FeedReader for OpenMoko

[Sean Moss-Pultz]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 02:19 +0100, Holger Freyther wrote:
> 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.

Awesome! This is the one application that I _really_ wanted ;-)

> 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.

Yes. We can work on this together. Harald and Werner are with me in
Germany now...so my time is almost non-existent to read / reply to
emails. I'm hoping to spend an hour or two with the designers sometime
this week.

>   - 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 :)

We don't have this widget designed yet. I can work on this with the
designers this week(end?).

> - 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?

I'm a big fan of caching this data. Currently I use a Nokia N73. The
feed reader is very simple but does its job. My biggest gripe is just
that it can't view offline content.

> - 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?

We should probably have this as pull down action button. Something like:

	* Refresh Subscription
	* Refresh All Subscriptions

(http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Action_Button)

> - 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?

Hide them?

> - 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?

Hmm...the width is 480 so this might not be horrible. Have you tried
actually showing the html?

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

Not that I know of. Mickey do you know?

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

Yes. This was our idea. We thought that the background region of the
footer could be a status bar.

> - 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)

Thanks again for starting on this application. You just made my week ;-)

-Sean