Bangarang

I’ve come across this program that tries to be not only a media player (we have enough of that), but also a media manager. It’s called Bangarang, which supposedly means noise. It uses Phonon for playback and, the interesting part, Nepomuk for organizing, rating and all that. The just released version 1.0, so I gave it a try today. The app is great, however doing anything more that just find all your movies or music is somewhat tedius because of the UI. Even the one source file, responsible for the interface, has a comment to simplify. I’ll try to break up the UI into separate packages to it’s easier to manage, plus there are a few features I’d like a lot, particularly auto-guessing Season and Episode numbers from filenames. That shouldn’t be too hard, just a button someplace, a few regular expressions, and we’re set.

KDE SC 4.4 Beta

I one again compiled KDE Software Compilation from trunk. The team had high promises and they kept them. Most of the new features are mentioned on http://www.kde.org.

As a fan of Semantic desktop, I am very happy to see the Virtuoso Nepomuk backend fully functional, and continued porting of PIM applications to Akonadi. I usually keep my programming files neatly organized, but school stuff sometimes get copied all around. I installed it only today and on my secondary installation (Ubuntu), so I suppose that’ll be used more when KDE SC 4.4 is released. I don’t have many files in the kde-devel account.

I’m also glad to see the new apps, Blogilo (from which I’m writing right now) and Cantor (I hate Mathematica with a passion, and Sage looks ugly in the browser). The new checkboard-like theme (I don’t know if it’s going to be the default in 4.4, I hope not) looks nice, but is very disturbing in combination with the transparent plasmoids. I hope they change that for something more like 4.3’s default Air.

I haven’t gotten around to test the PIM apps, especially the new GoogleCalendar-enabled KAdressBook. I’ll see how that goes.

Last but not least, the notification system still keeps crashing whenever a notification should be posted. I heard that has something to do with memory allocation on x64 or something, but that should have been fixed by now. Maybe it’s something specific to my system.

The latest KDevelop trunk won’t compile, so using the latest Qt features in my own programs will wait for a couple of days. Maybe I’ll just install the latest beta, because I’m very interested in the proclaimed performance gains in QGraphicsView. Resizing KChess, as well as any other KDE game, is very slow on my laptop with intel drivers.