Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom) Options

[koan]

Hi

Zocalo is a lightweight web feed reader for the Sharp ROM. It is designed for the PDA form factor, i.e. make sensible use of a small screen, use keyboard or stylus to navigate everything, don't use a lot of memory or disk space. It can handle RSS, RSS RDF and Atom.

I have been testing Zocalo for a few months now and it seems stable. There are a few minor issues that I want to improve in future releases and I have a lot of ideas for features that I want to implement. I plan to port to the other Zaurus Linuxes.

Please find more details at the Zocalo web page.

This image is linked to a screenshot of the latest version on my website:

[xamindar]

Thanks again for this rss reader. It has replaced the other two I was using.
There are still a few bugs and so I will post them here so at least you know about them.
-If I select to update all feeds and then click on a feed while it is in the process of updating other feeds it will delete that feed. I will have to re-add that feed.

Oh, a nice feature request would be the ability to put feeds in categories to make organizing lots of feeds more easy. (news, forums, software, etc)

[koan]

There are still a few bugs and so I will post them here so at least you know about them.

Thanks for the feedback, it's very useful.

I reproduced the bug I think; the feed wasn't deleted but its name was changed and all the articles were copied from the feed that was being updated at the time. After checking the feed information and seeing that the URL of the feed was unchanged I did an update on that feed and was back to normal. This will be fixed in the next version.

I'm not sure how to implement categories without taking up more screen real estate. How many feeds are you subscribed to and how often do you update ? Personally, I have about 20-30 feeds and I'm updating feeds on my Zaurus only when I travel somewhere. At home I run Zocalo on my Linux desktop most days.

[xamindar]

I'm not sure how to implement categories without taking up more screen real estate. How many feeds are you subscribed to and how often do you update ? Personally, I have about 20-30 feeds and I'm updating feeds on my Zaurus only when I travel somewhere. At home I run Zocalo on my Linux desktop most days.

Take a look at dmblogger. It had categories set up in a tree very nicely. For example:
-News
BBC
Slashdot
+Music
-Deals
Slickdeals
Fatwallet

The categories could be expanded or collapsed to show or hide its contents. That allows good use of screen real estate. No idea how hard it would be to code that change, just an idea.

Also, I can't find any way to organize the list. All my feeds are just listed in the order tgat I added them.

By the way, what does the "Get Enclosure" option do? It doesn't seem to effect anything for me.

Again, thanks. As it is this feeder is good enough for me.

[koan]

Take a look at dmblogger. It had categories set up in a tree very nicely.

It's a QListView. I also use a QListView. I had thought about doing this kind of hierarchical layout but you waste a line for each category and when you collapse a branch you are "hiding" feeds. I'm going to think about other ways to implement categories.

Also, I can't find any way to organize the list. All my feeds are just listed in the order tgat I added them.

Tap on a feed with the stylus and hold until the context menu appears. Use the "Shuffle Up" and "Shuffle Down" options. Or, if a feed is selected in the feeds view (by using the keyboard highlight the feed using cursor keys) then press Fn+"u" for up and Fn+"d" for down. Here is an image of the context menu:

 context.png ( 81.78K ) Number of downloads: 8

By the way, what does the "Get Enclosure" option do? It doesn't seem to effect anything for me.

It's for downloading podcasts. As I understand it, podcasts were originally mp3 files attached to RSS feeds. When I say attached, I mean there is a bit of XML giving the URL of the mp3 file. When you select "Get Enclosure" you download the file to your downloads directory which is set in the Storage tab of the settings.

Atom feeds can have more than one enclosure, it's for the case where you offer different formats of the same content, for example, podcast1.mp3, podcast1.ogg, podcast1.aac, etc. If there is more than one enclosure a dialog will appear to ask you which one you want to download.

Enclosures don't have to be only for podcasts, you can link to any MIME type. It didn't do anything for you because there was no enclosure in the item of the feed you were looking at. Here you can see a feed item with an enclosure, in this case a JPEG image of 99 Bytes:

 enclosure.png ( 56.95K ) Number of downloads: 7


The last line in the header shows there is an enclosure.

If you want to try it, I have a test feed at http://www.lyndonhill.com/test.rss ; it has 2 items and both have small images as enclosures.

In the next version of Zocalo these menu items and tool buttons are ghosted when they are not applicable.