gPodder Configuration Editor

I've had the idea of implementing some kind of about:config-like configuration editor for gPodder for some time now. Not only does it give a nice live view of the current configuration settings, it also makes it possible to edit some configuration values that were previously only available by editing ~/.config/gpodder/gpodder.conf by hand.

Apart from that, we might be able to strip down the preferences dialog to only the really important settings and leave everything else in the "advanced" configuration editor :) I think the interface is quite nice and even looks nicer than the real about:config editor. As with Mozilla's about:config editor, this also marks the settings that have been modified from their default value in bold.

Exaile: Python-based GTK media player

I don't know on which planet I got linked to Exaile, a GTK audio player written in Python. Anyway, I installed it some days ago and downloaded some plug-ins (IM status, which works great with Pidgin; and Mini Mode, which makes Exaile about as high as the Gnome panel and only about one third of my screen wide).

Exaile is great, it has a slick, but simple interface, nice features (the music library is created by adding paths to my music collections, which is a no-nonsense way of managing the library ;). Bulk downloading album art and album cover search are great features. Last.fm integration is built-in, and DAAP support can be enabled by installing a plug-in.

There are still some annoyances: For example, tracks with no album set are displayed as "Trackname from by Artist", i.e. the album title is simply missing. But thanks to the great build/run architecture of Exaile that makes it possible to patch and test/debug directly in the SVN working directory, I was quickly able to come up with a patch, which will hopefully be included in Exaile soon.

Other than that, I can only recommend Exaile. It is in active development, and the problems and bugs that are currently present will hopefully be patched out in future versions :)

Subscribing to podcasts in gPodder

Until today, gPodder users were presented the same dialog for adding and editing "channels" (i.e. podcast subscriptions). When adding a channel, only the URL was needed, so all other UI elements were simply hidden in the dialog. As adding a channel only involves entering one URL, and as our new, shiny channel navigator adds some free space in the lower left corner of the window, I decided to re-work the GUI, inspired by Tasks's main window. Here's the difference:

Of course, with this change, I also had the chance to revise the channel edit dialog a bit (remember, it's the same dialog, used for both adding and editing). Apart from stripping out unneeded code and re-factoring the code, I've tried to make the dialog a bit more pleasant to use. For one, I've removed the cancel button and changed the "OK" button into a "Close" button.

I hope you like the changes and it makes using gPodder a little bit more pleasant. Time to roll another release some time soon..

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 :)