Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Amarok again.

Looking at it again, 2.1.1 seems somewhat better than 2.1 (a huge, massive, ground breaking improvement: you can disable context thats in the middle and gets in the way of drag)

[edit: installed 2.1.1 . How the fuck do I actually disable that damned panel and get 1 splitter here? A shame, such huge disappointment, I thought I was wrong in my rant. Paranoya: RIAA probably would love that context thing. ISP stores logs for a while and it can potentially be useful as evidence in a court case if they can get logs from isp. Not that I personally care but anyway. Pirates better watch out.]

Upcoming amarok 2.2 (with dockable dialogs, if those will work) look kind of promising on the video, even though the way features are listed (docking just last, not even 'last but not least') doesn't look terribly great if it is any indicator of views on usability or priorities.

What made 2.1 particularly annoying (and prompted lot of ranting everywhere, myself included) is that in case of Mandriva (and, I heard, Ubuntu), after routine update we just find 1.4.10 removed without any straightforward way to revert. I'd blame packagers if it was 'Amarok 2.0.2' or 'Amarok2 0.1' or something else labelled unstable - but as it is labelled stable, it is entirely reasonable for a distribution to have it default.
On Mandriva in particular, you need to get 1.4.10 from 2009.0 repository - you are not supposed to do this (and it may fail to work for people whom did install 2009.1 afresh. 2009.0 RPMs are not supposed to be used on 2009.1 install. It's a luck when that works).

All the problem stems from how "rewrite" retained the name but entirely lost what the name used to stand for. It is not "excellent player 2.1", it's "average player 0.1", and pretty much nobody wants to overwrite "excellent player 1.4" with "average player 0.1".

Link, see comments for how Ubuntu users generally feel about amarok 2

6 comments:

  1. "installed 2.1.1 . How the fuck do I actually disable that damned panel and get 1 splitter here?"

    There really should be an option for this in the config dialog called "Hide Context View" IIRC. if not then its either a bug or you have 2.1.0 and not 2.1.1

    "even though the way features are listed (docking just last, not even 'last but not least') doesn't look terribly great if it is any indicator of views on usability or priorities."

    I already replied to this point when you brought it up in a comment on my blog:

    The reason I put those last is simply that I already had a previous blog post and video (and a follow up blog post) dedicated solely to this feature (my blog with the most comments, ever).

    http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1018-From-the-Post-2.1.0-Git-Vaults,-Part-3-Something-really-far-out.html

    and

    http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1022-Amarok-Dockwidgets-The-Followup.html

    As such I did not feel the need to focus on this in this blog post as there were other features that had so far not been shown off yet.

    So in essense you are reading _way_ too much into the ordering of the items in that blog post!

    Ps. ARRRRG! why doesn't arrow keys work in the edit box on thhis blog!?

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  2. http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1018-From-the-Post-2.1.0-Git-Vaults,-Part-3-Something-really-far-out.html
    "It is currently not planned for inclusion in any version of Amarok."
    0_0
    I actually thought you guys either planned that from start (even if at low priority) or just listened to all the feedback how layout sucks, and decided to let users customize the layout, as a regular planned feature, even if low priority. I'm rather surprised that you were surprised at the user's response.

    I very much appreciate that you did experiment with docking (I suppose that is a relatively small change to Amarok), looking at user's feedback that's certainly a step in right direction.

    "http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1022-Amarok-Dockwidgets-The-Followup.html"
    Interesting. So what decision did you want to base on the user's images?

    arrow keys: dunno, work for me (firefox), but yea, Blogger pretty much sucks there I agree.

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  3. "It is currently not planned for inclusion in any version of Amarok."

    At the time I wrote that blog post, the feature existed only in my private git branch and we had not yet discussed the ramifications of including it (and there are still issues arising from this that we need to take care of) so yes, it will be in Amarok 2.2 (its in trunk already), but at the time of that post it had not yet been decided. Hence it was not actually planned for inclusion.

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  4. My point is that this was not a planned feature before May 19 2009 .
    Which well deserves 0_0 smiley.
    It is really great that you did make experimental version and did show it off, good job and so on. But really, it would be better if Amarok team in general could somewhat predict what users want. It's not so hard.

    I see a huge contrast with how SpringLobby (an open source project I'm involved in) implemented docking. We knew users would want docking in advance, we realized that docking manager is superior to hardcoded layout. So we made a branch, got it working nicely, and released it.

    SpringLobby has significantly smaller user base and fewer developers (while having roughly similar project complexity). IMO, the software quality for any project peaks at some number of developers and then goes down as number of contributors increases; the peak happens at higher number of contributors for more fundamentally complex software like firefox, of course, so complex software does pretty much always benefit from having more developers, whereas software that is not fundamentally complicated not always.

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  5. I.e. I mean that not all projects scale to larger number of developers. Art in general and good user interface design in particular IMO does not scale at all; for an analogy, imagine 100 composers working on same music piece or 100 painters working on one painting... even if they all are geniuses, results may very well suck.

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  6. Привет!

    Это Линар Феткулов из Игромании, игровой журналист =)

    Мы хотим написать о Полиномиал -- Вы бы не хотели поделиться информацией?
    Рассказать о проекте, предоставить графические материалы (скриы и тп)?

    Жду ответа!

    fetcoolov@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete