Ian Monroe, Model/View Implementation and Usability Improvements for the Playlist

Amarok 2.0 is going to provide users with a new interface - one which is more refined, intelligent and with a greater emphasis on usability. Ian's job was to use the superior Qt 4 model-view architecture to create an effective and efficient playlist for listening. As a second time Summer of Code student, Ian got straight to work on his project. Conventional playlists have always been displayed as a typical column based list view, with a dense amount of information in a rather unreadable format. Ian's interpretation involves a customisable view for the display of playlist items, allowing for more complex displays of track information. For example, displaying album artwork for a track or groupings on an album basis could be possible. A little more under-the-hood, Ian focused on optimising the playlist to be capable of efficiently handling many thousands of tracks in the playlist. This is something which was not possible in Amarok 1.x due to technical constraints.

Leo Franchi, Web Services Integration

The Amarok project has always striven to provide users with the best experience when playing music, allowing them to rediscover their music. Leo was a first time Summer of Coder and his project was to integrate various web related projects into Amarok. Originally, ideas included upcoming concerts, artist trivia knowledge and more - however, it soon became clear that there were much larger obstacles in achieving this aim. There was simply no adequate place to display the information. Thus, the Context View was born, a prettier, more powerful upgrade to the Context browser seen in the Amarok 1 releases. Rightfully so, Leo decided that the Context View was more central to the features of Amarok 2, and proceeded to import the KDE 4 Plasma workspace as the backend of the new Context framework. After weeks of hard work, there is a wonderful vector graphics based Context View which shows context sensitive information relating the the currently playing song. In line with KDE 4's Plasma, custom applets can be created as plug-ins to display virtually any information (eg, guitar tables). There are a few applets already implemented, such as track information and lyrics fetching.

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