Tuesday 30 August 2011

[GSoC] Mission Accomplished

Hi folks. Sorry for too many weeks without any post about the project. During this period, I have been changing and arguing things related to the service source code and to the user design. Also, there was a lot of optimizations and bug fixes. Nevertheless, to the joy of all, I'm here to announce that gpodder.net features are now successfully integrated with Amarok.




Added features:
  • Podcast subscription synchronisation.
  • Podcast status synchronisation.
  • Browse through podcasts suggested by gpodder.net.
  • Browse through gpodder.net top recommended podcasts.

The difficulties:

  • Even though I had studied many things about Qt, there will be always some weird problem due to a lack of some specific knowledge.
  • Lots of bugs with no appropriate way to search for the root of the problem (Challenge accepted \o/).

The future:

  • Get users feedback, in order to fix bugs and so on.
  • Keep tracking mygpo and libmygpo-qt evolution, so as to analyse what new features could be implemented in gpodder service.
  • Keep contributing with Amarok team. Fixing bugs and adding new features.

So, my proposal objectives were fulfilled and I'm happy to give something back to the KDE community, since I have been literally "experiencing freedom" for so many years without any active role in KDE ecosystem. Besides that, 
the most valuable thing that I learned is that software development is not just about code. As a FOSS supporter, I already thought about it in the past, but there are a lot of things that you can only understand when you face it yourself.

At last, I really have to say that this whole experience has been one that I will carry with me for my whole life. So, I will keep contributing with Amarok, thereby further developing my hacking/coding/social skills and making great code for all users (Or, at least, I hope so ^^).

With all that said, I also want to give thanks to google for all the support to FOSS communities, to KDE people for the great desktop environment, to mygpo and libmygpo-qt team for the gpodder stuff, and to Bart Cernnels, my mentor, for the patience during the last three months.

2 comments:

  1. Hello. Congratulations, and good job! Can I ask what version of Amarok this feature will be in? I currently have version 2.4.3. and I do not see the plugin installed. I'm guessing it will be in the next stable release? Again, thanks for your hard work!

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  2. Thanks ^^. My project is being reviewed by Amarok developers now. As soon as they approve my code it will be shipped into Amarok official versions. So, It will probably be released in the next stable release.

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