Notices

Hildon Event Feed is an event feed application and widget for Maemo5, with the purpose of displaying events posted from third-party applications and scripts. Features:

• Display events in the UI application and homescreen widget.
• Remove an event, or events from a particular source, from within the UI
• Refresh events from within the UI.
• Launch the action defined in the event when activated in the UI or homescreen widget.

From the application developer/script writer side, all interaction with the application is done via DBus. A number of methods are provided to enable developers to:

• Add/remove an event.
• Remove all events from the specified source.
• Add/remove/retrieve a refresh action, which is called when the user presses the 'Refresh' button in the UI or homescreen widget.

Details of the methods, along with some examples, are provided on the (badly formatted) wiki page

The package name is hildonevents.

Some screenshots:

is this in extras-devel?

Yes. Current version is 0.0.3.

Just wondering, is it possible to show/notify twitter mentions and FB notifications with this?

fb account events???

You can use it for anything you like, as long as you have access to the information that you want to display. The event feed only displays events, it doesn't retrieve them.

More projects!? You must be super efficient! Also, great to see that the software has been released with documentation; thank you.

I have a few suggestions, which you are free to disregard, but your answers to the related questions would be of great benefit to many, even if you only do so on this thread.

Homepage
On the package page, the homepage field is empty. Perhaps, this could be assigned to the Wiki page?

Package information/description
Although the package information is written in clear language and well formed sentences (which is more than can be said a lot of packages!), I'm a little unsure the purpose of this programme. For those of us who are not so adept at dealing with systems etc., would it be possible to re-phrase the description?

Current:
Hildon event feed allows third-party applications or scripts to display events in the event feed application and homescreen widget.

Does this mean...
Hildon Event Feed (hildonevents) is an application that displays forthcoming events in its own desktop widget, in the form of an automatically updated list, or feed.

In this context, an event is ... <meaning of the term event>

• Can you elaborate on what an event is? System, calendar, when application x does y, etc. Maybe some general examples?

Events can be associated with Hildon Event Feed, so that they show up in the feed, by ... <summary of method to include events in feed>

• e.g. events are added to the feed using dbus and/or a higher-level language, like python.

*
* Is this correct as well? *
* Hildon Event Feed can also be configured to
* conditionally initiate secondary events, when
* an event in the feed occurs.
*

One point I'd make about the examples (I think there's only one at the moment, but written in two languages?), is: would it be possible to annotate them to say what the code does? Not too much detail, something like: in this example we're going to <action>, in order to do this we <send_signal> and <receive_signal>. Clearly, a full dbus tutorial is beyond the scope of this Wiki/article but a little context would be really helpful.

I'd be happy to add to the existing Wiki page myself, if I knew what I was writing was correct! (e.g. paste from your response).

From a beginner's point of view, and having looked through your examples on the Wiki, this could be quite a good way of learning how dbus works - by seeing it in action (so to speak) - in which case, extra thanks!

I'll do that for the next version.

Hildon Event Feed works in much the same way as the Harmattan Event Feed. I suppose I made the assumption that people were familiar with that.

The Event Feed displays events that are added to its database by third-party applications. These events are added using DBus.

Typical events:

• Twitter tweet.
• Facebook post.
• News article from an RSS feed.
• YouTube video.

A typical use case would be a twitter client adding latest tweets to the event feed, in the same way it would do if it had its own homescreen widget. When the user taps on a tweet in the event feed UI/widget, the action specified in the event will be launched (i.e. launch the twitter client to display that specific tweet). The twitter client could also add a refresh action to the event feed database, which would be launched when the user chooses to refresh the event feed. The refresh action will typically launch the same script/application used to add events to the event feed.

There are three examples:

1. Add an event using dbus-send.
2. Add an event using Python.
3. An example script in Python which retrieves latest 20 YouTube videos matching the query provided, and adds them to the event feed. In this case, when the user chooses a video from the event feed, the webpage is shown in the browser.

Thank you. This looks like the best Maemo project I've seen in a while.
I have one idea: could you create an option to filter the events by source? Let's say I usually need just a quick peek at what's new, but then one day I'll want to follow a football game without unwanted twitter updates etc.

That should be easy to do. I'll include it in the next version.