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.

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.

gPodder 3.4.0 "Quiet Earth" released

A new release of gPodder 3 is out, this time the first one since about 3 months, and bringing with it some nice improvements and refinements. I hope you'll like this one :) As this release combines the changes of roughly three months of work, the ChangeLog is a bit longer this time.

• QML UI (MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan on the N950 and N9)
• Check for new episodes via "Pull down to refresh"
• Subscribe to new podcast list is now a QML Sheet
• Open show note links in browser (bug 1556)
• Fix back button behavior (bug 1677)
• New episode list model (speeds up scrolling)
• Various smaller clean-ups and UI improvements
• Gtk UI
• Fix wrong artwork in podcast settings (bug 1675)
• Don't auto-update when offline (bug 107)
• Import titles from OPML / directory (bug 1711)
• Integrate shownotes into main window
• Don't require Gtk+ 2.24 in .ui file
• Web UI
• Various improvements to the interface (pull request 17)
• Command-line interface (gpo)
• Align safe_print() with Python 3's print() (bug 1697)
• Added experimental pipe-based IPC interface ("gpo pipe")
• YouTube
• Fix the new 403 issue (bug 1665)
• Gtk UI for video quality selection (pull request 19)
• Add support for https:// links
• Remove dependency on OrderedDict
• Fix downloading on Harmattan
• Extensions
• Improvements to the extension system
• New extension: update_feeds_on_startup (bug 1656)
• New extension: Enqueue in media player (bug 1583)
• Updated: TED Talks Subtitle Downloader Extension
• Groups and submenus in episode list context menu
• Add disable_in=win32 to a few extensions (bug 1729)
• Clean-ups and refactoring
• Remove old api.py module
• Remove podcast_id accessor functions (bug 1696)
• Don't warn about system files on Windows (bug 1712)
• Handle mygpoclient's MissingCredentials exception
• Util: Python 2.6 compatibility fix
• Vacuum minidb-based databases too (bug 1721)
• gpodder.util: Use gpodder.ui.win32 for new code
• Flattr integration
• Reload when pressing play in the shownotes (bug 1684)
• Use util.sanitize_encoding for the flattr payment-url
• Add Flattr option to the episode context menu
• Network connectivity detection
• Basic Offline mode support (bug 107)
• Offline mode detection for OS X (bug 107)
• Linux: Detect PPP as Internet connection (bug 1702)
• Other changes
• Download strategy: Only keep latest (bug 188)
• Download: Rate-limiting for progress updates
• Device sync: Per-podcast sync option (pull request 22)
• Updated translations from source (+German translation)
• Vimeo: Fix downloading of Vimeo videos

As always, a detailed changelog is available at gpodder.org/changelog/3.4.0.

Download: gpodder-3.4.0.tar.gz
md5sum: 1fc04fdc8ff3666316cd7fa74400d30e
sha1sum: 04e079c19a82f8c0f4c154d61921ceb907921e67

For packages in distributions, see the downloads page.

Thanks to all users who supported the gPodder project by providing bug reports, patches, documentation, feedback or donations / Flattrs. Special thanks to our first-time contributors for this release: Andreas Piesk, Chionsas, Daniel Schaal, Josh Mondragon, Sean Munkel and Simon Schubert - keep those patches coming!

gPodder 2.20.3 "The Odd Pod" released

As the YouTube fix in version 2.20.2 didn't totally fix the downloads for gPodder 2 users, the fixes integrated into the development version of gPodder 3 have also been backported to version 2.x, so that all Maemo 5 (and Maemo 4) users can also enjoy YouTube downloads again. In addition to that, the Spanish translation has also been updated:

• YouTube fixes (bug 1665, backported by Andreas Piesk)
• Updated Spanish translation (by Simó Albert i Beltran)

Again, we don't really support or develop the 2.20.x branch (except for regression fixes when the time allows it), it is recommended for all users to upgrade to gPodder 3.

Because Maemo 4 and Maemo 5 are not supported anymore in gPodder 3, we provide occasional updates to 2.20.x for these platforms, so that users using the N800, N810 or N900 are not left out in the cold.

Packages for Maemo will be prepared soon.

Download: gpodder-2.20.3.tar.gz
md5sum: 397b4cd542362454598d553fcfdad5b2
sha1sum: 1f58c7d96c4e62cf20d682123ca35bae653bb096

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.