gPodder 3.8.0 "On-Screen Bionic Screw Fastening" released

Well, then - another gPodder 3.x release for all fans of Desktop operating systems and MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Version 3.8.0 brings a bugfix related to deleting empty folders, various UI improvements to the Nokia N9 port, path fixes to the Windows launcher executable as well as other minor corrections and translation updates.

• Generic fixes and maintenance
• gpodder.util: Fix a bug in delete_empty_folders
• Fix a typo in the German translations
• Mention tools/localdepends.py in dependency check
• Remove obsolete Qt4-based Sailfish QML UI
• makefile: Force UTF-8 encoding in xgettext
• Updated German translations
• QML UI (Nokia N9 / MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan)
• Nicer "pull down to refresh" animation
• Allow updating of episode list via pull down
• Elide text in podcast and episode lists
• Scroll to top and bottom quickly (bug 1908)
• "Mark episodes as old" menu item for "All episodes"
• Better gpodder.net directory integration
• Margin fixes for sheets (bug 1915)
• Copy feed URL to clipboard menu item (bug 1916)
• Also show spinner while episode list is loading
• Move filter to episode list header
• Use new JSON API for searching gpodder.net
• Windows Launcher
• Fix download file name for custom folder (bug 1617)
• Update to Python 2.7.8 and PyGTK 2.24.2

As always, a detailed changelog is available at gpodder.org/changelog/3.8.0.

Download: gpodder-3.8.0.tar.gz
md5sum: a74e202eec6a00c73b2dab04e5b9f3c0
sha1sum: 03733e9954e7828ecbcc3738838a825cc5ef8076

For packages in distributions, see the downloads page.

Thanks to all users who continue to support the gPodder project by providing bug reports, patches, documentation, feedback or donations / Flattrs. Enjoy this new release! 

Future considerations: Gtk+ 3 and Python 3 support

Currently for our Desktop UI, we use PyGTK and GTK+ 2. In recent years and months, GObject Introspection has become available and with it new, dynamic bindings to GObject-based libraries like Gtk. Also, for future releases, the GObject Introspection-based Python bindings will be the only ones available, so it's a good idea to be forward-thinking and trying to see how good we can support gPodder.

I've now started an experimental branch based on the "tres" branch to see how well we can support it today, the result is gPodder running in Gtk 3:

You can grab the (highly experimental and unsupported) code from the tres-gtk3 branch on Github. This also paves the way for a possible upgrade to Python 3 in the future, as PyGObject bindings are already available on Python 3 (I haven't done any elaborate experiments with it apart from some very basic tests, though). However, neither PyGObject support nor Python 3 support will land in the first release of "tres" for practical reasons, but rest assured that we'll make the switch when we think it's a good idea (i.e. when PyGObject bindings are a bit more stable and more widespread in distributions). We will probably also switch to the new bindings first and only after we've stabilized the codebase there, we can then move on to working on the Python 3 support.

Python 3 support is more complicated, though - because some UIs (e.g. the QML UI, which depends on the PySide bindings to Qt) are not yet compatible with Python 3, or lack support elsewhere (e.g. on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan as found on the N950 or N9, only Python 2.6 is available, with no Python 3 in sight - at least not officially supported). Maybe that's something we can aim for in gPodder 4 then ;)

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: