FeedReader for OpenMoko

[Holger Freyther]

Hi Freaks,

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.

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.


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. As we have some designers and spec writers on this  
project I have a small list of questions.


  - 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?

- 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 :)

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

- Offline viewing of feed data. Should we cache the data? how much  
data should be cached? If a user presses refresh should we keep the  
old data in case of connection errors.

- Should we cache images from the feeds?

- 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?

- 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?

- 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?

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

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

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



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)


z.