gPodder 3.6.0 "Population: Zero" released

Time for another release of the stable gPodder 3.x release series. This release is recommended for all users.

• Bugfixes and packaging additions
• Various YouTube-related fixes
• Add manpage for gpodder-migrate2tres
• Fix FreeBSD network detection (bug 1730)
• Fix double episode download bug
• gpodder.net-related fixes if sync is not enabled
• Gtk UI
• Update shownotes behaviour
• Show duration column instead of size by default
• Move podcast list view options to preferences dialog
• Gtk status icon extension: Add option for progress bar
• Display episode's last played position (not only duration)
• Do not save maximized window position to configuration
• Model
• Fix problem with migrated databases
• Play info string for finished episodes contains duration
• Do not add files without filename
• iPod Synchronization
• Alpha release by Joseph Wickremasinghe
• Device Synchronization
• Require eyed3 version 0.7 (Fixes #100)
• Internationalization and localization
• Update translation templates from source
• Updated German translation

As always, a detailed changelog is available at gpodder.org/changelog/3.6.0.

Download: gpodder-3.6.0.tar.gz
md5sum: 1867850208964cb9121cd13daaad7c24
sha1sum: 211e4aa68b3cbd42d7b7f5d8dd3deecbb7efcd22

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. For this release, special thanks go out to patch contributors: Andreas Piesk, Ben Hummon, Dov Feldstern, Joseph Wickremasinghe, Tony Mancill, Wes Morgan and zombie.

gPodder 4 QML UI on on Blackberry 10

While for Sailfish OS, we do a native UI, the Blackberry 10 version of gPodder will at the moment not feature a native UI due to the native UI (Cascades) not being available for Qt 5 yet. Instead, we will use our own QML UI Reference Implementation, which shares common code with the Sailfish OS UI, and just uses plain QtQuick 2.0 elements and a custom UI Component set specifically for gPodder.

Powered by the Open Iconic icon set and Source Sans Pro, the QML Reference UI takes gPodder onto a new set of platforms, while still keeping some of the patterns we have established with the Harmattan (Nokia N9) version of gPodder:

• Playback color is "blue", play/pause right from the episode list, playback progress subtly displayed inside the episode item; currently-playing episode item highlighted in blue
• Download color is "green", download progress is displayed on the episode item
• Separate play page (now in the "blue" playback color scheme) with a progress bar, but also seek buttons for going 10 seconds and 1 minute in both directions - skip advertisements or talk segments easily, or skip back to rehearse
• Adding subscriptions by directly entering the feed URL, with some shortcuts (e.g. "fb:" for 
• feedburner-based URLs, etc...) or by using the gpodder.net search feature

All this runs nicely on any system where Python 3 and Qt 5 is available. For glue, we use PyOtherSide, which has recently got its first public 1.1.0 release, and is now well-documented over at readthedocs.org.

In summary, we're making good progress on gPodder 4 for both Sailfish OS and Blackberry 10. Once we've release gPodder 4 for those platforms, we might want to look into porting it to other platforms.

podcastparser 0.2.1 released

podcastparser is a simple, fast and efficient podcast parser written in Python. This library is a dependency of gPodder 4, and is used for parsing RSS and Atom feeds there, replacing feedparser used in gPodder 3 and earlier. Advantages of podcastparser include smaller size and better performance (especially on mobile devices) for podcast parsing, as well as support for some XML extensions for podcasts (e.g. iTunes Podcast).

Changes in version 0.2.1:

• First official release
• Added support for Atom feeds (in 0.2.0)
• Updated documentation and new website

podcastparser-0.2.1.tar.gz (2014-02-05)
md5sum: 0ff9614417830c5217d851121d23b1bf
sha1sum: 35acce15063944cff35241ec7afe81245a6c5e06

gPodder 4 on Sailfish OS - progress report (pt 2)

It's time for another gPodder-on-Sailfish OS update. Since last time, there have been some improvements to the three modules that together result in gPodder for Sailfish: core, ui-qml and sailfish.

The core is now fully complying with the XDG Base Directory specification, which isn't only important for Harbour requirements, but also makes gPodder behave nicer on Desktop Linux (if you still care about where gPodder puts its data, use symlinks or the still-supported $GPODDER_HOME and $GPODDER_DOWNLOAD_DIR variables).

In the ui-qml module, which serves as glue code between the native frontend UI, using PyOtherSide and the gPodder core, new pass-through functions have been added for deleting episodes (ef279bbd), toggling the "new" flag (3579f4bf) and renaming podcasts as well as changing podcast sections (d267582a).

And finally, the Sailfish Silica UI variant of gPodder has received some love, with added features, Silica-ization (e.g. the Subscribe page is now a dialog, and you can swipe to confirm instead of relying on a normal button) and some layout fixes.

Here's a video of the current development version:

The gPodder 4 development version is not yet ready for prime time, so if you want to try it out already, you have to clone (--recursive, to also clone the submodules automatically) it from source. Make sure you have PyOtherSide and Python 3 installed on your Sailfish OS device. For development, there's a convenient "dev_symlinks.sh" script that will create symlinks so you can run it directly from a source checkout. Rsync the source tree to your device via ssh, then start by pointing qmlscene at the harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish.qml file. Once gPodder 4 gets a bit more stable and feature-complete, and once Harbour gains support for PyOtherSide and Python 3, the plan is to put gPodder into the Jolla Store for easy downloading onto devices.

gPodder 4 on Sailfish OS - progress report

Back in action, we have some small progress to report on gPodder 4's Sailfish OS port: The QML UI has now been mostly converted to use Sailfish Silica, so work can now progress on finishing features and polishing up the UI. The plan is to get gPodder into Jolla Store, which will happen as soon as it's mostly feature-complete (day to day usable) and once PyOtherSide is a supported API in Jolla Harbour (which is a work in progress also).


The source code can be found at http://github.com/gpodder/gpodder-sailfish (you can use "git clone --recursive" to also check out the submodules in one go).

The research work done on the podcastparser library really pays off - compared to the feedparser-based parser used in gPodder 2 and gPodder 3, gPodder 4's podcastparser parses most feeds almost instantly on a WLAN connection. Add to that the nice asynchronous nature of PyOtherSide, and you get a really fast application for which most users probably can't tell the difference between a Python-based and C++-based Silica application.

gPodder 4 status update: Sailfish OS and BB10

It's time for another status update on the upcoming gPodder release: Version 4.0.0. Version 4 will (at least initially) be more aimed towards mobile devices and QML, for all other use cases, you can keep using (and contributing to) gPodder 3.

The bleeding edge development happens in the "cuatro" branch in the main gPodder Git repository. From there, code is merged to the "gpodder-core" repository, which only contains the core gPodder library. On top of the core library, there are user interfaces, the single one that we have right now is the QML UI Reference Implementation in the "gpodder-ui-qml" repository. Taking this one step further are then the device/OS-specific repositories for customizations and packaging. Right now, we have "gpodder-bb10" for packaging of gPodder on Blackberry 10 as well as "gpodder-sailfish" for gPodder on Sailfish OS. Both of these use "gpodder-core" and "gpodder-ui-qml" as submodules to import the code from there, but might customize or replace parts of the QML UI Reference Implementation with platform-specific controls (but the Reference Implementation itself is still fully self-contained and functional, and in fact, most of the OS-specific packaging right now reuse everything and don't customize UI elements - yet).

Of course, for all you keyboard cowboys out there, we still have the CLI ("gpo") available. This is actually in the "gpodder-core" repository and is used to test the core library.

The gPodder 4 QML UI is not at all complete yet, but basic subscribing, downloading and playback works already. Stay tuned!

gPodder 3.5.2 "The Prime Mover" released

It's time for another release of gPodder, your favorite podcast client. This release brings some improvements and fixes that we've collected over the last few months. An upcoming release of gPodder 3 will contain iPod support that Joseph is currently working on. But for now, here are the highlights of gPodder 3.5.2:

• Extensions
• Support for Flattr'ing extensions and showing documentation (Bernd)
• Option to auto-embed covert art images into files (bug 1742, Bernd)
• Gtk UI
• Various keyboard-related improvements
• Various fixes (Eugene, bugs 1825, 1832, 1834)
• Device sync: Fix to only include episodes in playlist (Joseph)
• QML UI
• Various UX-related improvements (Rigoberto, bug 1813, PR #94)
• Translation updates
• Italian (Maurizio)
• Spanish (Rigoberto)
• Tooling and other fixes
• Disable gpodder.net when authentication failed (Stefan)
• makefile: Add Harmattan an Sailfish to QMLFILES

As always, a detailed changelog is available at gpodder.org/changelog/3.5.2.

Download: gpodder-3.5.2.tar.gz
md5sum: 03b6906fbb52bce49542ec53632cf07d
sha1sum: a39dfdba48424322c7d5579d92c2622a57591997

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.