RSSNOW, a new rss plasmoid... requesting feedback.
Rob Scheepmaker
r.scheepmaker at student.utwente.nl
Sat Mar 15 04:05:21 CET 2008
Hello Plasma devs,
I have imported a brand new rss reader plasmoid: RSSNOW. In playground
there allready existed a news applet, but i wanted something that
presented RSS feeds in a different way, so I built my own, using the
existing news applet as basic framework to work from.
This rss feed reader is able to present feeds in multiple 'scrollers'
which are able to scroll horizontally (using Phase :)). The applet
automatically slides to the following item in each feed every 10
seconds, but you can always navigate manually if you want to. Since I
see plasmoids as a more passive approach on presenting data, I wanted
the applet to display entire rss feeds without the user having to
scroll, and without having text scrolling by continuously like a
newsticker.
The obligatory screenshot:
http://cripplefight.student.utwente.nl/rssnow_screen.png
The applet is still young, and there's still a lot to improve. Some
ideas for features include:
- at the moment each scroller presents one feed... i want to be able to
make the grouping completely custimizable, so you can for example
assign 3 feeds to one scroller (usefull for feeds which are low on
traffic). I'm still thinking about a nice way to implement this. How
could you give grouping functionality in the configuration interface?
- adept nicely to existing in the panel, probably grouping all feeds on
one scroller.
- customizable interval, and the option to drop items older then x
hours.
- display the date on items in a fuzzy way.
- an optional preview part where the content of the feed item is
displayed, maybe even the website where it's linking using QtWebkit.
- in the long term.... akanodi integration and being able to mark
messages as read and share this info with akgregator.
I would like some feedback on this applet. I'm very new to plasma and
QT, so don't hesistate to point out flaws in my code, so I can learn
from it.
If you feel like trying RSSNOW, it's in playground. You'll need a recent
version of the rss dataengine (with support for fetching favicons).
Rob Scheepmaker (pinda)
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