Preparing Breakfast (or what’s up in bangarang:master)

Warning: this is a screenshot-laden post.  Nobody likes those kind of posts about a project in development so feel free to ignore what follows… 🙂

It’s been roughly two months since the last release of Bangarang, so I thought I share a little of what’s been happening for the 2.0 (Breakfast) release.  Just to be clear, we’re still probably at least a couple months away from even an alpha release, so anything described here exists in a so-seriously-early-I-can’t-even-call-it-pre-alpha state.

One of the focal points for this next release is putting information in front of the user that helps them make decisions quickly.  It’s generically identified as “Media semantics” on the target feature list and most of the underlying framework is now in place to start using throughout the app.  It took some time to work out but it is starting to take shape.  The idea is to take information accumulated by users in the normal course of enjoying their media and use that to provide context-relevant info that should hopefully help the user make decisions.  The screenshots clippings below show the first cut at how this’ll look and work:

The info view from the 1.0 version has been transformed into the sidebar on the right (shown or hidden with the familiar Info icon).  The idea is for the information in this sidebar to reflect contextual information for whatever is currently being viewed/selected in the main media list view.  So when the list of artists are being shown it shows contextual information about all artists.  When an artist is selected it shows information about that artist – supplemented by some info from dbpedia – and so on…

Information about a selected media item is available in the sidebar as well (metadata is editable directly in the item view as well).

While the screenshots above are for Music, similiar data is/will be provided for Movies, TV shows, Actors, etc. as well.  It is definitely not all working perfectly or smoothly yet and not all types of data has all the contextual information yet, but I hope this provides a little info on how this particular feature might be shaping up.  It is definitely not the end-all of ideas for media semantics but underlying the framework – which includes the usual heavy dose of nepomuk – allows for a decent amount of flexibility that would certainly allow for other even more interesting contextual semantics (never played, most played at this time of day/year, unfinished movies, playback timelines, etc.).  Perhaps I’ll blog separately on this framework.

By the way, if anyone is interested in contributing to KDE I encourage you to consider Nepomuk. It is neat technology and Sebastian is awesome and definitely welcomes participation.

All the work so far hasn’t just been on this feature though.  Notice the album art in the in album list screenshot and basic bookmarking support was added this weekend.

Hope you found this interesting and don’t worry, I’m still trying to fix bugs, maintaining some ui restraint and working on the basics. 🙂

As always if anyone is interested in helping please feel free to holler at me (especially if you live in North America or the Caribbean, but all are welcome). See the gitorious project page for more info.

Thanks for reading!