[Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Linguine is an app that downloads the RSS data from a collection of news services and provides a list of their latest podcasts. You can then choose one of these podcasts to be streamed and played in Linguine's own media player.

You should be able to find this app in the "Extras-Devel" repository.

Some screenshots:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine...guineDaily.png

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine...inguineBBC.png

I've set up a website for the app at

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine/


The grubby details:

I have been slowly, slowly working my way back to updating the Orecciette app; in particular, I've been trying to give myself more of an education into the mysteries of the GStreamer library. So, I've been putting together all sorts of sources & sinks & bus watchers & callbacks and so forth.

One of my little projects involved downloading some podcasts; I kind of liked the idea of just streaming podcasts, without bothering to ever save them to the SD card. So, I built a little RSS reader into the project and started pulling down some news podcasts.

Well, with the just awful and always-getting-worse international news this week, I've been running the poor app practically nonstop. As such, I figured I should go ahead and polish it up a bit and release it.

As of version 0.1.1, the video player is working much better, but only because I'm locking the phone into landscape orientation whenever a video is being played. :o (I take comfort in knowing that this is the same mechanism used by Open Media Player, so it is probably the best solution available...)

I should also note that my N900 gets a bit warm after streaming for a half-hour or more. But it never gets really hot, even after streaming for hours on end, so I don't think this is a serious issue. (And yeah, I've been listening to way too much news this week...)

I've provided a selection of podcasts mostly from the US, but also a few from the UK, Canada, and Japan. I'm not all that familiar with non-US broadcasters, but I'll hopefully be able to add more in the future. And as usual, I've set up an XML file mechanism, so you can add your own podcasts without having to wait on me. An example Linguine XML file can be found at the website:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine/newsfeeds.xml

(And yeah, I don't have a DTD set up for this one yet, either...)

I hope you enjoy this app! :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Man, You've made my night, and my week-end too, and my next week, and the next months! You are just awesome. Thanks a billion....!!! :D

PS: ZIP ? tar.gz ?how can I handle with those files ? :rolleyes: :confused:

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

ZIP ? tar.gz ?how can I handle with those files ?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Linguine is designed to stream podcasts off the net; it isn't really designed to do anything with files. (Except, of course, it can read an XML file to pull in a new list of podcasts.) Can you give me a little more information about what you want it to do?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

I think they're referring to the download links on GitHub. :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Ah! Yeah, those won't be too useful to anyone who doesn't like to compile their own code, I guess. :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Yep, I found the App in the repositories. Man your apps are always clean, clear and simple to use. This app was one I waited for a moment.

PS 1: I have an idea about an other app like this, but which streams video news podcasts (maybe 3gp or mp4) instead of audio.

PS 2: Any idea for French news podcasts ?

PS 3: @Marxian: FARGO avatar ???? :D

Thanks a billion again!!!

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Actually, Linguine can already handle video podcasts (although with some caveats, as noted above). I've got the CBS evening news as well as Anderson Cooper 360 video podcasts already in the list (under "daily" and "news"). I think the most interesting video podcast I've found so far is the Reuter's one (listed under "other" frequency and "news" category); they randomly update that feed with raw videos they've taken from various hot spots around the world.

The biggest problem I've found so far, though, is that most broadcasters have abandoned the standard podcast format for video; instead, they've been switching to more controlled, closed formats that allow them to add advertising or demand upfront payment. I'm not sure I could add support for such closed systems into Linguine...

(But yeah, if you do run a video in Linguine, remember to keep the phone horizontal for now. I will try to get a better video player implemented...)

I know absolutely nothing about French news services, but I'll give it a shot. :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Well, I spent a few minutes this afternoon browsing through the Open Media Player sources to see how they deal with managing video playback in portrait orientation, and discovered that they use an extremely simple (if somewhat disheartening) method: they don't. Instead, they just lock the phone into landscape orientation whenever a video is playing.

So, I went ahead and did that as well. This does "fix" most of the problems with video playback, as I can now lock the GStreamer output into a single, unchanging, horizontal box. And so, version 0.1.1 of Linguine is now heading up to extras-devel.

Also in this update, I fixed a handful of bugs, including one that caused the app to forget any user-loaded podcasts every time it restarted... :o

And, I've added a handful of new podcasts. I've got political shows from the Guardian and TruthDig, a weekly news wrap-up from On Point with Tom Ashbrook, a couple of French-language news dailies from Radio France Internationale, a Spanish program called "24 Horas", a German news brief from Tagesschau, and the BBC Russian Service. As I only speak English, I can't really vouch for the quality of the podcasts in other languages... Also, I've added another video podcast, the left-leaning news program "Democracy Now!". I'll try to add some more video podcasts now that I have more confidence in the video player. (It is still choking on some types of video that it really should be able to play, so there is still more improvement needed...)

Enjoy! :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Fine! Thanks in advance! I will try to find some french news podcasts too.
Thanks again for this great app!!!!

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Can you also add an option like "current stream" or "now playing" to go back to the play.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

That shouldn't be too hard to add, let me give it a shot... :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Can you also add an option to automatically download the podcasts and save them in the software to listen/watch them later?

And also an option to sort the podcasts by audio or video

Then i think it should be perfect!!! :D

I also have a similar idea for newsfeed app with a simple widget on the desktop which shows news (mostly from xml rss feeds).
A bit like the android geniewidget (news and meteo widget). Your apps are very clean and simple. The widget could be resizable as fettuccine widgets!!!

PS: talking about xml, i can't modify the one in first post (newsfeed.xml). I don't know why but it seems that it gets corrupted when i try to add other links. Anyway it's hard to find links (not as easy as fettuccine webcams) so if you have more links, update the file in the first post!!!!

:D, Well, enough typed!!! Thanks for this great app and Keep the good work!!!!!

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Ah, well, just between you and me, quite a bit of the underlying guts of Linguine was ripped out of a longer-term project I've been working on, to manage collections of media retrieved from sources like RSS. (I'm a huge fan of Mike Duncan's history podcasts, but downloading the entire set every time I get a new device is an awful pain...)

But that project still has a long, long way to go. :) I'll see if I can implement something simpler in Linguine. (Until then, I should note that a decent general-purpose podcast client, such as gPodder, can probably be made to do all sorts of tricks beyond the abilities of Linguine...)

Absolutely! :) (Actually, I built that into the first iteration of Linguine, but I was having so many problems with video that I figured I'd have to ditch it and go with just audio podcasts...) I'm also thinking that filtering by language might be nice, or by country of origin, or even conservative / liberal (as a lot of the media in the US today has become completely partisan...).

Hmm. Probably the best thing to do would be to let the user tag the podcasts themselves, and sort by those tags. Everybody has their own favorite way of doing things. :)

Hmm. There already is a standard RSS widget that comes with Maemo... I guess I don't really use it much, as I personally don't find trying to read through long lists of news items on a cellphone very comfortable. (Let alone such a list crammed into a little desktop widget. This is one widget that I'd resize to be as large as possible! :) ) But yeah, Linguine as a widget would work for me; a widget that showed just a single line of text, or heck, even just an icon showing that there was a new audio news item available, that I could then click on and listen to; that's something that I might go for... Let me take a look at it. :) (But yeah, do check out the existing RSS widget and see what you think about it!)

Will do! :) Sorry about the crappyness of my current XML parser, I really did just throw it together very quickly. (It has absolutely no user-friendliness, and is probably buggy to boot. I'll improve it as I have time...) Thanks!

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Let me take the ball while is still bouncing.. ;)
I suppose you are not the only one not using the N900 rss readers... i can't find one good working solution for a reader with a decent widget and a good management of rss bookmarks.
Yes, it's not supposed to have the same functions of a desktop application...but at least a nice customizable widget for a quick overview of latest news. ..Hoping someone would pick up the request
...... :rolleyes:

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

YEAH!!! That's what i had in mind. the stock one is very :mad: to use!!! For sure someone will pick up the request!!!

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Well, as I do now have an RSS parser and the ability to create widgets, let me ask: what would make a good RSS reader? I did a quick google of the "genie widget", and most of the screenshots seem to show it taking up the full screen; is there a good way to deal with RSS data in a tiny widget window? (On the other hand, perhaps a full-screen widget would work in this case; the Maemo UI guidelines specify that widgets should never take up more than half the screen, but with so many desktop screens available, I kind of like the idea of being able to dedicate an entire desktop to a single task...)

And what features should a good RSS reader support?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

- widget size should be customizable (size or entries)
- there should be a way to select the categories that should be checked in the widget (if i have 20 bookmarks, have all of them in the widget is a mess)
- custonizable actions (update,scroll, open THAT entry)
...
Just a few ideas, most of times what we need is a quick overview to decide what is interesting.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Sorry to ask a silly question but do we need another RSS feed reader?
I actually like the stock one, it's not perfect but I assume it nothing that couldn't be fixed as the sources (widget and reader) are available.

Set to open MicroB straight from the widget, it works fine for my news feeds.

There are a couple iof RSS applications in extras too including FeedingIt

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

@sixwheeledbeast
I tried every feed reader application. None of those is ready for a daily use.(sorry for the authors)
Probably the stock one is the best but after a few hours you can discover all the missing settings that make the widget far from be usable.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

I seem to remember trying a few and returning to the stock one.
Well why not fix the stock one so everyone can benefit from the extra features?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

I've taken a quick look at "osso-rss-feed-reader" in Gitorious, which I think is the source for Maemo's RSS reader:

https://gitorious.org/osso-rss-feed-reader

It doesn't look too hard to work with, but it is a GTK project. For myself, I'd be more comfortable coding in Qt... But porting the Osso app to Qt would probably be such a big project, you might as well consider it a new app afterwards. :)


I've found a couple of very fascinating RSS discussion pages here on the Maemo site, started by Qgil; a wiki page on a new RSS app:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:RSS_feed_reader

and the corresponding forum thread:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=25706

It doesn't look like the effort got very far, though...

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

This is a fair point.
Well to even start fixing or re-coding the current one a list of proposed features would be a start. From there you could decided which direction to take?

I suppose I am just concerned it's less efficient spending time to make something we all ready have that could be fixed.
The more core Maemo applications that people work on the better IMO.

Maybe we should move this discussion over there?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Well, my current point of view is that I'm enjoying streaming podcasts with Linguine, and am quite willing to extend Linguine towards more general RSS work if folks are interested. However, I'm not an expert on RSS (I don't generally use any RSS readers myself), nor well-educated on GTK, nor for that matter much of a user interfaces guy to begin with. :) So, I may not be the best guy for doing a total overhaul of the existing RSS reader...

But yeah, as you pointed out, all of this discussion really hinges on the list of proposed features. To start with, I agree with the top item on Qgil's list, the integration of multimedia into the RSS app. ;) I would also like to see a widget that has less emphasis on being finger-friendly and more on supporting a large, easy-to-read display of news headlines...

Er, which "there"? :) Qgil's thread? Or maybe the Gitorious forum for osso-rss?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

I understand

Well the stock application doesn't have a 'wrench' option. This could be added with a resize widget option.

That's what I was thinking

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Given the amount of qt apps and lack of gtk devs, i don't think sticking to stock rss is a necessity here.

would it not be simpler to extend what you've got to cover text/web feeds? The sample xml file on the website already contains a media tag, so why not just add an extra type here and a simple renderer using a textbox or qtwebkit if necessary. Then it should (but probably won't :) ) be as easy as detecting feed type on click and selecting appropriate renderer.

In all honesty, I've always thought of the stock rss app as less integrated than the rest. It just doesn't have the same appearance or polish. Might be the split window vs stacked that does it.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Well, after spending days going in a dozen different directions with this app, I figured I should go ahead and pull together what I've got so far and release an interim build, to get some idea of what folks think about it. So, version 0.2.0 of Linguine is now heading up to the extras-devel repository. In this build:

* Newsfeeds are now being organized by category. The list of available categories are displayed in a scrollable tab bar at the top of the main screen. Tapping on a tab brings up a list of the associated newsfeeds in the list below. Unfortunately, the categories are currently restricted to a handful of defaults; I'm still working on the process for creating custom categories.

An image containing the new tab bar:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine...guineVideo.png

* Linguine now has limited support for standard textual RSS newsfeeds. Text newsfeeds will be displayed in the main screen in pretty much the same manner as podcasts, by just picking the most recent item off the list and displaying its title. When you click on one, the entire RSS file will be opened up in a new window inside a QWebView widget; so far, this seems to be the most easily readable mechanism I've found to display the data. Unfortunately, clicking on any links within the data will bring them up within the widget; I'm still working out how to pull them up with an external browser. Expect lots of additional tweaking here in the future.

An image of a text feed being displayed:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine...nguineText.png

* I am still plugging away on my original goal of teaching myself GStreamer. Last week's topic was "seeking", and so seeking support has been added to the audio and video playback windows. In the audio window, there is now a button with a double-headed arrow; press this, and a dialog box will pop up with a slider that will allow you to move to an arbitrary point in the podcast. For the video player, the slider is constantly available at the bottom of the screen. Here's an image of the audio window with the new button:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine...inguineNPR.png

On the widget front, I'm becoming skeptical that I'll ever be able to have what I would like. The sticking point for me turns out to be the incredibly limited set of input controls available: you can't "swipe", because Maemo uses that gesture to switch between desktops. You cant use a "long press", because that brings up the "edit mode". (This also means that you can't "drag", because you'd have to do a "long press" to do that.) So, the only UI control available appears to be a quick tap somewhere on the widget.

In short, this seems to mean you can't have a widget that you can scroll. This is a showstopper for most of the widget concepts I was coming up with...

I'm still fiddling with lots of other stuff: the mechanism for refreshing the feeds within Linguine, the UI for constructing your own categories, the UI for adding newsfeeds, and as always more GStreamer support. I'll try to get more updates out in the near future. :)

Edit: If you are updating to this version of Linguine, you will need to go to the menu and select "reset newsfeeds", as the internal newsfeed options have changed slightly.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

great work on this update! I'm testing it right now.
I have one more request: keep the backlight on when watching video podcasts.
:D

Edit: yeah, my 700th post!! :D :cool:

WOW and big thanks for the french link links :D you added! Really cool! :cool:

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Actually, I'm not sure I can force the backlight to stay on from within the app itself. There is an option in the Maemo "Settings" app under the "Display" category called "Display stays lit while charging", that will leave the backlight on while the phone is plugged in. I should note, though, that when I tried streaming down a video and charging the battery while leaving the backlight on, the phone did get fairly warm. Use with caution!

I will investigate more French news sources. :) (I should at least get some French broadcasts for the CBC, as I've already got English ones...)

Edit: Scratch that, dunno what I'm thinking. The normal media player plays video without the screen going dark, so I just need to find the right settings somewhere...

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

You can override the default behaviour when clicking on links by setting the 'linkDelegationPolicy' property of QWebPage to QWebPage :: DelegateAllLinks (or QWebPage :: DelegateExternalLinks if you want the QWebView to handle local resources).

Using a QWebView, you can access the QWebPage via the page() function:

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

You can do it with libx11 by setting the "_HILDON_DO_NOT_DISTURB" property: https://github.com/marxoft/qt-compon...creensaver.cpp.

NOTE: I'm not certain that the above example works. It may be necessary to pass the id of the application window, instead of using the desktop widget.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

On managing external links:

Cool, I'll give that a shot! I was thinking of perhaps displaying the RSS feed in something other than a QWebView in order to have better control over the embedded links & such, but it is so much easier to just construct an HTML page and let the web viewer do all the hard work. ;)

On managing the backlight:

Thank you very much! I'll use this for Linguine videos asap. :)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

with the webview, would it be cleaner looking to implement a stylesheet. that way you could cheat a bit to recreate maemo ui colors.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

That shouldn't be too hard to do, I've been learning a bit about stylesheets elsewhere. However, every time I play around with setting colors, I start worrying that I'll end up clashing with any theming choices made by the user. Do you know if there's a way to find out what the user's theme color scheme is?

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

You can use QMaemo5Style::standardColor(). :) There's a list of the colors here: https://github.com/marxoft/qt-compon...tformstyle.cpp.

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Marxian to the rescue again! ;)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Well, given the set of requests brought up yesterday and the equal set of solutions immediately provided by Marxian to each request, it seemed only logical to go ahead and implement those solutions. :) So, version 0.2.1 is now working its way into extras-devel. In this version, the screen saver is now turned off while videos are running. (As it turns out, at least when using Maemo's stacked windows, you need to set the do-not-disturb property on the currently active window, rather than the main application window.) One curiosity is that when you turn the property off, Maemo does not immediately restart the screen saver timer; you apparently need to perform an action (such as closing the video window or changing the volume) to get the timer moving again. (I would imagine that there is some way to programmatically force it to start again, I'll look into it...)

Also in this release, clicking on links in the RSS Text display will open them in the default web browser, rather than in Linguine itself. This works much much better. :)

And, the Text RSS display is now colored in a manner that should fit better with the user's chosen theme. There isn't a 1-1 mapping from Maemo text colors to HTML CSS text colors, but they can get pretty close; I've got the "Default Background Color" and "Default Text Color" set as the CSS defaults, and I've associated the "Active Text Color" with links. In any case, here's a screenshot of a Text RSS using this scheme:

http://jpietrzak8.github.io/Linguine...guineText2.png

I've also continued to add a few more news feeds. In particular, I've got ICI Radio-Canada audio headlines and text RSS. (ICI is the Francophone half of the CBC.) As before, please go to the main menu and select "Reset Newsfeeds" to pick up these new feeds. Thanks! (And thanks Marxian!)

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Colors in screenshot look good enough to me

Re: [Announce] Linguine - News & Politics from around the world
 

Quick request can we name the window after the feed name, like media player and other media applications do?