From our front-page news:
It's been a relatively long-time coming, but the first 2.0 alpha release for the popular Linux audio player, Amarok, has now been released. Since 2.x is highly dependant on KDE 4 libraries, that desktop environment is required in order to run it. Those of you, like me, who would rather stick with 3.5.x for the time-being, will have to miss out. The good news in all of this, though, is that the future player will work on Windows and OS X.
What's new though is brand-new graphics and 'innovative user interface'. At first look, I'm really skeptical, but I'm going to hold off on my opinions until I get a chance to spend some good time with it. I've been using Amarok 1.x for so long now, I'm almost scared about taking such a leap forward, because there's definitely a noticable difference here.
But I digress. Also new is a nice Internet service framework, allowing fantastic integration with popular music services, like Last.fm, Magnatune and others. I assume that these will simply run better and be easier to navigate than 1.x, since those services were available there. There's lots of good stuff though, so you will need to either read through the news post or get on downloading and testing it out. I'm so tempted to finally install KDE 4 just for this reason...
Don't miss several UI innovations like the Plasma powered Context View, new space efficient playlist, and amazing PopUp Dropper! The new Context View allows you to show all the context information you care about. We expect a lot of Plasmoids to be provided by the community in the first months after the release of Amarok 2.
Source: Amarok 2.0 Alpha
What's new though is brand-new graphics and 'innovative user interface'. At first look, I'm really skeptical, but I'm going to hold off on my opinions until I get a chance to spend some good time with it. I've been using Amarok 1.x for so long now, I'm almost scared about taking such a leap forward, because there's definitely a noticable difference here.
But I digress. Also new is a nice Internet service framework, allowing fantastic integration with popular music services, like Last.fm, Magnatune and others. I assume that these will simply run better and be easier to navigate than 1.x, since those services were available there. There's lots of good stuff though, so you will need to either read through the news post or get on downloading and testing it out. I'm so tempted to finally install KDE 4 just for this reason...
Don't miss several UI innovations like the Plasma powered Context View, new space efficient playlist, and amazing PopUp Dropper! The new Context View allows you to show all the context information you care about. We expect a lot of Plasmoids to be provided by the community in the first months after the release of Amarok 2.
Source: Amarok 2.0 Alpha