gPodder 4 on Sailfish OS - progress report (pt 2)

It's time for another gPodder-on-Sailfish OS update. Since last time, there have been some improvements to the three modules that together result in gPodder for Sailfish: core, ui-qml and sailfish.

The core is now fully complying with the XDG Base Directory specification, which isn't only important for Harbour requirements, but also makes gPodder behave nicer on Desktop Linux (if you still care about where gPodder puts its data, use symlinks or the still-supported $GPODDER_HOME and $GPODDER_DOWNLOAD_DIR variables).

In the ui-qml module, which serves as glue code between the native frontend UI, using PyOtherSide and the gPodder core, new pass-through functions have been added for deleting episodes (ef279bbd), toggling the "new" flag (3579f4bf) and renaming podcasts as well as changing podcast sections (d267582a).

And finally, the Sailfish Silica UI variant of gPodder has received some love, with added features, Silica-ization (e.g. the Subscribe page is now a dialog, and you can swipe to confirm instead of relying on a normal button) and some layout fixes.

Here's a video of the current development version:

The gPodder 4 development version is not yet ready for prime time, so if you want to try it out already, you have to clone (--recursive, to also clone the submodules automatically) it from source. Make sure you have PyOtherSide and Python 3 installed on your Sailfish OS device. For development, there's a convenient "dev_symlinks.sh" script that will create symlinks so you can run it directly from a source checkout. Rsync the source tree to your device via ssh, then start by pointing qmlscene at the harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish.qml file. Once gPodder 4 gets a bit more stable and feature-complete, and once Harbour gains support for PyOtherSide and Python 3, the plan is to put gPodder into the Jolla Store for easy downloading onto devices.

gPodder 4 on Sailfish OS - progress report

Back in action, we have some small progress to report on gPodder 4's Sailfish OS port: The QML UI has now been mostly converted to use Sailfish Silica, so work can now progress on finishing features and polishing up the UI. The plan is to get gPodder into Jolla Store, which will happen as soon as it's mostly feature-complete (day to day usable) and once PyOtherSide is a supported API in Jolla Harbour (which is a work in progress also).


The source code can be found at http://github.com/gpodder/gpodder-sailfish (you can use "git clone --recursive" to also check out the submodules in one go).

The research work done on the podcastparser library really pays off - compared to the feedparser-based parser used in gPodder 2 and gPodder 3, gPodder 4's podcastparser parses most feeds almost instantly on a WLAN connection. Add to that the nice asynchronous nature of PyOtherSide, and you get a really fast application for which most users probably can't tell the difference between a Python-based and C++-based Silica application.