giovedì 8 luglio 2010

Akademy 2010

Akademy 2010 was an awesome success! I really enjoyed the time here and had really no time to blog anything.
I'm currently staying at the amazing Demola building here where hackers can just do whatever they want. I've just committed a bunch of stuff into PMC and I'm going to give a brief overview of what i did.

Way more elegant with...

...blurred reflections


I've just added a bit of blur and opacity adjustment to the reflections and they now just look quite better (imo). Sane use of caching makes everything still smooth and slowdowns-free and therefore enjoyable.


...initial gestures implementation

As already mentioned in my talk at Akademy PMC is going to support gestures. This won't only allow common gestures on multitouch input devices but, most importantly, will ease the integration of different input devices. As I like to mention often, you'll be able to comfortably lie on your sofa and browse through your media files directly via your wiimote.


...nepomuk integration

Nepomuk integration is getting more and more attention and you just have your media files already there with no need for navigation or such. Soon there'll be the chance to group your media files by author, date, size etc...


...video previws

A kind of a stupid implementation mistake avoided video previews to be there in the browser applet. Now those are just there:



...plain video widget

Phonon::VideoWidget doesn't quite behave well if embedded in a QGraphicsProxyWidget. At least you can notice weird video painting if fullscreen. This has been solved as now we're making use of the plain video widget rather than the embedded one. A better solution will soon involve KWin and I'm looking forward to writing a KWin plugin possibly with near-to-0 pokes to Martin which was really really friendly in showing me the advantages of it.


...qml goodies

Qml is also takin' is way to PMC and you can already find some goodies under the declarative folder of your beloved MediaCenterComponents checkout.
It's planned to have a view for the media browser written in qml.


...JS dataengines for web media content fetching

The GSoC project Hayri is working on is going pretty good in my opinion and we'll soon have a working codebase to fetch media contents from the web and directly make them available through the browsing applet. You won't even recognize what's on your pc and what's on the web, just hit play and enjoy.


Side note for packagers

There'll be soon a tech preview for PMC in order to show the progresses we reached so far but, before then, please don't package anything from the PMC codebase as it'd lead to a bad user experience. 


Thanks
I'd like to thank the whole Akademy team who made it possible as it appears to be one of the best organized Akademys so far! Everything went just smooth and I think we all enjoyed the time here.

Cheers everybody

12 commenti:

  1. For this amazing stuff I recomend to use everywhere monochromatic icons. :) And the background doesn't fit right. Is it changable? What about plasma wallpapers plugins there so we can have something animated :D Yes, people have fast computers nova days :)

    RispondiElimina
  2. Great stuff!

    That blurred reflection looks amazing, what are the chances of getting that elsewhere in KDE (like folderview, dolphin, or gwenview)?

    RispondiElimina
  3. Small suggestion: wouldn't it look better if the icons bottoms were all aligned?

    At the moment the icons that have a wider aspect ratio look like they are set further away because of the reflection. Especially noticeable in the video preview image with the top centre video looking to be set well back.

    RispondiElimina
  4. Can you clarify if TV recording will be a part of PMC so I could replace my MythTv installation?

    RispondiElimina
  5. Wow, you really are cranking it up. Private life is currently causing my programming time to tend to zero. I hope I can join PMC again soon, there is still a patch from me in reviewboard and I want to get that in :-)

    RispondiElimina
  6. @Tomasz Dudzik: Monochromatic icons is an interesting matter; i was already thinkin' about that and I'll talk about that to other developers and see if it is doable. The wallpaper is just a plasma wallpaper so it can just be changed at will :)

    @Anonimo: sure, icons should be aligned, it's just something should do it in the code :p If you'd like to do it yourself a patch is appreciated! :)

    @DeKay: TV recording is highly intended to be there, it's just we're not working on it currently.

    @binarylooks: I didn't forget about the patch, just need to have time to review it :p. Anyway I'm really looking forward to having you back on PMC :) Take your time of course!

    RispondiElimina
  7. The video previews look a little bit naked. Small Left & right film strips would look better. I think ;-)

    RispondiElimina
  8. Awesome progress, Alessandro. I would've loved to spend a little bit of time to talk about all that, but given your above blog, there's actually very little I've got to add, other than that I think the direction you and the other PMC people are taking looks very promising

    RispondiElimina
  9. @Alessandro Diaferia: Cool :) I think, i'll try this today evening. Is it in KDE's SVN or somewhere in GIT? :)

    RispondiElimina
  10. @sebas: Thank you very much!! I'm really happy you like it! I'll soon ping you on irc to hear some of your suggestions :) Thanks again!

    @Tomasz Dudzik: Hey, it is on KDE svn playground/base/plasma/MediaCenterComponents
    Be aware that huge development is going on so many things might be broken :p

    RispondiElimina