Tim Samoff // Weblog (old)

November 09, 2007

Vagalume...

I only choose to spotlight those maemo apps that I truly love. If you’ll remember, a recent one was PyChord (you can read what I think about it here). Now, I must take some time to thank Alberto Garcia Gonzalez for developing Vagalume Last.fm Player for maemo.

Vagalume is pretty bare bones as far as the user interface is concerned. But, that is perfectly fine, since the app just works. Alberto has taken standard (and pre-existing) maemo/Hildon UI elements and assembled them into a functional and easy-to-use application. There are no frills here, but this is exactly how I would recommend any programmer who doesn’t want to deal with graphic design to begin (honestly, there is a lot of value to rapid development and not getting caught up in minor details). And, that’s exactly what the maemo SDK is for. (Anyway, I’ll stop myself here and just say that if you’re a geek for this type of stuff, I wrote a whole lot more about it here.)

Vagalume contains all of the functionality you would expect to find in a Last.fm client. It scrobbles. You can love and ban songs. You can tag artists, songs, and albums. You can play your songs, others’ songs, songs with specific tags, or songs by similar artists. You can play recommendations… You’re basically getting what you get on Last.fm.

As I say for every app, there’s always room for improvement. As a graphic designer, I would like to see a few more frills (even something as simple as an application icon). It’d be neat to see the Last.fm logo somewhere. It would be really cool to have a page where you could view user/neighbor profile avatars.

But, those are minor desires for an application that works as well as Vagalume does (and things that Alberto himself plainly admits) — not to mention that this project is still very brand new.

If your a Nokia Internet Tablet owner and a Last.fm user, I highly recommend installing Vagalume.

Posted at 4:30 pm

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Thank you very much for your comments, Tim. I started Vagalume just some days ago as a hobby and it’s really rewarding to see that people find it useful.

I initially began implementing the core protocol and I made the simplest UI that I could in order to test that the basic functionalities were working.

The first goal was to make program just work. I’m not an experienced UI designer and I didn’t want to spend more time on the UI than the strictly necessary.

Once the most basic things were working (playing, skipping, changing radios, scrobbling) I thought that I should make a decent UI before publishing it, but then I decided that if Vagalume was actually working it didn’t make sense to keep it hidden just because of the lack of a nice UI, and that’s why I published it.

I think I made the right decision and all of the positive comments and suggestions that Vagalume is receiving are encourading me to make a better program. Let’s see what happens, and thank you again

Berto

P.S. It seems that the links to garage.maemo.org in your post are broken

Berto (URL) - November 09, 2007 at 7:42 pm

Berto, Thanks for dropping by. I assumed as much about how you developed Vagalume, and I completely agree with your approach. I can’t wait to see what else you do!

I think I fixed the link (it works for me anyway).

timsamoff () (URL) - November 09, 2007 at 9:59 pm