gPodder as a RSS reader

Eric Le Lay has been working on modding gPodder to work as a normal RSS reader for non-podcast news feeds. As announced on gpodder-devel this week, he has now published a guide on what he had to change to get it working, including a Git repository on Github. His changes include some nice ideas that might be worth merging back into mainline gPodder, although our goal is still to be a great podcatcher only and no news reader. Here's a screenshot of Eric's modified gPodder, with shownotes embedded in the main window:

Drafting the new podcast directory dialog

Since last year, our gpodder.net web service has gained lots of features, including text search and tagging. The official gPodder podcast client doesn't yet support all those features in its UI, and so I've been looking to redesign the podcast directory ("Find new podcasts" / "Discover new podcasts") dialog:

The first draft (which you can see at the top left) was a wizard-style dialog that guides the user through different steps. The second one (on which the final prototype is based) adds a two-pane layout with different sources in the left pane, and controls and the list of available podcasts in the right pane. This allows us to add more services and directories in the future and also adds a nice place for us to add "bookmarks" to OPML files on the web (i.e. you could bookmark the public OPML URLs of your friends' gpodder.net podcast subscriptions). Here's the final (implementation-specific) Gtk+ UI draft:
This new dialog will be part of the 3.x gPodder releases, and as soon as some details are worked out, the code will land in the "tres" branch of our Git repository. Here's a screenshot of the current prototype implementation:

gPodder 2.14 now available for Ubuntu, Maemo and Windows

The latest release of gPodder is now available in Debian unstable, in Ubuntu (via the gPodder Ubuntu PPA), for Maemo 5 (Fremantle, N900) in Extras-Testing and for Windows. Packages for Maemo 4 (Diablo, N800 and N810) have been uploaded to the Extras Autobuilder and will be available soon. Happy podcatching! :)

gPodder 2.14 "The Friendliest of Fruits" released

We're back with another release in the 2.x series of gPodder releases. While we're still brewing cool stuff in the "tres" branch of our Git repository, it's time to revisit the old stable branch and get some fixes out there for you to enjoy :)

Here's a list of changes:

• Various tray icon-related fixes (bug 1253, with contributions by Pavel Puchkin)
• Decode strings to unicode before slicing (bug 1277)
• Handle None in replace_from_channel (bug 1291)
• Updated French translation (by Vysserk3)
• Remove partial files that are already downloaded completely
• Fix YouTube-related download problems (HTTP 400, bug 1308)
• Maemo 5: Add per-podcast keep settings ("Keep episodes")
• Maemo 5: Re-add "Visit website" button in shownotes dialog
• Fix typos in gpodder.desktop (Debian bug 620438)
• Better GUID tracking with fallback URL (Maemo bug 12073)

You can find a detailed ChangeLog on gpodder.org/changelog/2.14.

Download: gpodder-2.14.tar.gz
md5sum: c63c14938bbaee3753b7a52f9e3435aa
sha1sum: 878f4fb451f76dba31229fb9a23fe6f8e41f333f

Thanks to everyone who was involved in the making of this release :)