It’s been almost a year since I publicly stood in front of you all to coo over the Qt-based Babe music player — and now I’m back to coo at it some more.
You can blame Babe developer Camilo Higuita. He’s shared a new video of his app that has me excited. The clip, which is embedded above, demos the ‘initial work’ he’s made on a Qml port of the Babe that uses Kirgami.
Kiri-what?
Kirigami. It’s a “lightweight user interface framework” from KDE that lets Qt developers build applications which work across multiple form factors, and platform, convergence style.
So, in theory, the Babe Qml app can seamlessly move from the KDE Neon desktop to a Plasma Mobile smartphone, adjusting its UI and features to suit.
And as you can see in the video, Kirigami enables some impressively slick visuals.
Y’know what babe reminds me of? The music player from Ubuntu Touch:
Forever in development, Babe
Babe remains one of a handle of really promising apps that I’m yet to actually try. I’ve never got the development builds to build, and I don’t use a deeply cool Linux distribution that stocks it in the repos.
Not that Linux is not short of music players: Clementine, Rhythmbox, Lollypop, Sayonara, YaRock, Banshee, DeaDBeeF, QuodLibet, Guyadaeque, Museeks, et al are all great choices.
But most of them look the same. They all tend to use the same sort of layout and library conventions, and though some players can be rearranged to look different, things like interface transitions are toolkit dependent.
Babe doesn’t look like any other music player on the Linux desktop that I’ve tried — and I think that’s why it intrigues me so much.
I’m excited to see where this goes. Hopefully it won’t be another year before I get to mention it again.