Episode selector dialog for gPodder

Today after University, I decided to hack a feature into gPodder that I have thought about for a while - the episode selector dialog. It should be used in several user interaction situations where a simple binary question is not specific enough ("delete old episodes?" vs "which of these old episodes do you really want to remove?"). So I set out implementing this neat little feature and when I looked at the watch and decided that I had to leave for math classes, most of the episodes selector has been implemented, with quite some fancy features and options. I used the last two hours to look through the my working copy diff to fix some obvious omissions, but as of now, the code of the new episode selector is already in SVN. I've attached some screenshots so you can see how it looks.

Thanks to lambda expressions, PyGTK coolness and getattr, i.e. accessing attributes by name, this dialog is now quite customizable and the code is still readable and (compared to what other languages would have yielded), small. If you are using gPodder, be sure to check out the current SVN trunk head.

One feature I used several times was enumerate() - you give an iterable as parameter, and get a generator that yields tuples with two elements - a zero-based index and the values you would normally get from the iterables directly. So, instead of writing code like this:

index = 0
for item in items:
    print 'item %d is %s' % ( index, item )
    index += 1

you can simply write

for index, item in enumerate( items):
    print 'item %d is %s' % ( index, item )

which isn't only nicer, but you save two lines and the code is IMHO more readable (you instantly recognize "index" as being related to the for loop in the second code snippet).

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..