Re: [tlug] Amarok 2 sucks

["David J Iannucci" <jlinux@example.com>]

On Thu, 28 May 2009 "Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> > Amarok 1.4 is sweet music listening goodness, so much so that it
> > makes you wonder why they went so wrong with version 2.0.
>
> I think it is another case of developers writing code that challenged
> them, that they considered elegant, without caring one whit for the
> user experience for the set of users that was not them. :)

A while ago when I started using Amarok, I couldn't figure out how to
get a small player window on my screen, because I like that (I used to
use XMMS, but it was removed from Gentoo's portage so I had to find
something else, otherwise I'd probably still be with XMMS).

Eventually I figured it out, but it was a kinda sucky display, so I went
on their forums to see what was being said about improving it. It seemed
the developers cared not one whit for this player window, had put it in
under pressure or as an afterthought, and really thought of it as
useless and unneeded, because all functionality was available through
the tray icon or keyboard.  And I believe they said it would be gone
from 2.0 (which I haven't tried, and have carefully masked all KDE
software with a version >=4.0 from my machine...)

But I, and many other ex-MMS-ers *like* to have that slick-looking
little window that tells us what's playing without having to do
*anything*, to see the little analyzer bounce around, and to have
convenient buttons to play/pause/etc without having RSI-inducing
keyboard shortcuts to remember.

Sorry for the diatribe... this was really just to back up Josh's point
about the developers :-)  And apparently Amarok and KDE provide
appropriate hooks to allow one to write one's own player window
app(let?) without too much(?) trouble, so maybe I'll try that some
day in my copious free time.  Sigh.

Dave