FeedReader for OpenMoko

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer mickey at openmoko.org
Wed Mar 21 23:45:20 CET 2007


Hey Zecke,

> department of confusion confirms zecke has been seen hacking Gtk for
> the last three hours. The result is a comparsion between Qts  
> Interview Framework and Gtk's one and a RSS reader. If you consider  
> that Gtk's stuff was created back in 2002 (and even earlier) it is  
> actually quite good.

Glad to hear that.

> Well http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~freyther/FeedReader.png a  
> screenshot, and the source http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~freyther/ 
> openmoko-rssreader-0.0.1.tar.bz2 and it would be appreciated if svn  
> would be made to work soonish.

Yeah! That's quite an achievement for a quick hack.

> I decided to use libmrss as this is a small but powerful and rather  
> complete reader and composer library. And the autofoo usage is quite  
> clean and obvious. This allows me to only concentrate on the  
> userinterface.

Wise choice!

>   - How should the config dialog look like? How to add categories for
> the filter bar? Screenshots would be welcome. E.g. a quick add  that  
> shows a GtkEntry and a ComboBox to select the group and a complete  
> management dialog that allows you to move and delete existing feeds?

Thanks, we have forwarded this to the graphics-designer. They will
complete the specs asap.

> - HTTP authentication. I have never seen a private livejournal page  
> how would a password dialog look like? What keyring do we have at  
> OpenMoko? Where to cache passwords :)

I'm afraid I don't have an answer yet...

> - Integration into messages. The messages application could poll the  
> feeds according to the SkipHours and then open the feed reader to  
> download the feed.

Sounds interesting.

> - Offline viewing of feed data. Should we cache the data?

Yes.

> how much data should be cached?

I'd like to have an API in libmokocore that allows you to query the
amount of cache you are allowed to use per-app and allows you to query
the path for caching data. That way libmokocore can control this
depending on global preferences, heuristics, and information about the
attached storage devices.

>  If a user presses refresh should we keep the  
> old data in case of connection errors.

Yes.

> - Should we cache images from the feeds?

Yes, but please honor the overall caching limit (see above)

> - The "refresh all button", Is it bound to the active categroy? e.g.  
> refresh all feeeds in the current category/filter or is it global?

Sounds like you should use the popupmenu facility of the
MokoToolButton here.

> - What should we do with the extra toolbox buttons. Currently they  
> say "Rent me" and "Buy more Mate". I would not mind to display Ad  
> Click advertising on these buttons but if you have a better use  
> shout. E.g. one could control the font size of the TextView?

Pretty good idea. Since we only have 4 slots for action buttons, I
feel it's a waste if we don't map them to actions.

> - Commercial feeds (sorry both are german) like spiegel.de and  
> heise.de only publish their headlines and force you to visit the real
> webpage. Should one try to display the HTML within the feedbrowser or
> switch to the webbrowser?

Try to display HTML -- even if it just knows about a couple of tags. A
full-fledged webbrowser won't be there very soon.

> - Is the SMS dbus interface specified yet? Would one send the URL or  
> text of the article both?

Please bear with us for some more weeks, that's under construction.

> - How to report progress and errors? Should the Footer be used to  
> display messages?

Yes. That's pending the StatusBar API in MokoApplication which will be
implemented early April (if no one beats me to it) and/or the
openmoko-footer GSoC project.

> - much more I forgot because I ran out of caffeine... and missed my  
> last bus...

D'oh.



> My personal agenda for this is:
>         - Use GAIM HTML tokenizer and display HTML inside the GtkTextView
>          - Use ModelFilter and ModelSort for searching, sorting and  
> filtering the feed
>          - Fight with the Column Header sizing
>          - Implement caching of feed data (e.g. in sqlite)
>          - Do the loading of feeds inside a GThread
>          - Instead of hardcoding the feed data use GConf
>          (- Release the Qtopia version as well)

Great plan! Welcome on Board. It's pleasure to work with you together
in a project again.

Cheers,

-- 
- Michael Lauer <mickey at openmoko.org>                   http://openmoko.org/
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