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 :)

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:

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.