JuK Interview - App of the Month
Interview with the author of Juk, Scott Wheeler
You can check out the overview of JuK.
When did you start your work for this project? Who else should be mentioned when we're talking about JuK?
I guess that's a bit fuzzy -- once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away there was a project called "QTagger" which kind of, sort of became JuK. I started on QTagger in mid-2000. QTagger wasn't much more than the standard "first silly project for learning Qt" but it kept my interest for a while. The last version of QTagger could play things -- but just one file at a time and then to facilitate tagging.
At the beginning of 2002 I ported QTagger to KDE's CVS (which would later become KDE 3), added a playlist and renamed it to JuK.
Now here's the part where some of the "other people" get involved. In mid-2002 I started a new job in Germany at the same time that Daniel Molkentin started an internship at the company where I currently work. He saw me using JuK and persuaded me to actually get it into a releasable state. During that time he was working on the first bits of Kontact and I worked on JuK. I guess they both turned out alright. :-)
There are a lot of guys -- Daniel being one of them that have contributed bits and pieces along the way. A lot of people got involved around the time that JuK first went into KDE CVS. Tim Jansen did the original GStreamer port, Stefan Asserhäll added configurable key bindings, Stephen Douglas added the track announcement popups, Frerich Raabe did all of the work on filename based tag guessing and tag-based file renaming, Zack Rusin and Adam Treat did the MusicBrainz integration, Matthias Kretz had to deal with my aRts questions, Maks Orlovich worked with me on some memory profiling and Antonio Larrosa added the original DCOP interface.
They're a great bunch of guys to work with and JuK wouldn't be where it is today without all of their help. And it has freed me up to do the boring stuff like messing with the internal APIs and keeping the code in a tidy state.
The "additions" to the names in the "about" section of JuK are pretty funny. It sounds like good teamwork. Do you know all the project members personally?
I know about half of the guys personally -- Daniel has been one of the frequent guests of the Hotel Wheeler. Matthias really *is* the friendly neighborhood aRts guru -- he lives about 200 meters away. Those that I haven't met in person I've talked to enough on IRC that I guess one could say that we "know" each other. So I think it's fair to say that on one side we're working together on JuK, but we're also friends.
What are your future plans for JuK? Any new features we may be looking forward to? :-)
Well, there's a lot of stuff that I'd like to get done, but being realistic my goals for KDE 3.3 are CD ripping and playing and some internal cleanups. I've got these sort of working in some proof-of-concept stuff locally, but it's nowhere near ready to check in.
I've also talked to Mark (the amaroK author) about moving their code for internet radio into a library that JuK can use too. If time permits I'd like to get that working for KDE 3.3.
There a quite a lot of media players available for KDE. What have been the reasons for you to develop another one? What makes JuK different in comparison with other players?
Well, at the time that I started on QTagger and began its slow progression towards JuK there weren't a lot of players for KDE. I started on QTagger within a couple of months of Charles starting on Noatun -- Noatun eventually added tagging; JuK eventually added playing. That was about it at that time. Most of the newer stuff has come around since then. But it's actually a good problem to have -- I'm just excited that there's a renewed interest for in KDE's multimedia and that we have so many new folks coming into the KDE multimedia community.
JuK is published under the GPL. What have been the reasons for this? What do you think about "Open Source"?
Well, I think the GPL embodies a certain type of "fairness" which appeals to me. I see OSS mostly as a social phenomenon that is the product of a dedicated community and I see the GPL and "copyleft" as community building ideas.
Is your work on JuK sponsored in any way?
Well, I have a "KDE friendly" job (i.e. I work with KDE CVS at work) but I'm not directly sponsored for work on JuK. There are times at work where I'm asked to work on things in KDE, but they're usually in more of the core components.
Do you have any favorite KDE tool (apart from JuK ;-) )?
XEmacs, oh, wait. Well, I guess I'd say KCacheGrind. It's done groovy stuff for me since I discovered it a while back. I also have a love / hate relationship with KMail. :-)
How could/should the "desktop of the future" look like in your opinion?
I think there's definitely not enough blinking on today's desktop. In the future there should be much more blinking.
On a more serious note -- I really don't think the look will change much in the near future. Really we're making incremental progress now -- the ideas haven't changed much in the last 20 years. I think for the near future we'll build towards something more refined and mature and keep making progress towards a more intuitive desktop. I think the Linux desktop is finally to the point that framework wise it's competitive with the other major desktops; now it really needs application maturity and polish.
Which OS and hardware do you use at work / at home?
Home: SuSE 8.0, Athlon 1.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM
Work: SuSE 8.2, Dual Athlon MP 1800, 2 GB RAM
Could you tell us more about the person "Scott Wheeler"? What do you do for a living?
I met this "Scott Wheeler" fellow once. He's a bit odd. As it turns out he's a used bit salesman. There aren't really many options available on bits these days -- they tend to be either 0 or 1, so it seemed a pretty easy job. However he claims that when you put enough of them together they make machines do things. Odd, I tell you. There's this place full of these bit salesmen -- "programmers" seems to be the politically correct term -- where he spends much of his time. Apparently this place is called "the SAP LinuxLab" in the local dialect. :-)
How do you spend your spare time (if there's any ;-) )?
Well, I actually have quite a few hobbies -- too many probably. I love to travel; I'm planning on making it to 5 continents this year. I also read quite a bit -- mostly history and philosophy lately. I'm also kind of a music geek -- I play (and once upon a time taught) bass; a lot of why I enjoy working on JuK and multimedia in general is because it's a way to combine two of my hobbies.
Scott Wheeler can be reached by email at wheeler@kde.org. The interview of "Application of the Month" JuK is conducted by Andreas C. Diekmann.
You can check out the overview of JuK.
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