Device Sync in 3.x: Brainstorming for User Stories and Volunteers

Several users have - in various channels - complained about the missing support for device synchronization in gPodder 3.x. As I've mentioned in the original announcement, it's not because we don't want to have that feature in gPodder (we do!), but rather the reason for it was that the way it was implemented in 2.x was not as good as it could be, and it was hard to maintain (and also nobody of the core developers tested the iPod and MTP variants for a long time, with several bug reports staying open because nobody was able to test/reproduce or otherwise deal with them).

There is now a Wiki page where I would invite all users interested in getting device sync back into 3.x to add their user stories, maybe add themselves as volunteers (for either testing, development or documentation) and help us get a good idea of how the perfect device sync integration should look like:

• http://wiki.gpodder.org/wiki/Brainstorm/Device_Sync

Thanks for your support :)

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: