tigert.com | my life and stuff um, what do I write here?

Ho hum..

I am having one of those "long time no blogging" moments again But whatever, I have some thoughts I have wanted to blog about, and also a goodie for those of you who are enjoying the new Maemo and the N900 device already.

GPodder fun

I've been bicycling to work all summer and I enjoy listening to podcasts and internet radio while enjoying the fresh air. I recently installed gPodder and enjoyed the new maemo5-style user interface a lot. The application is easy to use with fingers (not recommended while biking! seriously! ) but I there are a few thoughts I wanted to share. I am sorry to use the lazyweb for this instead of contacting the guys directly - but maybe this sparks up some interesting discussion, so what the heck.. read below for some lengthy ascii-art UI design proposal fun and for the N900 goody surprise..

GPodder: Adding podcasts

I already wrote a nice, polite paragraph about how it would be nice if gPodder would just fetch the RSS feed url information from the website for me, so I could just type "www.uncontrolledairspace.com" into the "Enter the podcast feed URL" -dialog. You know, so I would not need to worry about finding the RSS feed url by hand.. then I tried..

It does it already!

So maybe the dialog title should read "Enter the podcast web address" instead? Like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder ________________[ X  ]
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
|============== Add new podcast ===============|
|                                              |
| Web address: [______________________][ Add ] |
|______________________________________________|

Notifications

When you add a new podcast, the popup notification that says "downloading episode information from.." in a notification banner. I guess this is because you don't have any information about the podcast yet, so you couldnt show the name in the podcast list. How about creating a list item for the new podcast, showing "Downloading information..." in there until you get the RSS feed, and then populating the list with the real data? This would be more consistent with how updating a podcast works, and it would avoid the popup banner that feels like it's blocking the user interface.

Navigation

The two-column main view is not really useful in a small screen, as both sides contain pretty long lines of text. So you end up having just a bit of your podcast names visible, or alternatively just a bit of the episode list. It might be more useful to split this view into two. So that when you start gPodder, you would see just the list of podcasts. Or, maybe a front page like this:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder_________________[ X  ]
|                                              |
|                                              |
|        _                           _         |
|      _| |_         /`´´\         _| |_       |
|     |_   _|      (_|o_O|_)       \   /       |
|       |_|          `  °´        .-\ /-.      |
|                                  ˙˙˙˙˙       |
|   New podcast    Podcasts      Downloads     |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

Press "Podcasts" to get to the list:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder Podcasts _______[ <= ]
| /icon\  Daily Source Code                  * | <= green dot
| \here/  4 new, latest 2 days ago             |    (new stuff!)
| -------------------------------------------- |
| /icon\  Uncontrolled Airspace Podcast        | <= no green dot
| \here/  Latest 5 days ago                    |    (all listened)
| -------------------------------------------- |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|                                              |
|______________________________________________|

One could sort them by (Name | Updated | Recently listened ) via the menu? Once you click on a podcast, it would open a new view with episode information about that podcast:

[ # ][ 13:37 %& ] gPodder: Uncontrolled A_[ <= ]
| Uncontrolled Airspace #151                 * | <= new
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 3 days ago             |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #150                 * |
| "Dave needs NyQuil" - 12 days ago            |
| -------------------------------------------- |
| Uncontrolled Airspace #149                   |
| "Midnight in the Morning" - 21 days ago      |
| -------------------------------------------- |
|______________________________________________|

From there you would naturally show the episode information for the selected one.

Wow, now that was some ASCII-art.. I wonder how this works out in Planet Maemo and on the blog itself..

Oh right.. the surprise. I made some N900 wallpapers, go grab them from here. Hope you like them