Progress report from the April 2013 hack day

As you might have figured out by now, some of the gPodder core developers meet up monthly at the Metalab in Vienna to discuss current developments and plans for the future. This also happened this month on the 13th of April.

What we have done:

• Bernd worked on new features for the Flattr extension
• Stefan created a new project out of thp's podcastparser code
• Stefan also added gpodder.net file type statistics (bug 1505)
• Thomas merged Bernd's pull request 89
• Thomas also worked on a responsive HTML design for gpodder.org's website
• We added some more best practice guidelines for publishers
• Stefan (our second Stefan) released libmygpo-qt 1.0.7
• Andreas worked on Sphinx-based developer documentation

The next hack day will be on May 11th, and we will definitely be discussing more about gPodder 4 by then.

Progress report from the March 2013 hack day

After the 3.5.0 release last week, we also had our monthly Jour Fixe for gPodder hacking at the Metalab on Saturday. This is a summary of what happened:

Bernd worked on bug 1265 (Notification bubbles in Ubuntu), Stefan worked on the draft for the new gpodder.net API, and I worked on getting Windows and Ubuntu releases in shape. Also: Merging some pull requests and fixing the Gtk+ submenu activate issue, creating a workaround for the focus issue in the toolkit (see GNOME bug 695488), although it seems like we still have to tweak the workaround a bit.

The next hack day is planned for April 13th 2013 and will again take place at the Metalab Vienna. Until then - happy hacking, and see you in #gpodder on FreeNode IRC.

Progress report from the February 2013 hack day

Our monthly Jour Fixe for gPodder hacking at the Metalab Vienna has taken place on the 16th this month.

We've been mostly working on fixing several bugs related to extension scripts on different platforms and we have been discussing the initial plans for gPodder 4. Right now, there's some code in the "cuatro" branch in Git that features a new, faster podcast feed parser. The extension fixes will be included in the next release.

Next up: The March 2013 Hack Day (already on the 9th).

Progress report from the January 2013 hack day

Another meetup in Vienna has been held this month to push forward some parts of gPodder (both the client, the web service as well as related projects such as the library and Detlef gPodderson).

There have been several topics that we discussed and worked on:

• thp demonstrated his work with the new podcastparser, the C implementation of it, we discussed how to use it in the future
• brot worked on bug 1441, closed as duplicate of bug 1324
• brot worked on bug 1751, closed as won't fix as there's a workaround
• brot worked on bug 1749
• skoegl started work on a "Stream to Sonos" extension for the gPodder app
• skoegl fixed some bugs in the mygpoclient library
• horrendus requested an Ohloh organization for all gPodder projects
• horrendus fixed a bug in libmygpo-qt (using cgdb)
• moe presented Detlef and continued working on its implementation
• thp removed the time tracking field in our Bugzilla (we didn't use it)

moe from the Detlet project (an open source gpodder.net podcatcher for Android) demonstrated their Android Podcatcher in the Android Emulator:

Thanks to all for attending, and see you at the February 2013 Hack Day!

Progress report from the December hack day

For the third time, we've met up for the monthly gPodder Hack Day, where people involved in gPodder and related projects meet up in Vienna and discuss and push forward gPodder and the gPodder Web Service.

On December 22nd, the Hack Day December 2012 took place at the Metalab in Vienna. Here's a short list of what we have done:

• Bug 1728: Decided to close as WONTFIX, and described how the user can patch the required changes in manually
• Released gPodder 2.20.3 for Maemo 4 and Maemo 5
• QML UI: Refreshed UI with Sheet for Subscribe UI, Pull down to refresh and a (hopefully) nicer visual style
• Created an initial Extensions page with some basic information
• Updated the information on the gpodder.org start page (extensions, etc..)
• First work on Auto-Flattr support for gpodder.net (the website) - it's still a WIP
• Bug 1729: Add disable_in=win32 to a few extensions
• Add smart grouping of extension context menu
• Add Flattr option to the episode context menu

Also, the preparations for gPodder 3.4.0 were done, and (as you probably already saw) gPodder 3.4.0 was released the day after the hack day. Thanks to all for attending, and see you again in January for the Hack Day January 2013.

Progress report from the November hack day

Since October this year, parts of the gPodder team meet up every month now in Vienna to work on the project in person, which allows us do better discuss design decisions, help each other with understanding the code, and push forward different parts of the gPodder sub-projects (gPodder itself, libmygpo-qt, gpodder.net, etc...).

This month's hack day took place this weekend. Among other things, we fixed bug 1711, integrated the episode shownotes window into the main window (this still needs some more work, but in general I think having the shownotes in the main window as extra pane is nicer than having a separate window pop up) and removed the long-deprecated gpodder.api module. Stefan restructured the API documentation for gpodder.net, which should make it easier to find your way around all the features our web service provides. As always, Stefan also spend some time getting some bugfixes and UI improvements integrated and deployed. As the extension system in the gPodder client gets more and more uses, Bernd worked on improving it by adding categories and new metadata fields that allow us to set extensions to be mandatory in certain UIs (e.g. we always want to load the Unity integration extensions if the user happens to run Unity, without requiring the user to hunt down the extension and manually activate it). In general, these changes should improve the usability of extensions in the long run. A student from the project group working on a gpodder.net client app for Android has also joined us for the first time, and we hope to see more from this project soon.

Thanks to all who attended, and see you next time in December.