it, or disagree. The truth can be told, and it's expected to be told.

I do not have very many "true friends", but: Quality > Quantity. My girlfriend is in this group of close friends. I don't think that there is a huge difference between what is classically called "Love", and "True friendship."

Think about this, and, as always, I appreciate comments. Some KDE folks are friends, just to make the connection

Amarok Insider - Issue 16

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:27:05 +0000

The Amarok Team is very happy to announce a new edition of our Amarok Insider newsletter. This time, we have really packed it with information, cool insider details, and fun!

Image copyright by Ben Golub

This edition also features an exclusive interview with Amarok core developer Bart Cerneels, who is starting to resemble Bono from U2 more and more:

Bono Cerneels from Amarok

Please enjoy:

Amarok Insider - Issue 16

Amarok - The Career and Friendship Maker

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 10:35:21 +0000

I am not quite sure yet what my exact intention with this blog is, it came from a sudden inspiration, like most of my articles. I think, this thought has been breeding in me for a long time: Pointing out that contributing to Free Software projects can actually give you back a lot, without getting directly paid for it.

Let me illustrate this phenomenon with Amarok as a case-study, because I naturally know this project well, and I was able to watch it evolve over the past 8 years. An amazing process, interesting, and certainly life-changing for me. But not for me alone. Over the time, our project has served as a real "Career Maker" for many of our contributors. Also, which might be just as important, it has lead to many good friendships (even personal friendships) between members of our team. In this article, I will not so much go into the friendship aspect, because this is a rather private thing. Let me just say, I consider many members, and also former members of the Amarok team, as close friends. Some friendships have lasted for many years, and they are still going strong. Simply a great thing.

Switching to the career aspect, many of our contributors have started with Amarok when they were still quite young. Many of them have been students back then, or even pupils. Myself, when the idea of creating Amarok formed in my mind, I was in a rather desperate state. Being a student, I had next to no money. I did not have many friends. I had almost lost my interest in computing, which had been an obsession when I was a teenager (I started programming on the Commodore Amiga, at age 15, those were the times!). Nowadays, I am sometimes being treated very respectfully when visiting Free Software events. I have found many friends in KDE and Amarok, from all over the world, I have met a wonderful girlfriend, and I have had interesting jobs that I could never have dreamed of back then. And so much more.

Going back to our team, what has Amarok meant for them, after all these years? Let me just list a few of the achievements, which I think have at least partly been enabled by contributing to our project:

Max Howell: One of the first contributors to Amarok. Back when Max started, he had just earned his master degree in Chemistry. He was not really sure what to do with it yet. Then, one day, a guy named "mxcl" showed up in our IRC channel. I learned that he was from the UK, that he was friendly, and eager to hack on Amarok. So he did that, very successfully. After a while, Max realized that his real passion was in IT, not Chemistry. But he he did not have any formal education or degree in IT. He took the risky step to apply at Last.fm, and was accepted. A few years later, Max had become Lead Developer at Last.fm, famously developing the Last.fm player. Nowadays, Max is a highly competent and successful Software Engineer, works for TweetDeck, and still occasionally contributes to Open Source. Impressive career, I would think.

Christian Muehlhaeuser: Christian (Muesli) showed up around the time that Max had joined Amarok. Together, we are still listed in the English Wikipedia article for Amarok, as "The 3 M's of Amarok". After contributing to Amarok for many years, he took his chances, and applied at Last.fm. He became one of their first employees. When he left Last.fm, Christian was a sought-after Software Engineer. Today many companies are trying to hire him. He has the freedom to choose to do what he likes best. Very impressive.

Seb Ruiz: Seb comes from Down Under, and he was among the "second generation" of Amarok hackers. He contributed massive parts of Amarok 1.x and Amarok 2.x, as well as a unique sense for community spirit, and joy. Today, Seb is Team Leader at Atlassian, a renowned software company based in Australia. It's a great job, from what I heard. He seems to enjoy it a lot.

Ian Monroe: Ian also is from the "second wave" of Amarok developers. Back when he started, he was very young, just beginning his university studies for a degree in CS. When he left university, Ian worked at companies like Collabora. Today, Ian remains an active Amarok contributor, and an active member of the KDE community. His recent work on the KDE Git migration has been very appreciated. It's pretty clear to me that Ian has a great career in front of him, he is still fairly young.

Leo Franchi: Leo joined when he was still very young, just starting his studies in CS and Philosophy. He became one of our most active contributors, and remains with Amarok until today. Leo is now working at KDAB, a company with very good reputation, which has close ties to the KDE community. It's easy to see that Leo will have a very promising career ahead of him.

Lydia Pintscher: Lydia (Nightrose) joined Amarok when she was still new to Free Software, just having started studying for a degree in CS. Lydia quickly became our Community Manager, and a very active person in the KDE community. At this time, Lydia is finishing her master thesis in CS, which is about Amarok and another FOSS project. Heaving read a preview of her thesis, it is clear to me that it will be very successful. It's not hard to see that Lydia will have very good job options, especially with her long experience managing Free Software communities.

This is just a very small part of the many many contributors that Amarok has seen over the years. There are more examples of great careers, which have at least partly been made possible by contributing to a Free Software project.

If you are pondering about investing some time into Free Software, and you are wondering if this is really worth it: I think we can answer this question with a very clear:

Yes.

The Old Gang: Seb, Ian, Mark, Max, Muesli

Last Week in Amarok

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 13:02:06 +0000

Code-In a Big Success for Documentation

By Valorie Zimmermann:

Last week the students continued to work on our Handbook, and the tasks are progressing very nicely. Now that the Handbook tasks are almost finished, they are lending a hand for our next Amarok Insider (past issues available at http://amarok.kde.org/Insider). Its inspiring to work with these students, some of whom are very young, and yet are so smart, and work so hard. They have started hanging out in the #amarok and #rokymotion channel more, and getting to know some of our developers and helpful testers and users. Ive set 39 tasks so far, and 25 are already completed! And most of my open tasks are claimed, so were doing very well.

Dealing with Regressions and Crashes

By Valorie Zimmermann:

Everyone has been working really hard on testing out our new features, and making sure that 2.4 is excellent! Were collecting information about regressions and crashes to help in this effort. If you come across something which troubles you in 2.4 beta, please come into IRC, write to the Forum or list, or file a bug. We dont see this as whining or complaining, but helping us make Amarok better! IRC is great if you can come in, because sometimes help or bug-fixing can take place on the spot! Quite inspiring to see our talented developers and the rest of the team in action.

Dealing with regressions and crashes is not quite as much fun as seeing new stuff get added to Amarok, but it is very important to a successful process. So, please help us out!

Bugs and Wishes

By Myriam Schweingruber:

Last week we have continued our bug-fixing work to get the next Amarok version out of the door. Amarok 2.4 is shaping up nicely. We have fixed a total of 98 bugs only this single week! There were of course a fair amount of duplicates, but the statistics are the following:

8 implemented wishes

33 fixed bugs, of which 14 were crashes

13 invalid reports

33 duplicate reports

3 upstream and 2 downstream reports

Two reports were pushed to later and four were closed as WONTFIX. Now, what does this mean? Well, most of the time either it is a wish that is out of the scope of Amarok, or it cannot be implemented within a reasonable amount of time by the developers.

Why so many duplicates then? Well, it is simply an indicator of a growing user base, since the more duplicates we get, the more users are willing to report their problems! Of course it would be nice to have the users check for duplicates first, but not everybody understands the system the first time around, and it up to us triagers to help them making better reports in the future

KDE, Pizza, and the meaning of Luv

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:23:02 +0000

What I want to write about today is Pizza. Nom nom Pizza. We all love Pizza, right?

This here is the best Pizza place in Switzerland:

My plan is to invite Aaron to a nice Pizza there, when he comes around next time. Here's the relation to KDE: Who wants to join us?

PS:
I can't buy Pizza for everyone. This is why we need Pizza donations.

Last Week in Amarok

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:28:38 +0000

New Features

Similar artists applet now shows artist tags from Last.fm, and the full artist biography is shown when the artist image is clicked. Its very nice to be able to listen to a stream from Last.fm, go to the Artists page in Last.fm, or even check out similar artists to any that sound interesting! A great way to Explore Your Music.

Bug Fixes

Ralf is still working on the collection scanner. He reverted back to writing the database in batch mode (like the old scanner did) which solved some performance issues when committing more than 20000 files. But a new auto test uncovered some other issues. Most of those should be fixed now and the result should be finished and integrated this weekend.

New Incremental Podcast Directory

Bart has been working on a new podcast directory that, instead of storing a cache in the database, reads directly and incrementally from an online OPML file. OPML is the standard file format for storing lists of RSS feeds, such as podcasts.

A master OPML file will be stored on amaroks public server which will link to public podcast directories but also lists of favorite podcast channels maintained by Amarok developers.
The incremental feature is important because it means OPMLs are parsed even while they are downloaded and its contents are shown immediately even if the download takes multiple minutes. Furthermore this data is fetched on-demand, so there is no unnecessary internet traffic.
Since last week this work is public in the new git branch titled stecchino-IncrementalOpmlDirectory reflecting the naming convention we discussed earlier this month. This branch is open to any contributors and specifically we are looking for someone to implement the look and feel of this new service. Contact us via the developer mailing list or on IRC (Freenode): #amarok and ping Stecchino.

Bugs and Wishes

We closed 23 bugs during that week of which 8 were bugfixes, 1 wish was implemented, 2 closed as upstream bugs, 9 duplicates and 3 closed as invalid.

Related projects

Work continues on the new Phonon-VLC backend to Phonon, which is sounding excellent! In addition to that, it is now rock solid. We have not experienced a single crash in several weeks of testing, which makes it the most stable of all available Phonon backends. We have to thank the VLC team for cooperating so closely with us. Without their help, it would have been impossible to do.

There will be a new release soon and we hope that all distributions will ship the new Phonon-VLC backend soon.

Go go, Gadgetto Markey!

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 17:07:53 +0000

My latest toy:

HTC Desire

Not very long ago I had broadly claimed that the Nokia N900 is the best smart phone on the market. Now I'm in a bit of a situation, because that was not really true: I found out that the HTC Desire is really the best phone. Contradiction much? Nope! The N900 is ideal for geeks, while I would say that the HTC Desire is the best phone for everyone else.

What makes it so great?

AMOLED screen with fantastic quality, the best on the market in my opinion. You can read it even in direct sunlight, and the colors are vibrant. Contrast is great.

Android 2.2, with "HTC Sense" UI. Simply the best usability currently, beats iPhone easily. MeeGo might be able to challenge it, but a lot of hard work lies ahead for that to happen.

The size of the phone is "just right". It's neither a brick that needs rapper pants or a gold chain for carrying, nor is it too small. Also, the weight is nice, it is pretty light.

Good camera. 5MP, and with extra software you can get for free (Android Market), you can turn into a really nice HDR cam.

Excellent build quality. This device feels solid and well put together. I find it feels higher quality than e.g. the Samsung Galaxy, which also happens to have a bad screen.

Google's navigation software is hard to beat. With enabled "satellite" layer, it makes driving a nicer experience than I thought is possible.

It looks pretty.

PS:
I should note that newer models of the Desire (e.g. the Desire HD) do not use an AMOLED screen, but rather some "Super LCD", which is marketing BS for "really crappy TN TFT." I went through great efforts to get one of the original models.

ADHD - Gift or Disease?

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:59:09 +0000

First of all, allow me to point out what ADHD (Or ADD, as it is sometimes called) really is. However, instead of trying to explain it myself, I will let Wikipedia do it for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivity_disorder

So you might ask: "Why on earth should a random KDE developer write about a psychological disorder, and what does it have to do with KDE?" First of all, I am myself affected by ADHD. In fact I'm a pretty hardcore case. Some of you in KDE might have suspected this, or heard about it, as I tend to speak out openly. Second, I'm a bit of a hobby psychologist. I know, I know. "Hobby MDs" are the worst kind of MDs. And that's very true. However, I happen to have a good friend who is an MD in psychology, and I talk to her often. Adding to that, I have read many books, articles, and theories about ADHD. So this gives me a bit of an advantage.

Next question, how is this related to KDE at all? Well, KDE mostly consists of geeks. ADHD is very common among geeks. Some scientists believe that the rate might be as high as 30%. So, it is quite likely that many of you either have ADHD and know about it, or they have it, but don't yet know it. In my opinion, it is time for an article that could potentially help those who suffer from ADHD. So I'm doing just that.

Let's start by explaining common misconceptions about ADHD:

It means that a child is always distracted in school. WRONG

It means that someone is really totally nuts. WRONG

It's a bad illness, it needs to be treated, ideally with Ritalin. WRONG

There are many more such misconceptions, I only listed a few of them here.

But what is ADHD really? That's a difficult question, and not even professional psychologists are quite sure about it. Officially, the accepted theory in psychology is: "ADHD is a serious disorder. It is an illness."

I'd like to challenge this theory! That's quite something, isn't it? Here are some of my own theories about ADHD:

First of all, it is not really a disorder per se. In fact it is more of a gift, if used correctly. If not used correctly, it is a pest. It can ruin your life. So, it is worth trying to understand what it really is. Or else you will suffer, and suffer some more.

Let me list some of the advantages of ADHD, if "used correctly" (I will get to that later):

Ultra-fast learning.

Interest in almost all forms of science and crafts, ranging from IT to medicine, to bongo drumming.

Ability to multi-task. Very important in our new information based world.

Ability to "hyper-focus". This comes very handy. ADHD people can focus so strongly on a task, that they can get it done much faster than anyone else could.

Being pretty smart. Some ADHD people are in fact very smart.

Being good communicators. ADHD people are often found in leading positions, such as CEO's or Project Managers.

Being able to detect lies easily.

Less need for sleep. 5 or 6 hours per night are just fine.

However, there is a price in life for everything. ADHD is no exception. These are the disadvantages:

Having next to no patience. Big obstacle, because this really annoys everyone else.

Being unable to lie, or being unable to be dishonest. Can be a problem, because not everyone can take the truth.

Going nuts if bored. Boredom is the worst thing that can happen to an ADHD person. In fact it can lead to deep depression. Imagine it like a CPU that needs constant data feeding, or else the cache starves.

So, let's get back to the point of "using it correctly". What does this mean? First of all, never let that CPU starve. It needs input. A lot. Feed it books, the Internet, science, anything. Just don't get bored. Then, ADHD people tend to be chaotic. "Messy" is actually an advanced form of ADHD. You don't want that, right? So, always try to keep order. Throw things away that you don't need. Never hamster stuff. One phone is enough, you don't need 5 phones. Give them away to friends who can put them to good use. And: Always use TODO lists. They help you organize your life, which is all important. Got a funky idea, but you are taking a walk? Always take something to write with you, pen and paper, or a smart phone. Write the idea down. Later on, think about it again. It might just be a brilliant idea, or a very crappy one. You'll find out later.

Try to be patient with other people. I know, it's next to impossible. But there are ways to get around this. If someone talks slowly and you get bored, find an excuse. "I'm sorry, but I really need to take a leak. I will be back later." That works most of the time. Also, try not to get into pointless arguments, and always stay friendly. Other people will get very annoyed if you are too harsh. It happened to me in the past. Now I know how to handle this better, and it works.

Let's get to the core of the theory. Please read this article first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention-deficit_hyperactivity_disorder_controversies

So you see, not everything is nice and dandy in the world of psychology. It's a science, and as such it is constantly evolving. New theories replace older ones, if they work better. The current official theory about ADHD might be true, or it might be wrong. We will see in the next years. I'm pretty confident that there will be some revisions.

And now we get to the meat! This is getting really controversial. If you don't like controversial ideas, please stop reading here. You have been warned.

"What is ADHD really, then?"

It's the next evolutionary step of our brain. Studies show that the rate of ADHD increases world wide. This is no coincidence. There must be a reason for it. Only ADHD allows you to live comfortably in our new information based society. Without it, it gets very hard to work e.g. in IT, as you need to learn constantly. Stopping to learn means losing your job, essentially. ADHD people love learning, so they actually enjoy the work, if they like it. Work == Fun. Simple as that. I don't have something to work on, be it payed work or a hobby project, I will get very depressed. It has happened to me, it can happen to you.

ADHD is the Brain 2.0.

There you have it. Discuss!

PS:
It took me exactly 25 minutes to write this article. Only possible thanks to hyper-focusing.

Last Week in Amarok

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:22:30 +0000

Ralfs huge Collection Scanner patch

Amaroks Collection Scanner, which is the part that reads your music tags, was one of the oldest pieces of code that we still had in Amarok. It stemmed from the very early days of something like Amarok 0.8 (jurassic!). While the code was later on greatly improved by Jeff Mitchell, the system started to show its age, and it was very hard to get an overview over what had become a rather complex part. Ralf Engels has now rewritten the scanning system entirely. While we are currently still ironing out some bugs, the new system should be even faster and easier to maintain.

Visual improvements for the Current Track applet by Rick

The Current Track applet was neglected for a while. It now is cool and useful even when you arent playing music, accurately listing the last 6 or so tracks played. And doesnt it look great while Amarok is rockin? Of course you can still easily rate your tracks there, but also love them in Last.fm, save your position in a long piece or podcast, and new: edit track details, such as tags, lyrics, labels, and such.

Also new to the current track applet are the Show In Media Sources icons, which allow you to add filters to the media sources browser using the current tracks album, artist, composer and genre if available. These are not shown by default, but they can be enabled in the applets configuration dialog - accessible by right-clicking somewhere in the applet.

Colored debugging output by Rick and Kevin

You might not notice this unless you run Amarok from the console. It really is interesting to see the work that Amarok is doing to keep your music humming, though! So sometimes start up a console, and type in the command amarok -d or amarok --debug and see the output just scroll past your unbelieving eyes! Someday you might have trouble (yes, it happens occasionally) and well ask on the list or in IRC to run Amarok this way, and show us the output. Youll already know how to do this, when you are not stressed out.

New Guitar Tabs applet

We have a new applet that shows you the guitar tabs in the Context View. Thank you to Rainer Sigle for this nice applet for guitar enthusiasts.

Ralfs refactoring that improved stability

Another patch from Ralf improves Amaroks overall stability. While it already is a rather stable application (I personally cannot remember the last time it crashed on me), this patch should improve some corner cases where things could go wrong.

Improvements in the Lyrics Applet

In the past, you possibly lost your edits if you were editing lyrics and the song ended. Now you are prompted to save your edits as the track changes. Remember, you can always right-click on a track and Edit Track Details > Lyrics. Your computer doesnt even need to be online to do this type of editing.

Bugs and Wishes

Over all, we closed 80 bugs and implemented 2 wishes:22 were bugfixes, 2 downstream bugs, 1 upstream bug and 34 were marked as duplicate.

Last not Least

Please remember that we are still running our annual fundraiser Roktober! The Amarok team will be happy about every donation you make, and you will be added to a special edition of our About Amarok dialog!

Last Week in Amarok

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:54:34 +0000

This new series of articles was inspired by Boudewijn Rempt's great "Last Week in Krita". Thank you Boud, for giving us the idea

Please enjoy an overview of current Amarok development. Things are moving at a crazy fast speed currently, and Amarok 2.4 is going to rock hard, I can promise you that. Here is what we did last week:

We launched our annual Roktober fundraiser

Each donor who agrees will have a Thank you entry in the Amarok about dialog, optionally with social networking features provided by openDesktop.org for those who have an account!

Rick's mega patch, fixing most Applet issues

Amarok developer Rick W. Chen committed a mega patch, consisting of no less than 110 separate commits! What he did is simple to describe, but hard to do: He fixed almost all bugs and various issues in Amaroks Plasma applets (those applets in the middle part of Amarok). Additionally, he made many small improvements to the applets, such as:

Improved layout of the Wikipedia applet, and added a nice progress bar that shows how far the page has loaded.

Better layouts for the VideoClip, Labels, and Album applets.

Much less memory consumption.

Performance improvements.

All applets now work with proxy servers.

The main features (the main motivation for context view changes for me) were supporting Wikipedia locales and upcoming events for specific venues.

MusicBrainz auto-tagging from Sergey

This is a killer feature, as far as I am concerned. Like most developers, I am very, very lazy. To be honest, I have not tagged an album in my life. This feature changes all that. You click one button, and everything you want is tagged correctly. This is awesome.

MusicBrainz tagging in action

New option for hiding the menu bar

This has been a much requested feature for a long time. And since we care about usability a lot, Amarok is going to explain to you how to disable this feature before you activate it.

Font size of On-Screen-Display is now configurable

The user can now control the font size of the text in the OSD. Rather than setting the absolute point size, as was the case in Amarok 1.4, the user can specify the size in a relative percent-of-normal size. For example, setting the size to 115% makes the OSD font a bit larger than the normal screen font. Why the change from absolute to relative sizes? It lets Amarok look better on a wide range of devices, from small mobile or netbook screens, to HTPCs.

Playdar Collection by Andy Coder (GSoC project)

Amarok will now render this menu readable with all color schemes

Bugs and Wishes

Over all, we closed 98 bugs and implemented 6 wishes: 29 were bugfixes, 3 downstream bugs, 4 upstream bugs and 62 were marked as duplicate.

Thank you to all Amarok developers who have contributed to this article

Podcast Interview with an Amarok Developer (me)

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:24:06 +0000

Image copyright by Ian Hayhurst

A few days ago, Paul Adams and Guillermo Amaral recorded a pretty nice Podcast interview with me. We were talking about some pretty interesting things (secrets will be revealed!), and about some pretty silly things (ROFLing will be achieved!). At any rate, we had a blast recording this, and I recommend to check it out.

You'll find the Podcast for download here:

KDE and the Masters of the Universe: Amarok founder Mark Kretschmann

PS:
Of course you could also use Amarok's Podcast feature to subscribe to the feed

Nokia N900 - The best smartphone?

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:10:39 +0000

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer:

I have been very lucky recently. At the fantastic OVI and KDE Sprint, kindly hosted at the Nokia office in Munich, I was given a N900. First of all I would like to say "Thank you!" to Nokia, for doing that. It's a great gift, and I promise to put it to good use (MeeGo port of Amarok...)

I had already heard great things about this device. As a former owner of a Nokia N810, which was nifty, but "not quite there", I was very excited to find out if the N900 got it right. And hell yeah, did they get it right this time. This is the device that every geek has been dreaming of: A full Debian computer that fits in the pocket of your jeans, including a phone. Usability is excellent (far better than e.g. of the N97 Mini, which uses S60). I will admit that this device is probably more suitable for geeks, than for example for my daddy. It's a bit too "computer'ish" for the average non-technical person.

However, I find it easy to use. And features... well. There isn't anything that the N900 cannot do. Every day I'm discovering some new amazing feature. It has: A full Debian OS, with all the apps that you would use on a desktop too, e.g. X-Chat, ScummVM, and even an X terminal. Which brings us to another important point: It runs X11. What other phone does it? None that I know of. The big advantage is that all your favorite Linux apps will run just perfectly, without much of a porting effort.

Hardware wise, this is just the best of the best: The OMAP 3 CPU (well, SoC really) is pretty fast, the camera is neat (although the image noise level is a bit too high for my taste). It has Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi, a real keyboard (big advantage!), pretty decent battery life, and great sounding speakers (they sound far better than my laptop does), and really good in-ear canal headphones, that can be used as a headset too. Ah yes, it also has an FM radio receiver, which I haven't used so far. The display is really good, excellent viewing angle, great contrast. In fact it's so good that watching movies is a pleasure with the device. I watched "Avatar - The Last Airbender" in bed the other day. Btw, that movie is far better than people like to say

So, to sum it up, for a geek, there isn't a better phone currently than the N900. This is the device you want, believe me that. Well, there is one better device, which is the N900+1, but it's not yet released. I will probably buy it on day one, because thinking about it alone it already gives me a nerdgasm.

Amarok Celebrates "Roktober" Fundraiser

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 10:27:29 +0000

Here it comes: October in all of its glory! For some, this is a time of falling leaves. For others, it is a time of warm sunbeams. Either way, we are once again nearing the years end and are ready to sum up our efforts, while we continue to develop and Rok the World!

In the last twelve months, we have made more than 4000 commits, closed over 4000 bugs, released 6 new versions of Amarok, wrote a Quick Start Guide to Amarok, attended over 10 conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland. All of this, thanks to your donations!

Some of the highlights we worked on in Amarok itself:

new Automatic Playlist Generator

improved cover fetching

new applets for the Context View (Upcoming Events, Similar Artists, Videos...)

moodbar support

better desktop integration (including KNotify support)

better podcast handling

queue support

custom label support

a huge number of improvements to existing features!

For Amarok 2.4 (planned for early 2011) and upcoming releases we have planned:

transcoding, so you can transfer files to your media device in the right format

UPnP support

Playdar integration

spectrum analyzer

completing the Amarok handbook

many more exciting features and improvements!

You might have noticed that our development pace has quickened! In order to continue working on Amarok at such speed, we call on your help. Costs such as server maintenance and travelling expenses are too much for our tiny budgets to handle. Remember, everything we do, we do for free! And this is where you come in!

This years Roktober, our annual fundraiser, has a goal of 5000 Euros. Reaching this goal will help us handle this next exciting year smoothly. The funds will help us develop more powerful features in Amarok, pay for our servers, and send team members to conferences; we may even run a developer sprint or two!

As a sign of our appreciation for your support we will add donors agreeing to it to a special section in Amaroks About Dialog. Your name will then appear in each version of Amarok that gets released in the next 12 months.

So join us, and throw in your share to Rok the World!

Qt Dev Days 2010 - And OVI Sprint

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:58:31 +0000

I will be attending the Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich. As I hear, the number of attending KDE developers is especially high this year, so I'm really looking forward to meeting many of you.

Before the event there will be a developer sprint hosted at the Nokia office in Munich. This will be the first time I'll visit the Munich office (I've had the chance to visit the Berlin team a while ago), and I'm sure we will make good use of our time and do some cool things with MeeGo and Qt hacking.

So, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming week. It will be interesting to learn new things, and at the same time it'll be fun to meet old friends, and to make new ones.

Serenity in Space and Office

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:35:44 +0000

Hyperion, Serenity, and the Model M

The four computers in our household are named: Hyperion, Endymion, Serenity, and Shrike. Can you tell that we are big SciFi nerds?

What you're seeing above is a photo of my work place (home-office, which rocks in so many ways!). Hyperion and Serenity are compiling Amarok with 12 compile jobs, using Icecream.

What I really wanted to write about is Serenity, my new ThinkPad X201 lappy, because some of you have asked me for a little review. Before I start I would like to say one thing about the keyboard, which is really dear to me: This is actually a vintage IBM Model M, from 1985. The Model M is often referred to as "the best keyboard in the world". Simply put, that's no lie. If you get the chance to lay your hands on one, never (ever!) give it away. Typing was yesterday, Model M is flying.

ThinkPad X201

This is the configuration I got:

Intel Core i7-620M Processor (2.66GHz, 4MB L3, 1066MHz FSB)

360GB HDD, which I exchanged for a Intel X25-M G2 SSD, 160GB (more on that later)

One 6 cell Li-Ion Battery, and one 9-cell (up to 11 hours running time)

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 WiFi

UltraBase docking station

Price was about 2,000 USD for the ThinkPad, and an extra 350 USD for the SSD. Was it worth it? Totally. It's a sweet machine. What I like about it:

It's fast, extremely quiet (even under full load you hardly hear fan noise), and very small. In fact I like to think, the X201 manages to pack the power of a "real" laptop into almost Netbook format - quite impressive. The SSD was something of a personal dream of mine. It's the first I got, and I must say it's totally worth it. Boot times of about 2 seconds, instant application start times, and especially no more freaking harddisk noise. You often hear the argument "Yeah that's cool, but HDDs are still bigger!" That might be so, but think about the real use of an SSD: 160GB is more than enough for putting your whole system data on it, plus some personal data and such. This is what needs frequent access, so it really matters to have the speed. All the rest, the rarely accessed data like movies you watch once in a blue moon, you simply put that on a dirt cheap external USB HDD. Problem solved.

So, yeah, overall the X201 is really fancy. There are a few things I dislike about it. One of them is the rather poor performance of the Intel GMA HD graphics (which is actually integrated in the CPU). Desktop usage with up to two displays is fine, but forget about anything fancy like gaming. I'm suspecting that the Linux drivers play a rather huge part in this issue. Something else that annoys me is the bad quality of the docking station's audio jack, which produces a lot of hissing noises due to bad shielding. However, the audio jack on the lappy itself is just fine.

Verdict: Buy. (and get a Model M - the most beautiful model there is)

KDE and Amarok rock FrOSCamp 2010

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:37:39 +0000

Left to right: Edward Toroshchin, Mark Kretschmann, Myriam Schweingruber

A new Free Software event is born: FrOSCamp. The location is nothing less than the renowned ETH Zurich university, in the beautiful city of Zurich, Switzerland

KDE of course could not miss out on the chance of partaking in the first out of a (probably) long series of successful FrOSCamp events. Thomas Thym, Myriam Schweingruber, and myself (Mark Kretschmann) organized a joint KDE / Amarok booth. On the second day, Amarok hacker Edward "Hades" Toroshchin joined us at the booth as well.

Thomas Thym gave a great talk about "The 7 principles of successful open source communities". Check it out, it's seriously interesting (and I don't say that lightly).

Check out more photos of the event here. And don't miss out on joining us next year! You can talk to the organizers in #froscamp on irc.freenode.net. Also, the wiki page contains heaps of useful information.

The Jukebox that almost was Amarok

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:00:21 +0000

The image you're seeing above is showing the Wurlitzer Lyra, an innovative digital jukebox by the Wurlitzer company (a subsidiary of Gibson Guitar Corporation), which has a long history of building famous jukeboxes. The Lyra however is their first all-digital product, marking the advent of a new era.

I wouldn't have blogged about this product if I didn't have a special relationship with it. As it happens, members of the Amarok team were in fact part of the original team of engineers that designed the Lyra. Originally the jukebox was supposed to run a modified version of Amarok, which some of us worked on for several months, including a meeting with the CEO of Gibson Guitar himself, which I had written about earlier.

Although the final product did not end up using Amarok, I'm still happy about the fact that it did not get shelved, but that it was turned into a real device that can actually be bought. Also I'm pretty sure that the Lyra will generate a rather decent sound, which I could witness as I had been partaking in some of the hardware tests. Gibson stands for quality, and they wouldn't have used crappy speakers in their gear.

PS:
As for why the Lyra does not use Amarok now, there are several reasons: For one, the timing was simply bad, as Amarok back then was at version 2.0.1, and it simply did not have the maturity we required for such a use case. Additionally, and for this I blame Gibson, they tried to get away with development on the cheap, and they did not allocate sufficient resources for our development team. Software development is expensive. There is no way around this, if you want quality.

We're back, baby!

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:56:36 +0000

After a summer hiatus with lots of... well, not Amarok hacking... we are back with a fresh release. I won't list all of the changes here in my blog, as you might as well head over to the official release notes.

I will however say that our team now seems to be beaming with a newly found spirit of excitement. We all had to reload our batteries a bit, I guess. If you have ever toyed with the idea of contributing to Amarok, now is the perfect time to do so! We are now starting to work on the "next big version" (likely to become 2.4), and we have an influx of new developers, promoters, handbook writers, and all that makes up a team of this size.

We are also happy to welcome again two teams of students working on Amarok as university projects, one team from France, and one from Germany. Now is the time to introduce new features, and test out all of the wild ideas that you might have for Amarok. Git makes it possible to develop your very own branch of Amarok, and when you feel it's done, you can request a merge into the main development line. Dive in now!

Rapid Progress in KDE Multimedia

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:42:44 +0000

Lately we have made some really nice progress on the Multimedia front, and I thought it would be nice to keep our users (and other developers) a bit up-to-date with all the latest buzz. First of all, I'm happy to announce that we have finally been able to make Phonon-VLC usable and stable. Mostly we have to thank Ben Cooksley for that, who invested many hours in doing some rather complicated detective work for making this work nicely. But now we are there, and most features are working, minus some things like Equalizer support (but we'll get there too).

Let me sum up why exactly this new Phonon backend is so important to us:

Phonon-VLC is fully cross-platform, so we don't need special backends for Windows and Mac any more

It's already far more stable than most other existing Phonon backends

We can now focus on creating one good backend, instead of having 10 more or less broken ones

It simply sounds awesome. I'm not sure why that is, but the sound quality is notably better than with xine

It is currently a bit complicated to build this backend, as it needs libVLC 1.1, which is not yet packaged by most distros. However, we plan to write a tutorial for building it, and we're also happy to help out with questions in the #phonon IRC channel. Give it a try

In other news, Amarok is making rapid progress. Only a few weeks ago we have released Amarok 2.3.0, but thanks to our extremely short release cycle (I had earlier written about this system in this article), our current ChangeLog for 2.3.1 is already rather promising. Not only will 2.3.1 come with many bug fixes and some polishing, but we'll even introduce a number of exciting new features. I'd like to give you a preview of two new features here:

CoverBling

Similar Artists

KDE at OpenExpo 2010

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 08:33:39 +0000

Left to right: Heike, Klaas, Myriam, Mark

On Wednesday and Thursday a delegation from KDE represented our Kool Desktop Environment at OpenExpo in Berne, Switzerland. Unfortunately I couldn't make it on Wednesday, so that Heike, Klaas, and Myriam were rather busy handling the booth (their voices started to sound rather strained). But yesterday I found some time and could help out a bit.

Klaas Freitag is working for Novell (openSUSE team), and in his spare time he and his wife Heike create a very promising application for businesses, called Kraft. Myriam Schweingruber is from KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu/FSFE (is there anything she doesn't do?), and myself of course I'm from Amarok and KDE.

The event itself generated mixed feelings due the stronger commercial orientation than usual, resulting in less space for Free Software, while the business side (called Topsoft) was more emphasized this time. However, this was not the fault of the organizers (the OpenExpo team is doing a great job). We will see how things are going to work out with this in the future. The Free Software community is hoping that the event could regain the great atmosphere of the past years, which generally used to be very well received.

After the event we went out with Heike and Klaas to the city of Berne, which has a very charming architecture and some great pubs. We ended up having beers in my favorite place, which happened to play videos of Pink Floyd and U2 concerts, and that was just the perfect ending for this day.

Many thanks to Heike and Klaas for attending OpenExpo, it was really nice to meet them!

Finding something else to do: Me too

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:19:38 +0000

Image by Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester

As I am finding myself in a similar situation as my fellow Amarok developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen is currently in, I figured that doing something similar as Nikolaj did could make sense.

To sum it up, I have been working as a software consultant for quite a while. Having my own small company (Kretschmann Software Consulting - KSC), I have mostly worked as an independent contractor doing software engineering. Recently I have worked for Gibson Guitar Corporation, and more recently for Collabora Ltd. In my free time I work on Amarok, a Free Software music player.

I am specialized in C++ development with Qt, and I have been an active member of the KDE community for a long time. Further on, my special areas of interest include Software Quality (finding and fixing complicated bugs), GUI Design and Usability, and Multimedia.

If you are a company that would like to work with me, please contact me at kretschmann@kde.org for getting my full CV.

Thanks

Amarok 2.3!

nospam@example.com (Mark Kretschmann) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:49:16 +0000

Image by Roozbeh Shafiee

Dear Community,

you might have heard it already elsewhere, but I thought it would be a nice touch if I wrote a short article as well. The good news:

Fresh Release: Amarok 2.3 'Clear Light'

We are rather happy with this release, and I think we were able to deliver a nicely rounded start of the new Amarok 2.3 series. As always, you can expect new releases in this series fairly rapidly, as we plan to keep our "roughly 6 weeks" release cycle.

I hope you enjoy this release, have fun

Amarok Blog - markey

KDE - Amarok - Birthday Party in Ulm

KDE 4.7 Release Party @ Ulm

Fear and Loathing in Ulm

Technological Singularity - We're heading right into it

About Friendship

Amarok Insider - Issue 16

Amarok Insider - Issue 16

Amarok - The Career and Friendship Maker

Last Week in Amarok

Code-In a Big Success for Documentation

Dealing with Regressions and Crashes

Bugs and Wishes

KDE, Pizza, and the meaning of Luv

What I want to write about today is Pizza. Nom nom Pizza. We all love Pizza, right?

Last Week in Amarok

New Features

Bug Fixes

New Incremental Podcast Directory

Bugs and Wishes

Related projects

Go go, Gadgetto Markey!

ADHD - Gift or Disease?

Last Week in Amarok

Ralfs huge Collection Scanner patch

Visual improvements for the Current Track applet by Rick

Colored debugging output by Rick and Kevin

New Guitar Tabs applet

Ralfs refactoring that improved stability

Improvements in the Lyrics Applet

Bugs and Wishes

Last not Least

Last Week in Amarok

We launched our annual Roktober fundraiser

Rick's mega patch, fixing most Applet issues

MusicBrainz auto-tagging from Sergey

New option for hiding the menu bar

Font size of On-Screen-Display is now configurable

Playdar Collection by Andy Coder (GSoC project)

Amarok will now render this menu readable with all color schemes

Bugs and Wishes

Podcast Interview with an Amarok Developer (me)

KDE and the Masters of the Universe: Amarok founder Mark Kretschmann

Nokia N900 - The best smartphone?

Amarok Celebrates "Roktober" Fundraiser

Qt Dev Days 2010 - And OVI Sprint

Serenity in Space and Office

KDE and Amarok rock FrOSCamp 2010

The Jukebox that almost was Amarok

We're back, baby!

Rapid Progress in KDE Multimedia

CoverBling

Similar Artists

KDE at OpenExpo 2010

Finding something else to do: Me too

Amarok 2.3!

Fresh Release: Amarok 2.3 'Clear Light'

Ralfs huge Collection Scanner patch

Ralfs refactoring that improved stability