gPodder 4.2 Feature Preview: Podcast Chapters

In the next release of gPodder 4, we're going to introduce support for Podlove Simple Chapters. Support for it has already landed in podcastparser 0.4.0, gpodder-core as well as gpodder-ui-qml and gpodder-sailfish, so here are two little demo videos of the new feature in action:

Blackberry 10 - Demo Video


Sailfish OS - Demo Video

Common prefix elimination for episode lists

Something that I've been wanting to get into gPodder for a long time has finally landed in our Git repository: Common prefix elimination. We apply this to all episode titles that we show in GUI lists (e.g. in the Gtk UI and the QML UI), and it really helps to show you more information that is useful to you, especially on mobile devices:

On the first screenshot, you can see the Harmattan QML UI of gPodder 3.0.1 showing the Linux Outlaws episode list. As you can see, about half of the screen is "wasted" with information that is global across all episodes. On the second screenshot, you can see the development version of gPodder, showing the exact same screen, but this time with common prefix elimination enabled.

Right now, we have a very conservative algorithm for detecting common prefixes (i.e. it has to be a real common prefix across all episodes) - one could think about improving this with some heuristics, e.g. removing the podcast title in front of episodes, calculating the common prefix of a certain majority of episodes, etc. - I'm interested to see how the user base likes this feature, and if there are situations where this does more harm than good.

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 :)

Transifex integration for gPodder 2.x and 3.x re-enabled

Since Transifex changed their system to not integrate with Git repositories, we have not had integration set up with the gPodder project. Now that the "tres" branch is nearing its release, it's time to set up the translation facilities again, so we can get a properly-translated first release out.

If you are interested in helping make gPodder more international, or if you have been a translator for some time, but were waiting for Transifex support to be re-enabled, now is the time to head over to the gPodder on Transifex project and submit translations :)

Panucci is coming to the N950

gPodder's sister project Panucci is being ported to MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan on the Nokia N950. The port is done by Panucci's current maintainer, Jens Persson (xerxes2). He announced the first progress on the project today:

And as you shouldn't make promises you can't keep, as Frank Martin's fourth rule, I got right to it and Panucci already runs pretty well on Harmattan. Some small things to fix but nothing major. I'll also pick up a headset to fix the bluetooth implementation which is missing now. The QML version will probably/hopefully work very well on Fremantle too. It will (probably) never support as many features as the GTK one as I don't got an N900 to fix stuff but it should work reasonably well.

Jens has posted a video on YouTube of the project's current status, and a short overview:

If you didn't know, Panucci is a resuming audiobook and podcast player, and can be used on Maemo and on the (Linux) Desktop to provide resuming functionality of your audio podcasts. Panucci also plays well together with gPodder to synchronize the playback status of audio files, so gPodder can track your playback progress. With dedicated seek buttons, Panucci is very well suited for listening to podcasts and seeking through long pieces of spoken audio.

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:

libmygpo-qt 1.0.1 released, call for packagers

Stefan from the libmygpo-qt project announced a bugfix release for the gpodder.net Qt client library:

Dear gPodder Community,

after finishing the v1.0 Version of libmygpo-qt, the first Bugfix Release is here, v1.0.1

This is a bugfix Release, especially targeting a Bug in the Build System (library couldn't be built on Maemo 5/ARM)

Source download: libmygpo-qt.1.0.1.tar.gz

md5sum: 96095ae07a27db5593dfb73a5fa14d90

sha1sum: e94d8d96f231e946b2c1b259679140488ee04b6b

I am looking for interested people that help us with the packaging of the Library. Please contact me via the gpodder Mailinglist.

Important Links

Git Repo: https://github.com/ase23/libmygpo-qt

Project Site: http://wiki.gpodder.org/wiki/Libmygpo-qt

Doxygen Documentation: http://stefan.derkits.at/libmygpo-doc/

gpodder.net API: http://wiki.gpodder.org/wiki/Web_Services/API_2

Bugreports: http://bugs.gpodder.org

Contact: gpodder-devel@lists.berlios.de

What is libmygpo-qt?

libmygpo-qt is a Qt/C++ Library wrapping the gPodder.net Webservice. It was created as part of a University Course & is used in one of the next versions of Amarok (2.4.1) with the new gpodder.net Service, that makes the gpodder.net Podcast Directory available from within Amarok.

Improvements to the gPodder command-line interface

For quite some time now, gPodder ships with the "gpo" utility - a command-line utility to carry out some basic tasks (subscribe, update, download, ...) with the gPodder database. For the future version, we have some cool new features that I'd like to share with you today (you can try them out in the "tres" branch of our Git repository):

• Interactive mode (just run "gpo", and you get a "gpo>" prompt), complete with readline support and tab completion :)
  
• Automatic paging of long episode lists ("less"-like scrolling, powered by pydoc)
• Handling of keyboard interrupts in interactive mode

Of course, the feature set of "gpo" does not cover all that's possible right now with the GUI, but it would be easy to extend if someone wants to step up and contribute some features. The latest version, 2.13, already contains some improvements to the CLI, and you already get nice, colored terminal output when updating feeds or downloading episodes.