Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Amarok Bugfix and Documentation

Documentation is important/useful. I don't mean just comments in the code, I'm talking UML and perhaps written-English documentation walking through a large amount of classes. I've started to, in my free time, document things related to the Media Device Framework of Amarok, with the double purpose of helping to ease in new device developers, as well as to spark discussion about the framework to make it better. I'm well aware of many of its flaws, but the more eyes the better of course, especially when I have nearly no time to work on it.

One helpful thing the UML has helped to do, in particular sequence diagrams, is to spot where bottlenecks occur (where things can lock up the GUI) and thread them. One such big one with parsing device metadata has become threaded, so some of you with rather large collections on your devices may notice that the GUI no longer locks up during the parse. This applies to iPods, MTP, and UMS devices. So yay.

Hopefully as I do more diagramming, this will make it easier for me to work on Amarok when my brain/body are otherwise quite occupied with other things.

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Off-topic: to the KDE person I ran into in downtown Mountain View coffee shop, please leave a comment so that I may remember your name.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Alejandro, have a nice New Year's.

Charles Samuels, in Mountain View

awainzin said...

And to you as well. If I see you in Mountain View again (with more time) we can chat a bit.

Anonymous said...

Certainly!