Notices

Hello!

I'm the upstream author of gPodder for the Desktop (gpodder.org). Mika Leppinen did a great job in early 2007 with porting the then-recent 0.8 release of gPodder to Maemo.

Since then, many improvements have been made in the original (upstream) gPodder. I've now tried to re-port the original upstream version of gPodder to the Maemo platform. It is just a quick hack, but it basically works and even the tray icon feature works

Please give some feedback and tell me if this is of any use to somebody and if you would like to see this port be moved forward or if you would not use it for whatever reason. The UI surely has to be modified a bit more (and stripped-down probably), but with the package below you get the idea how it would look and act like.

You can enter a new RSS URL in the top left field in the "podcasts" tab" and click on the "+" button to add it to your list.

The repository and single-click install file have their own URL now. You can go to http://maemo.gpodder.org/ to download the latest gPodder version (you might have to remove a manually-installed gPodder first). After you installed gPodder from this repository, you can update it via the application manager.



Feedback _very_ welcome!

Some screenshots (well, photos..) follow:

List of episodes currently downloading:


The application's main menu:


A normal main screen situation (podcasts on the left, episodes on the right):


Download progress is shown in the tray icon, if the tray icon is enabled in the preferences:

I'm really excited about the return of gpodder! Sadly the app won't launch for me

Trying to launch by commandline results in the following:

~ $ gpodder
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/gpodder", line 155, in <module>
sys.exit( main())
File "/usr/bin/gpodder", line 113, in main
from gpodder import console
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gpodder/console.py", line 20, in <module>
from gpodder import util
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gpodder/util.py", line 61, in <module>
import xml.dom.minidom
ImportError: No module named dom.minidom

Oh, seems like I've forgot to list a dependency.. Please install the package "python2.5-xml" manually and try again.

Will the tray icon also take care of downloading new episodes ?

What I am looking for is for an option like a generic "automatic podcast update" option coupled with a per podcast "automatically download new episodes" option.

That would make gPodder a must have for me.

The tray icon is able to carry out the "update feeds", "download all new episodes" actions. You can configure gPodder to update the feeds every X minutes and also additionally configure it to download new episodes after an automatic update (when minimized).

The "minimized" status detection and the hiding from the task list doesn't work at the moment (so "hide to systray" doesn't work the way it does on the Desktop version), but once this is fixed, I think this is possible What I would also like to do is replace the pynotify notifications (from the Desktop version) with the corresponding upper-right-corner Maemo/Hildon notifications, so the user knows when new episodes are available, etc..

The "automatic podcast update" is already available in the "extras" tab of the preferences dialog, you just have to enable and configure them.

The "automatically download new episodes" option is currently global, but could be made per-podcast, if need be.

That did the trick, got it installed and working. And it's looking great! I'll be testing it more tomorrow, but in answer to one of your questions, I can't imagine not using this app frequently... perhaps only second to browser. I really hope it continues to move forwarrd, and stays with us in the next OS upgrade. Thanks!

ps, to others, you also need to have python2.5-feedparser which you may already have if you've got canola I think.

Great to know all of this!
I'll go ahead and install it.
The "per podcast" option would be very welcome on the tablet due to its memory (flash) limits and, usually, because of internet consumption as well (mobile internet, on-the-go WiFi connection and so on...).

With a per podcast option I can fine tune my automatic download tasks.

Also, will it queue the episodes to download or will it try to download a bunch of them in parallel ?

I could see an option where I could tell it to download (general option) 1 episode at a time (embedded devices) up to all of them available at the same time (desktop version).

What do you think?

PS: Installing it right now...

Cool the download queue is there...I'll check it out more before asking other stupid questons :P

Posting issues I found:

gPodder takes a lot of CPU when downloading...
Also a "OMAP McSPI/0" process is taking up CPU when gPodder is running...

Why is that ?

Moreover when I enable the tray icon I get a second battery icon!
And that icon does not react to taps.

update: I think it was the speed of downloading.. it was downloading at 560Kb/s.
The next episode is going at 27Kb/sec and the tablet is much more responsive now...

I don't know what that "OMAP McSPI/0" is, but a quick google search revealed this post. And this irc log suggests it's something related to the WiFi connection. I guess you could try enabling the download throttling (also in the preferences) if you want to have a responsive gPodder, although then of course you can't download with the maximum speed that the device and network connection could achieve.

The tray icon works for me, don't know what could be wrong here. The code currently uses the gtk.StatusIcon object to show the icon, maybe on Hildon/Maemo there is some different "correct" approach to show a status icon? (like with gtk.MessageBox and hildon.Note)