gPodder gets new channel navigator

My PyGTK pet project, gPodder is currently receiving a bit of a face-lift for its main window. After Carlos Moffat has raised some concern about the usability when being subscribed to many channels and suggested a "sidebar".

So, I first added some unread episodes information to the channel drop down list, so one can easily see where new episodes are to be found. Two e-mails later, I thought I should improve this a bit more and added a gtk.TreeView and a gtk.HPaned onto the Podcasts tab, displaying the top gtk.ComboBox's contents (thanks to the reusability of Gtk's TreeModel structures) in the left pane.

The next step was adding a bit more design to the whole UI, and while fixing many bugs that cropped up while testing the new interface (and cleaning up the source code, for example unifying the new episodes algorithm into a single function), I finally had a nice-looking interface that gives the user much more information about the subscribed channels and new episodes. By using the channel's iTunes cover image (if available) as icon, a user can easily recognize specific podcast channels if the list is huge. Adding a bit of the channel's description below its title also gives a better overview over one's channels. The number in the sidebar tells us how many new podcast episodes are available for the channel. Here's how it looks currently:

The code should be available in gPodder's Subversion repository in the upcoming days after I've cleaned up the commit a bit. Enjoy :)