Introducing Bangarang

Bangarang is a media player with a focus on simplicity paired with capability. Simplicity comes from a careful attention to the user's media-related goals and how the UI satisfies those goals. Capability comes from taking advantage of KDE pillars like Nepomuk, Phonon, Plasma and more. Much more is at the website.

Improving Bangarang

It has been lots of fun improving Bangarang touch support for Plasma One. It involves much more than just making the clickable elements bigger. Several interaction choices had to be revisited. For example, Bangarang makes extensive use of mouse-hover to convey information. With no mouse-hover in a touch interface, some functions had to be modified (touch video to show/hide controls instead of hover) or disabled (editing in the info view). In Plasma Active, Bangarang always uses the full screen (except for the Plasma bar at the top). So drag and drop support between other applications and Bangarang could be sacrificed to support flickable scrolling in the playlist and media list views. Lots of similar updates are made to support touch, all without sacrificing the desktop experience (command line switch).

Beyond touch support, I've been working really hard to improve keyboard navigation and shortcuts support (geez, this is hard!). Also, adding ownCloud support was surprisingly easy since it was just a matter of creating a new ListEngine that parsed ampache xml data. In fact, developing remote/online InfoFetchers and ListEngines have become quite easy - just need the url api and the xml format.

Interfering with Bangarang

(No really you would be helping out)

Fixing paper-cuts is the current focus(resizing video in fullscreen mode, unsightly genre codes, recursive add media from drag and dropped folder and more). I could certainly use some help from anyone willing to contribute. :-) There is one rule and one guideline for this.: Have fun! If you’re not having fun, take a break.: Basics first, gravy later

As a special note I am currently considering moving the source repo to the KDE Infrastructure. If anyone would like to help me to build on another pillar of KDE, the community, please get in contact!