Welcome to the artwork-for-2.0 page

As you may already have been aware, Amarok 2.0 will be using a themable Context area, in the design of Plasma. This will allow for much flexibility on the part of the artists, as well as much prettyness for the user :) In order for each applet to be themeable, it needs to have, of course, a default theme. All of the applets will be based on SVG themes.

We therefore are in need of artists who are able to provide designs for applets in SVG.

How applets are drawn

The steps to drawing an applet in the context view are as follows:

Applet loads svg. This is done in a theme-specific manner; i.e. the svg from the currently-chosed theme is loaded.
Applet is told to paint itself to the ContextView
Applet renders elements that it expects to exist in the svg. The applet will have hardcoded element names which are required to exist in the SVG.
If the applet has data (text) to render on top of the svg, it then gets the locations for the text. This is done by getting the location and boundary of certain pre-set "text" elements (that can be empty, but serve simply to tell the applet where to put the text).
Applet renders text on top of already-rendered parts of SVG, at location specified by SVG.

Needed Applet Designs

Database Info

This applet is shown by default on the home screen. It will display statistics about a user's collection, play counts, recently added albums, etc. It will primarily contain text, with some images as well. Think of this as the "home" on the contextbrowser in amarok 1.x

Information that could be displayed:

Total Tracks Total Albums Total Songs Total Playtime

Newest albums (with name, artist, and albumcover)

Top Rated Albums (again name, artist albumcover)

etc. a mockup displaying a bunch of these would be a great start :)

Related info

This is also an applet which is shown during track play. it will contain information such as songs related to the current song, other top-rated albums by this artist, etc.

Current Track

This is, arguably, the most important applet. This shows data about the current track: artist, title, album cover, play info, rating, score, etc. This will probably always be enabled, so should be quite pretty :)

That one looks good, although i think we need a couple of approaches for this, even if one was selected as default. I, for example, don't use ratings, and that one would look quite bad having quite a lot of empty space. But keep up the good work! --Emunkki

Lyrics

The lyrics applet has the requirement to show the lyrics for a track, as well as the track title and the track artist. The vertical size should be adjustable, as the length of the lyrics will dictate it.

Last.Fm Events

The Last.Fm Events applet will have 3 sets of data to display: Friend events, User events, and Recommended events. Each event has a bunch of data associated with it: title, location, description (may be *very* long), date, city, link).


OOOOLD "original" version	new mockup: Clearbeast	another approach: Clearbeast	current version: lfranchi

I like the latest design a lot as well :) My only qualm is that we seem to be sticking to a very black/red color scheme... maybe something more blue-based would be better? anyway, colors can come later. --lfranchi

I think the latest version (dark colors) is by far the best. The original version wasn't designed to actually hold any information. --Emunkki

Suggested songs, related artists

Also last.fm-related, the last.fm applet has the ability to display a list of suggested songs, as well as a list of related artists, for the current track.

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia applet displays the wikipedia page of the artist that is playing, if it exists. Something fancy could be done here, for example extracting the title from the page and showing it separate to the actual content. This all remains to be seen (and is up to individual designs).

Toolbar Background

These are a few ideas for possible toolbar backgrounds. Please leave comments as to which is more pleasing, or if you would like to see something else that's not shown in these examples.

Misc

Also needed is a general wallpaper svg. This will be *very* prominent, so i think this should look pretty stunning (if simple). Also, a default background for applets that need it is needed, but currently the plasma-provided one is fine.

If you are working on any of these applets, please edit this page to reflect that-this will avoid duplication of work. Also, please post any completed (or work in progress) designs under the proper headings, to allow other people to improve on them. On the other hand, if you don't like or agree with a current design, feel free to come up with your own.

As the designs of the SVGs for these applets are in a way tightly linked to the actual design of the applet code, interaction with the applet author is usually necessary (and desired!). As right now I (lfranchi) am the only person writing applets, please get in touch with me at lfranchi@*NOSPAM*gmail.com or on irc in #rokymotion (as lfranchi). I am open to suggestions and willing to write my applet to cater to your designs!