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Don't know if you noticed, but we've been building maemo's best music player. Works on both devices, open source, power management aware, tap sensitive user interface with playlist building/editing support and continuous updates. I won't be including any screenshots in this blog entry (one might say article) since I'm feeling tired after writing all this and there are some screenshots in the wiki anyway.

The Looks
I have to admit that the first few releases of Kagu weren't much of lookers, since us programmers were doing (you wouldn't believe how awful we're at graphic design -unless you've seen the previous Kagu themes of course- ) the theming. Luckily, just a few days before the 1.0.8 release we cought a break as yogz joined the team. He's been busy with our theming ever since and it's looking much better now, and the next release will be even better. We have some themes in development and theme switching is coming really soon. Expect editable layouts (and maybe even a portrait layout, not promising anything though) in a few releases as well. We usually do one release every two weeks, so you don't have to wait months for a new release.

The Feel
With each release we're working hard to tweak and improve the user interface. The current (1.0.8) release feels really smooth. The previous one did too in fact, but I'm guessing it's more noticable with a good theme. In fact I'm really happy with 1.0.8 (yes we screwed up on the prev/next button order and didn't notice until after the release, sorry about that) though I could use a "crop playlist" option that would clear the playlist but leave the selected song. Oh, did you know that you could arrange songs within a playlist with a simple key-touchscreen combo? It's hidden in the Kagu wiki. Speaking of, audioworld joined us a few weeks ago and we've been keeping him busy with the wiki and user support. Glad to have some documentation finally, and gladder for not doing that work myself. :P

We're also trying to keep Kagu cpu-aware. It will stop all visual (and some background) activity when the screen is off or it's not in the foreground. A simple method, but works pretty good.

On the other hand ogg support is flaky on the n800. But since it works ok in the 770, we had to contact the n800 ogg-support package developers. While it's being sorted out we're also planning to put some code to assign different player engines to different formats, so either way that won't be a problem for long.

Kagu currently uses two types of players, the Nokia's "osso-media-server" for normal playback, and mplayer for a2dp (yay for bluetooth!) playback. I won't be mentioning how great a2dp support is since I don't have a headset and never used that feature myself. On a second thought, I will. It's great. They say. Even supports AVRCP! Mono headsets are not supported though. If you're interested in developing that for us, keep on reading.

Speaking of headsets. I tried to make use of the Nokia headset's (the wired one) answer button a few releases back. Unfortunately libSDL has some problems with it, so it won't work with pygame, which Kagu is using. I'm still looking for a solution to that, and open to suggestions as always.

The Code
The code is object oriented and extensible. Don't like and don't keep dirty code and the project's head developer (our beloved Jesse Guardiani, aka trevarthan) being a neat freak (and the co-developer -that's me- being a smartass) really helps on that. If you want to contribute, drop us a note at freenode #kagu channel. Or you can just dive in to the codebase and start playing with it. It's not excessively documented but it's open, clean, and that's what counts.

Other development aspects are also documented in Trac, like todo tickets and a roadmap. You can just drop by and see what we're up to without having to wait for the (bi-monthly) release.

To install Kagu, you'll have to install Python for Maemo first. And here's our wiki for documentation.

For me, the Nokia 770's Audio Player was probably the single most useful (and bug free) software on the 770. I don't want to carry a DAP/PMP along with an all-purpose tablet, (my cellphone, wallet and keys are enough clutter thank you) so the logical answer was to use a media player software. Since Canola didn't have -still doesn't have- playlist editing functionality, Audio Player was the best choice at the time being.

Then came the n800. Audio Player was gone, instead we got a unified "media player" that played both video and audio. Great.

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Today I was on the bus and got a new idea for the n800/770: a car kit like software that integrates with your cellphone. It would work like this:

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