JuK and amaroK

Aaron Seigo recently mentioned JuK as an example of why it is useful to have powerful application development frameworks in order to seed great applications.

Aaron said this: “we ship with juk, a great little media player that is playlist centric, kicks ass at tagging and otherwise tries its best to stay out of your way while playing your music. meanwhile, amaroK is an application that is developed by people in our greater development community which is so amazingly killer in its network integration, hardware player support (think: iPod) and general eye candy and usability sweetness that the Ubuntu project actually bent their freeze date rules to allow it into their next release! and instead of fearing for juk’s popularity, everyone (including the juk authors i know) cheer for this success.”

Well that’s certainly my view, and I know that Scott feels the same way too. We will work on JuK to continue to refine it and make it better, but meanwhile we’re just as happy when amaroK continues to improve. And indeed, you’ll find both my name and Scott’s name listed in the amaroK credits thanks to code contributions that the amaroK devs saw fit to use.

In a way, it makes things easier on us. There are many things that amaroK does that simply wouldn’t make sense in JuK. And thanks to the ease of application development with KDE, it’s not unusual for two programs to both have vibrant development teams behind them. I already know the normal argument (why have two applications when you only need one!) but the thing people sometimes don’t realize is that JuK and amaroK are different programs, with different philosophies and intents, which would probably both come out bad from a merger. This is unlike the unfortunate distinct between KEdit and KWrite, which are two programs that should be doing the same thing.

Anyways, on the JuK front, I’ve been trying to fix the low-hanging bugs over the past couple of days, so it’s looking like 3.4.3 will hopefully be the most refined JuK release in awhile. You can see the current set of bugfixes for 3.4.3 at this page.

To potential bug reporters reading this: There are a few crash bugs reported against JuK, which doesn’t horribly surprise me considering the hocus-pocus we perform with pointers. =D But if you encounter a crash, it would be great if you could find a way to reliably reproduce the crash. This helps me even more than a backtrace (although the backtrace would still be appreciated).

In other news, I’ve ported abakus to KDE 4.0 (or the shambles that we’re calling 4.0 ;-), but since the buttons are ginormously tall I think I’ll leave it alone for now. :-/