Elisa, Accessibility and other News

I should be communicating more often about development related to the Elisa music player. Recently Safa Alfulaij added support for right-to-left interface. This is a very good excuse to talk about what happened since my previous post.

Accessibility Improvements

As I said, thanks to Safa Alfulaij Elisa has mostly good support for RTL interface. From my testing as a French native speaker I did notice a problem with icons of ToolButton components that have no way to indicate that they should be mirrored. Apart from that, it should be usable.

Reversed Album View

This contribution is really important to have Elisa be more accessible to more people. This topic is also the main subject of the next KDE sprint in Randa (Randa Meeting). Please have a look to the contribute page to help fund KDE developer sprints (Make KDE more accessible).

Music Import

After having gotten quite a few feedback about the lack of user interactions during music import, I have started to work to improve this area.

I added two things:

• A passive area showing the count of imported music track files (before duplicates are ignored) ;
• An offer to modify configuration when Baloo indexing is disabled or the music is not found in the default music path. This also adds a KCM dedicated to configure the paths where your music collection is located.

Improvements in user notifications

Platform Support Improvements

I have been improving support for flatpak as a way to allow a faster way to test it and to get feedback for new developments. I also think that this in no way going to replace packaging by Linux distributions. At least for me, there is a lot of comfort to be able to “apt-get install” almost everything I need.

I also have been working on improved Windows support. This is mainly driven by my need to have a good music player usable at my work place. By the way, people working on KDE for Windows are both really helpful and they do a very good job.

Future work

I need to finish my work to have robust support for notifications allowing the user to have a better and more natural interaction with the player especially during music import.

I also need to integrate in the main branch a very nice work by Martin T. H. Sandsmark that adds support for visualizations during play of music. I just needed to learn how to write KCM (especially with an qml UI). I also want to allow the feature to be easily discoverable without bothering people not using it.