Notices

How to get an amazing feed reader for Maemo 5?

The official and 100% open source RSS Feed Reader will be ported. Anybody interested joining the development? Or building an exciting alternative?

http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:RSS_Feed_reader

If there is someone willing to push this we might consider to support the project as a Fremantle Star (((the selection of projects is still ongoing. Some candidates have been contacted already and others will be contacted soon))).

Very personal opinions:

There seems to be something still unsolved in the way local apps are offering and managing feeds nowadays. Probably we need a very creative approach? For instance what about an app + desktop plugin offering covering the features of RSS Feed Reader + Mauku + GPodder?

We are interested in hearing disruptive proposals (Firefox extensions, Qt based...) as much as pure evolutive getting involved in the development of the official RSS Feed Reader.

Is it possible to change the title of the thread visible in the index? Clever me, I didn't realize how easy is to confuse it with spam. I have edited the title of the first post but apparently it's not enough.

A mod/admin/Reggie will have to do it. It's one of my biggest vBulletin hates .

nearest thing to something new RSS wise I've seen in maemo was done by crashanddie, http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FuDFqr1_i3M

shame hes gone quiet, i'll give him a buzz and see if he wants to build from it.

And don't forget the search. Rebuild index...

I really like the idea of Mauku as a feed reader. In fact I already tried to bend it into one by using the feed aggregation feature of Jaiku. But of course all the feeds in your Jaiku account show up with your own photo and name next to it, so it's a bit confusing and not really practical as a feed reader.

But combining Mauku with a web based aggregator would be a really interesting option. You wouldn't have to put a lot of feed handling logic into the app itself, and putting all the fetching and checking on a server that with high and reliable banwith makes sense, too.

The problem with Mauku as a feed reader might be that it doesn't handle HTML and embedded media very well - or at all. This is where a browser based reader comes in. My feeling is that the browsing experience needs to improve significantly from what we now have in Diablo in order to be able to compete with native apps such as Mauku. For example, I think that this is an area where kinetic scolling actually makes a lot of sense.

The other option to a pure-browser based solution, or a firefox-addon as you suggested, is to embed the browser into a native app. PenguinTV does that, and I've tried it too with a little app I wrote. Unfortunately, embedding the mozilla engine in a python app is not very easy on maemo, as using gtkmozembed gives you an non-hildonized browser component without on-screen keyboard support or drag-to-scroll. Providing better support for embedding a fully hildonized browser component into apps written in high level languages such as python would be really valuable, too.

As a user I wouldn't mind having a desktop plugin showing n entries of 140 characters max from social media (Twitter, Jaiku, FB, etc), traditional rss/atom feeds and pod/videocasts. All mixed, whatever are the latest.

The info shown for each entry is Source - 140 chars - type of media - thumbnail if any.

Clicking the entry shows/plays the full content (offline if a wlan was available)

There is an OK button next to each entry. Clicking it makes the entry disappear and the next most recent pops up immediately.

There is a Reply button for those entries giving a chance to comment in the source.

something like that.

Following with that desktop plugin, each entry would show the number of comments ifnapplicable. A 'hot' background in the entry would tell me that such piece of blogosphere is bursting in digg / delicious / technorati... as we speak.

I have way too many feeds to be practical for Mauku ... I would like a way to sync / work with Google Reader effectively though and a homescreen applet that let me look into the latest would be quite nice. Too bad Google really does not seem to have an API for Reader

Inezha lets you "import" Google Reader into the default chat app.

Result: a "real-time" river of Google Reader via SMS + all of the native chat alerts.