danramos | # 191 | 2008-12-21, 02:59 | Report

Good God, man! My post was huge! My apologies. ^.^;

onion_cfe | # 192 | 2008-12-22, 17:16 | Report

My experience has been very similar. Unquestionably mostly positive. The performance of the application has gone from prohibitively slow to faster than I believed possible in just a few weeks, so a big thankyou for that. I think it's now faster than Videocenter in item browsing and feed switching, though it's hard to recall since I haven't ran that since joining in here!

I had the same feelings about the scrolling. At first I had expected it to only be an issue on rare occasions on which i'd like to scroll a long way down an episode list, but actually when driving today scrolling from A down to T took 4-5 swipes in my 20 feed list. If the truely kinetic scrolling is possible, it would be preferred. It's very intuitive especially on an alphabetical list.

I love the gestures. When I remember to use them it all feels very slick.

The only problem i'm having now, and I think this kicked in before the test package was installed, is the heavy load rebooting when updating feeds. I have experienced this three times now, once when also playing audio in Panucci and twice when the device was otherwise idle. This is a very nasty bug, as there's potential data loss. I don't feel safe pressing update feeds if I have anything unsaved now. It seems particularly strange as previously the updating process froze the entire tablet up, whereas now it doesn't seem anything like as intense, however it never rebooted for me back then, but it will now.

I also think i'm seeing it happen when I have the power plugged in, if that could mean anything?

I've heard this get mentioned before. Is there an existing bug I can tag on to?

danramos | # 193 | 2008-12-23, 01:49 | Report

I keep thinking that this feels a lot like a blocking problem in a cooperative multitasking OS (like the older MacOS, Windows 3.x, GEM on Atari's, etc.) instead of feeling like a preemptive multitasking OS (like MacOS X, UNIX, Linux, Windows 95 and newer, AmigaOS, MiNT on Atari's, etc.).

I can understand the GUI seeming sluggish and locking up within the same GUI frame of the blocking operations.. but not the whole system's GUI. It's like when I first started learning to write GUI interfaces in Perl/Tk for my old job and I kept making sloppy apps that would pause and wait until things were done before updating the window. Then I learned how to let the GUI have some slices of time to update the interface and allow the user to manipulate the interface while my app was busy.

But it seems as if the WHOLE OS is doing it on the Nokia. Makes me wonder if there's something really wonky about the way the Xwindow manager is coded that makes everything act as if it's cooperatively multitasking.

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Last edited by danramos; 2008-12-23 at 01:59.

thp | # 194 | 2008-12-24, 12:21 | Report

Good news everyone: I've just added a new menu item to support importing subscriptions from Nokia's Video Center application, so in one of the upcoming releases, you can easily upgrade from Video Center to gPodder without losing your subscriptions

thp | # 195 | 2008-12-24, 14:29 | Report

New testing version:

http://khan.thpinfo.com/~thp/tmp/gpo...maemo3_all.deb

Changes from the previous testing version:

* Upgrading from Video Center to gPodder (Menu->Subscriptions->Import subscriptions from Video Center)
* Re-designed toolbar ("update all", "update selected" and feed update progress now inside toolbar)
* The "no new episodes" info now appears in the toolbar, too

Enjoy this little christmas present and give some feedback how you like it and what should be changed in your opinion.

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Last edited by thp; 2008-12-24 at 15:49. Reason: maemo3 release

danramos | # 196 | 2008-12-25, 08:07 | Report

My observations:

Toolbar missing if it was disabled in stable version
The last time tested the test version, the toolbar showed up despite the fact that I had set the toolbar as disabled in the older version. I 'upgraded' back to the stable version and the toolbar still appeared so I disabled it again.

Now that I installed this newest test version, the toolbar isn't showing up. Since the new app has no 'view' options, I can't re-enable the toolbar. My guess is that the new version needs to check whether you're using maemo and override the config's setting to enable the toolbar, since it's going to be a necessary part of the maemo UI interface going forward.

I went back to the stable version, but it seemed the toolbar was enabled on my without my needing to do anything. I suppose I should have tried exiting the test version and going back in to see if maybe the toolbar magically appeared. Anyway, once I re-installed the test version, the toolbar appeared fine.

Severe bug: I don't want to go back to stable
I pressed UPDATE ALL and it took off as expected, with a nice big readable status bar. (MUCH LOVE!!)

Other than that...
Pretty much all the same observations as last time are still in effect.

For a test version working towards all those laundry lists of suggestions, this is pretty freaking good progress! Looks clean, runs very well! Going back to stable is killing me. (Except that I DO miss being able to select a bunch of things to save and then letting them play one after another during a long drive.. but that would be fixed by a playlist tab.. *nudge*)

Enormous thanks, Thomas! I hope you're having an excellent Christmas!

thp | # 197 | 2008-12-25, 10:42 | Report

Thanks for your feedback. I'll have a look into the toolbar issue. It _should_ do what you said (always enable toolbar regardless of setting), but it looks like this does not yet work correctly.

For all your other suggestions that you have reported/suggested, please file a bug report for each of them at http://bugs.gpodder.org/, so we can track them easily.

I do not yet have an idea how to set up the interface so that finger scrolling is possible AND multiple selections are possible. But, please consider this:

Download: It does not really matter if you add files separately to playlists and then "download" that playlist

Delete: You can use the menu item "Delete old episodes" to get a "playlist" of downloaded files that can be deleted - this way, you don't need to delete files one by one, and it even works for _all_ your podcasts at once.

Playback: Adding multiple episodes to a playlist ("enqueue") should not be handled directly in gPodder, but it will be handled in Panucci soon, and then you get the desired playlist feature (as far as i understand) "for free" due to Panucci's feature set.

Locking: Due to Anders Kvist's patch that allows locking of whole podcasts (in addition to single episodes), you can lock a podcast and automatically lock all the episodes, even not yet downloaded ones

That's about all the operations that I can think of that you can carry out with multiple episodes. So, I think in the long run, we will not need multiple selections or playlists _inside_ gPodder. I fear that this will make the currently very slick interface too complicated.

danramos | # 198 | 2008-12-27, 06:33 | Report

Feel free to just say, 'Clue stick!' and bat me with the exclamation mark, seeing as how I should know better by now. hehe.. I'll go log in and make a few entries for feature requests and bug fixes.

Thanks again, THP!

ltrinh | # 199 | 2008-12-30, 04:32 | Report

First off, thanks for the great program THP! I've used this program everyday since I installed it on my N810. There are however a few things I noticed. One is, certain podcasts play well with the designated default media player. Some of these shows are webalert, geekbrief, and the buzz report. Other shows like tekzilla, system, and hack require that i change the default player to mplayer and then it works fine. Is there a way to specify defaults for each podcast instead of having to change the entire system default every time i switch from show to show? The other thing is is it possible to have gpodder download the shows to specified folders for each podcast? For instance, webalert in the webalert folder and geekbrief in the geekbried folder which is how Miro does it?

Either way, keep up the good work.

danramos | # 200 | 2009-01-01, 00:20 | Report

Bigger question is... why wouldn't those play in the default media player at all? ...are you downloading mp3 versions of those podcasts, or are you downloading them as ogg files?

It would probably be simpler to just add ogg support to your tablet than it would be to re-engineer the gpodder db to be any less efficient by storing a whole new field per podcast just for what player to use. Not to mention, it is simpler and intuitive not to do that, I would think. Plus--it wouldn't actually fix your problem. It would just add a more complex band-aid. It would work--but I would think we're all going to give up a smidgen of performance for something that's better off being fixed at the player side.

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Last edited by danramos; 2009-01-01 at 00:24. Reason: grammar