Hello!
My name is Teo Mrnjavac and some of you might know me from my previous work on Amarok as a Summer of KDE student last year. Back then I implemented an interface for defining layouts by drag’n'dropping, which has been used for extracting tags, organizing the collection, defining playlist item layouts and also in Kopete for configuring contact list items as I’ve heard.
This year my Google Summer of Code proposal has been accepted and with the help of my mentor Nikolaj Hald Nielsen I’m embarking on a mission to make Amarok’s playlist the awesomest playlist ever.
The full title of the project as submitted is “Finish the playlist: multilevel playlist sorting with configuration interface”, which means that I’ll mostly be working on implementing multilevel sorting, plus some other related fixes.
The current implementation of the playlist view in Amarok has become much more configurable recently, allowing the user to customize the format of each item by dragging around tokens that represent the fields of the track’s metadata. However, there’s still no way to sort these items according to the content of the fields, forcing the user to move around the items manually to achieve the desired effect. This can be tedious and impractical even on small playlists.
A playlist is a list, and a user expects a list to be sortable. In this case, simple single level sorting just wouldn’t suffice: Amarok’s playlist is much more than a bunch of lines of text.
To reach feature-completeness with the Amarok 1.4 playlist, and to conquer an important milestone on Amarok’s road to eternal awesomeness, a nifty interface is needed to sort the tracks.
So during this GSoC season I plan to deliver multilevel sorting for the playlist, an interface to configure it and configurable grouping.
If all this was TL;DR (it would probably be for me), here’s a nice mockup of a possible multilevel sorting interface that shows off my mad Kolourpaint skills. Notice the thin multilevel sorting bar under the playlist search bar. It’s simple as that, the user would click the “+” to add the next sorting level through a menu.
At the end of my GSoC work the playlist would be considered feature complete.
Last year I was a very lazy blogger and now I would like to change that so I guess you can expect regular progress reports. I have been informed that failure to comply with the blogging requirements about my work this year will result in me feeling the Amarok community manager’s Long Pointy Stick Of Doooooooooooooooooooom (TM).
Cheers!