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:



* 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:



* 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:



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.