illogic-al.Org

When I started out trying to install Amarok on OS X it looked something like this:

As you may have noticed, the program is conspicuously missing. Before I could even get Amarok to show up I had to jump through a variety of hoops. But at last I was able to get Amarok to show a window. Win.
Eventually I even got music from this window. Epic Win.

As you can see in the above image, at first there was no context view. Thankfully apachelogger figured out why and fixed it.

While he was doing all this in preparation for unleashing the awesomeness of Neon unto the world, I decided it was time to do some serious coding myself. That turned out to be quite hard, and in some cases pointless. I re-organized the menus instead.

Hey look, it's the context view! Give apachelogger a beer next time you see him. Or I'll beat you.

I tried my hand at other attempts to make the application fit into the UI paradigms of OS X, as I understood them then. At times some ideas, such as the growl OSD (via a ruby-cocoa script), and grayscale/desaturated menubar icon (seen in the first screenshot) were put off to a later date. I'm still undecided as to the utility of some of these ideas on OS X, but I sure think they look cool. :-D

After the context view became viewable, "work" on Amarok mostly involved ensuring it could compile, and keeping the build instructions up to date. As a result of this I got to see much of the program's transformation. There were the plasma context view changes, which became progressively simpler

Probably my favorite I was there when it happened! moment were the changes the progressbar and volume indicator underwent.

Then I found out I could use the oxygen style in OS X. The style doesn't quite render properly but it has promise. If someone ever fixes it... This, while not directly related to amarok, is still cool.

But why even taint the purity of OS X with a linux skinning interface? you may ask. Well initially I tried it as a workaround to a problem I'd noticed with the, then latest, changes to the ui. On OS X we aren't seeing enough contrast in the svg thanks to the colors used in the mac os style provided by Qt. This results in Amarok looking like this on a unmodified installation:

If you tilt your screen you'll get an idea of what you're supposed to be seeing, or just look at the next image.

After a bit lot of tweaking with the SvgTinter I have what I like to call my obsidianish color scheme.

I also managed to get something more toned down

And now with a little oxygen...

I don't think it looks too bad. Not at all.
Obsidianish, as I'm calling it, does not do a good job of showing off all the svg elements. The tabs are a primary area where it the svg elements are overshadowed (that was meant to be punny). I know someone out there can do better. As soon as the Amarok bundles, and pkgs are ready to go we'll let the Oh Sexites, have at it though. I'll help you install it, and you'll make it pretty. Deal? Make it Pretty (tm). Let it do what it do. Pimp that ride. Etc.

Oh wow. Is it the end already? I guess I should get to the point then. The point is that all the progress you've seen here didn't just magically happen, and it certainly wasn't all me. When I began this little journey, nigh 3 months ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. Nor, I suspect, did the Amarok developers. Nevertheless thanks to the help of people like nhnFreespirit, hydrogen, apachelogger, markey, mxcl, et al. I've Done the impossible by getting Amarok to play nice with OS X. More importantly, this makes it much easier for other developers (you know, the ones who actually know what they're doing) to jump in and get to work on Amarok, instead of fighting (as much) with build systems and compilers.

None of this would have happened however if Nightrose (and i swear I'm still unsure as to how this happened) didn't rope me into being some kind of bastard developer/promo/documentation writer person within a few minutes of me meeting her. Thank you Lydia. I at least, if not all future Amarok users on OS X owe you, the most awesome community liason, organizer, promo person I've never met, a big thank you. Hopefully I meet you on this side of the pond sometime so I can say it properly and in person.