Michael Pyne added support for album art to Juk‘s D-Bus interface, and modified the now playing dataengine to get this artwork. The dataengine already supported getting artwork from MPRIS-enabled players, and Amarok has provided album artwork over MPRIS for a while.
So I’ve now added the display of album artwork to the now playing widget:
The Now Playing widget with album artwork
Naturally, this disappears (and the text moves over to the left) when there is no album artwork available, and the image resizes to be as tall as the text when you resize the widget.
Oh, and I fixed the scrollbars to work when you use the mouse wheel on them. This fix will be in the next release of 4.2 (although the artwork won’t be).
Now I need to improve the functionality of the widget when it’s on the panel. And any help in generally making the widget prettier would be most welcome. I really don’t like the scrollbars, and the album art needs a frame.
22nd February 2009 at 11:41 am |
What about having this plasmoid as a containment, i.e. fullscreen? Or make it adapt its layout, if it is pulled bigger, i.e. move the artwork on top of the text and display a bigger picture, if there is enough space. That way users could place it on the screensaver containment and use it for parties etc.
22nd February 2009 at 12:04 pm |
I have to say, I do miss the thing (I forget the name) that used to sit in the kicker panel and had a full-screen mode.
I’m not sure a containment mode would be suitable, though. And I don’t know whether “party mode” would work best as an expanded version of the same applet or another applet.
22nd February 2009 at 1:17 pm |
Kirocker was the name.
22nd February 2009 at 3:59 pm |
[...] El plasmoide “Now Playing…” con carátulas. Vía: return -EWTF [...]
22nd February 2009 at 4:01 pm |
Can I get this to work over ssh?
22nd February 2009 at 6:48 pm |
I know that the function of the scrollbars can be worked out once the application has been used for a few minutes, but I think a couple of small icons to identify the function of the two scrollbars might be useful. Perhaps a little speaker icon above the vertical scrollbar and an egg timer to the left of the horizontal scrollbar would help for new users.
22nd February 2009 at 6:51 pm |
“and the album art needs a frame.”
No it doesn’t.
22nd February 2009 at 11:30 pm |
@maninalift: what do you mean by “get it to work over ssh”? What is at which end of the ssh tunnel?
Basically, the dataengine that powers the widget uses the session D-Bus to communicate with both Juk and Amarok. So if plasma is talking to the same D-Bus daemon as Amarok or Juk, it will work. If not, it won’t.
23rd February 2009 at 9:58 pm |
Looks good. Atm i was using the other similar plasmoid just because it had album artwork feature
Cheers!
28th February 2009 at 6:19 am |
Any hope of bringing back the moodbars that Amarok used to have:
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Moodbar
I found those really handy.
10th March 2009 at 6:39 pm |
Great work! Completely agree with the author on the album frame and the bars. Still, if it’s possible to make it even more sleek and sexy then you’d have a clear winner
PS! do we really need the bars? Perhaps they could be hidden and activated in some kind of way when you need it?
Keep up the good work!
8th April 2010 at 8:43 am |
“So I’ve now added the display of album artwork to the now playing widget”
sorry for maybe dull question, but how exactly you did this. ‘nowplaying’ dataengine gives me QVariant(QPixmap) string for the artwork and i have no idea what to do with it
thanks in advance
17th May 2010 at 2:31 pm |
Well, it’s just a QVariant containing a QPixmap. So pull out the QPixmap (using QVariant::value(), say) and use it as you would any other pixmap.
Check out the source code for the nowplaying applet for an example.