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).

mygpoclient 1.7 "Nuisance Value" released

Another catch-up release of mygpoclient is out, bringing you new features and an improved syncing experience. The top contributors of this release are Stefan Derkits with 12 commits, and Stefan Kögl with 5 commits. New features include:

• Additional attributes for simple.Podcast
• Getting top tags and podcasts of a tag (public API)
• Added support for podcast and episode data requests
• Support and unit tests for the settings URLs
• Raise MissingCredentials exception in SimpleClient
• Accept episode actions with "flattr" as their type
• Various fixes, clean-ups and unit test improvements

It is recommended that all users upgrade to this new version of mygpoclient - it will become mandatory in a future gPodder release (or at least mandatory when gpodder.net syncing is used)

Download: mygpoclient-1.7.tar.gz
md5sum: fc4e237c40eba0733a362949d304974c
sha1sum: 9efb1d07b75b13bfa1ea7c644505ebef14fabb26

More information can be found on the mygpoclient homepage and in the cheeseshop.

Android Client "Detlef Gpodderson" 1.0 released

(This blog post comes from the Detlef team, who just finished their one-semester project at University to create a gpodder.net client for Android.)

After almost 800 hours of work, attending hackdays, thousands of lines written (and thousand of lines deleted again) it's finally done: Version 1.0 of Detlef Gpodderson has been released on Google Play.

Excuse me, but who is Detlef?
Detlef is the code name of a gpodder.net client for Android 4+ devices. It was created by a team of 6 students during a university course on software engineering tutored by Stefan (@horrendus) and released under the terms of the GNU GPLv2 license.

800 hours of work may sound like a lot for such an app - but the course focused in large parts on project management, organisation and documentation. So the 800 hours did not go exclusively in coding as one might think.

The resulting software forms a good basis for further development, and contributions are very welcome!

Sounds nice, but what can I do with it?
Detlef Gpodderson is designed as a dedicated client for gpodder.net for devices running Android 4.0 or newer. Here's what you can do with this first release:

• Synchronize podcast subscriptions (two-way)
• Discover new podcasts from within the app
• Listen to podcasts using the integrated media player
• Create playlists, filter episodes lists and much more

You want to contribute? Great!
Everybody can contribute to Detlef, and you don't even need to be able to write code to help us! Here are some ideas what you can do to help us out:

• Report bugs and suggestions for improvement
• Rate and review the app in Google Play
• Send a pull request with your code contributions
• Translate the app into your language
• Spread the word - write a blog post, tweet about it :)

All that’s left to say is: Have fun with Detlef, and send us some feedback! If something does not work in this first version, please file a bug or even send a pull request - we are sure that we can iteratively improve the application to a point where it's the best podcatcher on Android.

gPodder @ FOSDEM 2013

Several members of the gPodder Dev Team have attended FOSDEM 2013 last weekend in Brussels, Belgium. In addition to meeting with many developers and people from the community, we were also able to meet Eric (of gPodder-Mac OS X fame) and taste the wide selection of beers in Belgium.

It was also a great opportunity to try on the new gPodder T-Shirts (a very limited edition ;):

You can find more photos of the FOSDEM weekend in Brussels on Flickr.

The next physical meetup will be the Hack Day February 2013 in a bit more than one week. I hopefully get around to do some outstanding pull request merging until then. If you have a change and want to give it a little push, feel free to ping me (thp) directly.

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!

Flattr support in gpodder.net

Flattr support has just been added to gpodder.net! Flattr is an easy way to support content creators by giving small amounts of money for content you enjoy. gpodder.net makes flattring podcasts even easier for listeners, publishers and client developers.

Listeners
When you connect your Flattr account in the gpodder.net Flattr settings, Flattr buttons will show up for all podcasts and episodes that accept donations through Flattr. You can also set up auto-flattring played episodes -- this will automatically flattr all episodes that you've listened to on a supported client (currently gPodder and Amarok). The directory contains a list of all podcasts that accept Flattr donations.

Publishers
When a podcast feed includes a payment URL gpodder.net will enable flattr buttons and auto-flattring for it. The publisher pages will indicate if gpodder.net has detected payment URLs in a podcast feed.

Client Developers
When your podcast client supports sending episode actions to gpodder.net it is now automatically Flattr-enabled! When a user enables auto-flattring on the website, all played episodes will automatically be flattred by gpodder.net.
You can also make use of the Settings API to let the user edit Flattr settings locally. The documentation contains a short summary of the Flattr support.

Follow @gpoddernet for new Flattr-enabled podcasts or visit our Flattr directory regularly.

See also the announcement from Flattr.

gPodder 3.4.0 now available for Windows

Builds of gPodder 3.4.0 for Windows are finally available after a short delay of a few days:

Installer for XP/Vista/7: gpodder-3.4.0-setup.exe
md5sum: 53506d61ca779b4bb1ad0f3b7c5a8973
sha1sum: 745f67337e719744f21f6fc460c8f9d97e637938

Standalone .ZIP package: gpodder-3.4.0-win32.zip (SF.net Mirror)
md5sum: e04ad0b2401205b218afc9150904e68e
sha1sum: 852b2560612ec51409eba1dd255429dce34cbca2

As always, please check the downloads page for up to date information on the most recent builds. For details on this release, see the official release announcement.