OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Software => Topic started by: koan on February 28, 2009, 11:36:17 pm
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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 (http://www.lyndonhill.com/Projects/zocalo.html).
This image is linked to a screenshot of the latest version on my website:
[img]http://www.lyndonhill.com/Projects/Zaurus/Images/Zocalo/feed-view.png\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]
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woo, looks very smart, am impressed!
am interested in what you used to write it. just the regular qtopia kit?
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I have just uploaded a new version of Zocalo, version 1.1, please find it on the web page given above.
The new version includes a few fixes for minor bugs, modified behaviour if a download fails, uses the system preferences for displaying dates and slightly expanded setting dialog to change font size, network timeout etc.
It is written using the standard Qt/Qtopia SDK.
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Hi,
Thanks for zocalo. This is at the moment my favourite rss reader on the zaurus.
I have two questions for additions:
-images. Some feeds have images. Including these when downloading and showing them in the message would be GREAT.
-improved navigation in viewer mode. When using my SL-C3100 in viewer mode (with the keyboard hidden), it would be nice to navigate through the messages using the scroll button. FOr instance: up: next message down:previous message. Cancel: back to topic list, OK: enter topic list. Cancel in the feed list would exit the application.
Again, thanks for the application!
MaBo
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Wooh, nice to see new & good software for the Z and sharp rom.
Thanks!
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Hi,
Thanks for zocalo. This is at the moment my favourite rss reader on the zaurus.
I have two questions for additions:
-images. Some feeds have images. Including these when downloading and showing them in the message would be GREAT.
-improved navigation in viewer mode. When using my SL-C3100 in viewer mode (with the keyboard hidden), it would be nice to navigate through the messages using the scroll button. FOr instance: up: next message down:previous message. Cancel: back to topic list, OK: enter topic list. Cancel in the feed list would exit the application.
Again, thanks for the application!
MaBo
Hi, I'm glad you like it.
Navigation with keys: I'm sure I can improve it for the next release. It's on my to do list.
Showing images: you can open the link in a browser if you want to see the images. If I add support for images inline to the message that would be a lot of work and Zocalo would no longer be a lightweight feed reader. Downloading those images is going to take more network resources, if you have them then you may as well view open the link in the browser.
Thanks for the suggestions.
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HI,
The reason for the images question, was that I often download the feeds, then read them later when I don't have a network available (train etc.). Then having the images already downloaded would be great.
But I understand your reasons.
Looking forward to the navigation improvements!
MaBo
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Hi
Zocalo 1.2 is now available.
Screenshots at the website plus the screenshot above is also updated.
After the 1.1 release I was surprised (but not too much) to find some bugs, I hope I have squashed them all now.
In terms of new features there is now a discovery mode that allows you to enter a website URL and Zocalo will try to find the feed. You can edit the settings of some of the colours. I finally got the context menu working for the feeds list (the code has been in there since 1.0 but I just couldn't get it to work). There was also a lot of refactoring and tidying up.
I looked into using the OK and Cancel buttons to navigate in and out. Disabling Cancel to stop it quitting the application is a real PITA. Therefore I implemented both functions on the OK button. Press and release it quickly and you navigate in. Press it and hold for 1 second and it will navigate out - wait for the screen to change. And you can use the jog wheel.
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Zocalo 1.3 is now available to download.
The new version supports enclosures (podcasts) and website icons. A number of improvements to the GUI have also been implemented. Please check the list of changes on the web page for details.
As usual, the screenshot above is hotlinked, there are more screenshots at my website and on my flickr feed.
For this version I experimented with showing feed channel logos and also the channel icon (Atom) but they were too variable in size, quality and availability so I decided to remove them and go back to the website icon. However, I haven't yet implemented an algorithm to search for the icon on the webserver.
By the way, ICO image format is truly awful. W3C suggest a way to use other image types such as PNG for favicons (http://www.w3.org/2005/10/howto-favicon). I recommend you to use PNG for your favicon.
I still have a long list of fixes and improvements to make but bug reports and feature requests are welcome.
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Zocalo 1.4 was released, see the above links for downloads.
This version is much better at finding feeds on web pages and getting the website icon. Zocalo can now detect and select from multiple feeds at a single website.
The next task is to change the way feeds are stored, this will enable feeds to be organised. The only other feature planned is support for Atom feeds with multiple enclosures. If there are any features you need please let me know.
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Zocalo 1.5 is now available, see the links above for downloads.
New in this version:
Atom feeds with multiple enclosures (podcasts) are now supported.
You can reorganise feeds, use Fn-U to move a feed up and Fn-D to move a feed down, or use the context menu (tap and hold on a feed).
You can use proxies that require a login and password.
You can use feeds on websites that require you to login (HTTP authentication). For example, if you use Twitter, go to Manage/Add Feed and enter http://www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss (http://www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss) in the Enter Feed URL widget. You will then be prompted to enter your login for Twitter and then you can fetch your timeline.
Some other improvements were made, bugs fixed, etc. Please let me know if you find any new bugs or have any problems with it.
More screenshots are available at the Zocalo web page and on my Flickr stream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonhill).
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Thanks, I guess it is about time to check this program out. I have been using a couple other Japanese ones called dmblogger and zrssreader that work pretty good. Is this related to any of those? Anyway, guess I'll remove those and try this one.
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I have been using a couple other Japanese ones called dmblogger and zrssreader that work pretty good. Is this related to any of those?
Zocalo is not based on those programs and is written in C++ not Ruby.
A long time ago there was a program called ZauRSS. It was very basic and missing many features. For example you could only add feeds if you were online, it would not read Atom and you could only view the article titles, not the article summary. I couldn't find a better feed reader but I did find the source code to ZauRSS had been released under the GPL. Using the ZauRSS source I rewrote just about everything and started adding features that I wanted.
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You can get a nice RSS feed from Google News
1. Go to Manage/Add Feed and enter http://news.google.com (http://news.google.com) in the Enter Website URL widget.
2. The feed will be downloaded, but there will only be a few stories in it.
3. Go to Manage/Edit Feed. Select the Location widget and move the cursor left until you get to the part ...num=X&... where X is a number.
4. X is the number of stories downloaded, change it to a more reasonable number like 15 or 20.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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:
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
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 (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.
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Ok, thanks for that explanation. I should have paid attention to the context menu. At least organizing them makes it more readable without having categories.
Also, in your picture all your feeds have the sites icon next to them. Most of mine just have a green orb. I assume that is because I added most of my feeds while offline? Some of the new ones I added while online have the proper icons. Do I have to delete them and re-add to get the icons?
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in your picture all your feeds have the sites icon next to them. Most of mine just have a green orb. I assume that is because I added most of my feeds while offline?
No, adding feeds when offline should make no difference to whether they have the site icon or a default icon.
[!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=xamindar)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(xamindar)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]Some of the new ones I added while online have the proper icons. Do I have to delete them and re-add to get the icons?[/quote]
Search for the icon is performed only when you add a feed. If you have older feeds that were added with Zocalo 1.3 or older then they won't get icons - you'll have to delete them and add them again.
There are some cases where it's not possible to get the icon. If Zocalo can't find an icon and you think it should then please let me know the URL and I will look into it.
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Search for the icon is performed only when you add a feed.
Ok, that explains it. All my non-icon ones were added while offline and it was unable to check when I added them. Zocalo 1.5 is the first version I have tried so it's not due to an older version.
There are some cases where it's not possible to get the icon. If Zocalo can't find an icon and you think it should then please let me know the URL and I will look into it.
Well, I also have slashdot but mine has no icon like yours does. I'll give re-adding them a try. Thanks.
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Well, I also have slashdot but mine has no icon like yours does. I'll give re-adding them a try. Thanks.
No, I mean that adding a feed offline should not stop it from finding the icon. Uh, I can see some other problems now, too. This is worse than I thought. I know where the problems are so I'll try to get them fixed soon. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
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No, I mean that adding a feed offline should not stop it from finding the icon. Uh, I can see some other problems now, too. This is worse than I thought. I know where the problems are so I'll try to get them fixed soon. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
Hey no problem. I also just noticed today that after I organized all my feeds, it will revert back to the unorganized order they were in before when I close Zocalo and reopen it again. I'm just re-adding them all anyway in the correct order from the start so it's no big deal. Just thought I'd let you know in case it is another bug.
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Zocalo 1.6 is now available.
This should address all known issues. However, I haven't been able to test everything. For example, I have no way of testing if the proxy username/password works. There were some issues during start up - it's not possible for me to create all the possible situations that may have arisen.
If you are upgrading from 1.5 then user defined feed positions may be "lost" one final time as Zocalo sorts itself out; after the first time you run & quit 1.6 feed positions should be remembered.
In all previous versions of Zocalo you weren't really supposed to go browsing articles during updates but I didn't prevent the user from doing this either. It was my intention that I would eventually freeze the UI during updates. In the state I left it you could mess up your saved feeds quite badly, but no serious loss of configuration. I decided to let you browse feeds during updates and this is all implemented cleanly now but it's better if you don't because it's slow.
There is a new "Reload Feed" function to reload a feed that you have already added. If Zocalo didn't pick up the icon then you can choose this option instead of copying the feed URL, deleting it and re-adding it. Other features and fixes are mentioned on the Zocalo homepage.
Please continue to report bugs or problems.
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Thanks for the update. It seemed to be working better but then something happened tonite after I rebooted my zaurus. When I opened Zocalo only 3 of my feeds were showing. Then I tried opening it from the console and saw this:
bash-2.05$ zocalo
Display size = 480x640
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 5
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 5
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: unexpected end of file in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 76
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 76
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: unexpected end of file in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 38
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 38
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 1
fatal parsing error: error while parsing prolog in line 1
Parsing error
fatal parsing error: tag mismatch in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing element in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing content in line 293
fatal parsing error: error while parsing main element in line 293
Parsing error
I guess I need to add them all again. Not sure what caused this. I'll let you know if it happens again.
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It looks like your article store is corrupted.
By the sounds of it, you exited zocalo after updating many feeds and rebooted while it was still saving (?) Saving feeds to disk takes time, especially Flash memory storage on Zaurus. It's the price you pay for being able to run your battery down and not lose everything.
It's odd that it has caused you so many problems. At most, one feed would be corrupted and the other feeds be in the state before the update.
Originally, I tried to add a dialog to make you wait at exit so that you would know zocalo is still working but it didn't work well and I removed it. I'll have to look into it again.
Could you possibly email me your article store, in it's current state ? It's all the xml files in /home/zaurus/Applications/zocalo
Do a "tar cvf store.tar *.xml*; gzip store.tar" in that directory. Send the store.tar.gz file to emptystate at yahoo dot co dot uk.
If you are uncomfortable with sending the files, then perhaps you could do a ls -l so I can see what files are in there.
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Version 1.7 is now available.
xamindar pointed out a couple of bugs which I fixed and I changed some of the behaviour to make it more usable:
On start up loading the feeds is delayed just long enough so the main window can open. If you have many feeds with lots of articles you will now see a please wait message. Hopefully this will make you feel confident that it hasn't simply crashed.
After updating a feed it is now saved to disk immediately (previously Zocalo saved one feed every 2 minutes and everything else when you exit).
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A couple issues I am noticing in this version. First of all (and this is probably only me experiencing it) I can not launch Zocalo from the icon, nothing happens. I have to run it from the qkonsole application by typing "zocalo". I have checked the launcher icon and it is set to run "zocalo" as its command so I have no idea why it doesn't work. I have tried removing and reinstalling zocalo 1.7 with no change.
Second issue is that it will try to update all feeds on its own without me telling it to. I haven't narrowed it down to the cause yet but it seems to try to update all feeds on its own constantly once I have suspended my zaurus and unsuspended it again. It gets quite annoying when there is no internet connection and it keeps popping up telling me the hostname of a feed failed to resolve.
All in all the program is very stable and all feeds are working perfectly. Thanks!
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Thanks for the report. Unfortunately, both these things are "works for me" issues.
I can not launch Zocalo from the icon, nothing happens. I have to run it from the qkonsole application by typing "zocalo".
This must be something to do with the recent changes to get the main window to open before loading the data. Are you absolutely sure that the program does not start, did you check using ps or WhatsUpOnZ ?
Second issue is that it will try to update all feeds on its own without me telling it to.
I will try more soak testing. I can think of a few things I could change that may be related but I need a series of actions to reliably reproduce this bug.
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. Are you absolutely sure that the program does not start, did you check using ps or WhatsUpOnZ ?
Absolutely. Every time I tap the icon there is a refresh of the screen as if it tried to open for a split second and then nothing. Not running either.
I will try more soak testing. I can think of a few things I could change that may be related but I need a series of actions to reliably reproduce this bug.
I'll do some more testing to see if I can narrow down the cause and how to reproduce.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I forgot. It will not launch at all in portrate mode, not even from the console. I get the following in the console if I try to run it in portrate mode:
bash-2.05$ zocalo
QLinuxFbScreen::connect() disp spec Transformed:Rot270:Vga:0 != server di
sp spec Transformed:Rot0:Vga:0
Transformed driver cannot connect
Aborted
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Edit: Oh yeah, and I forgot. It will not launch at all in portrate mode
Try changing to portrait mode before running the terminal program.
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Try changing to portrait mode before running the terminal program.
That gets rid of the error message but it still will not open in portrait mode. But it does work in portrait if I first open it in landscape and then switch qtopia into portrait.
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Absolutely. Every time I tap the icon there is a refresh of the screen as if it tried to open for a split second and then nothing. Not running either.
I had a similar problem before with a different application. Rebooting the Zaurus fixed it. I don't know if it will work in your case but it doesn't cost much to try it out.
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It won't run from the icon in portrait mode for me; but if I rotate then run terminal I can run from the terminal (qkonsole). And I can run in landscape and then rotate. Very strange, but I can investigate and try to fix this.
I still haven't managed to trigger the unwanted -update all- though.
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I could never get version 1.7 to work properly. I tried removing all of my settings as well but it still will not start from the icon. In fact, it would not start at all, not even from the console, after I removed the settings and feed files as well. Get this error:
bash-2.05$ zocalo
Display size = 480x640
QGArray::at: Absolute index 0 out of range
I ended up sticking with the pre 1.7 version that you emailed me which still works just fine.
Regarding it trying to update on its own. The only way I can get it to do it is if I select update all and then disable the network connection while it is in the process. Then 50% of the time it will keep trying to do an update every 30 seconds or so until I have around 10 of the "do you want to continue updating" messages on the screen.
Hope any of this helps.
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This looks like a missing configuration file, or missing parameters in that file. Is it possible that you are using an old configuration, and are using it with the new version of the software? If so, try movimg the config somewhere out of the way, and restart the program. It migh shed some light.
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I could never get version 1.7 to work properly. I tried removing all of my settings as well but it still will not start from the icon. In fact, it would not start at all, not even from the console, after I removed the settings and feed files as well.
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Just a quick note to say that I haven't stopped working on this...
This looks like a missing configuration file
Thanks, but there is no reason for missing configuration to cause any of the problems that have been reported. Zocalo will not crash if you use old configuration files. In fact, it's something that I have to take into account whenever I change the config settings; that a user may be upgrading from a much older version.
The QGArray thing was my bad. Fixed for the next release.
I implemented some changes that may help prevent unwanted Update All, but as I never confirmed this problem I can't confirm that it will be fixed.
it will keep trying to do an update every 30 seconds or so until
It's trying to update each feed in turn and 30 seconds is the default timeout for network connections in the settings. If you hit No to the "Do you want to continue?" dialog it should have stopped those messages. I recently went through this code and don't remember fixing any problems, certainly the next release will stop.
There was a small bug that was revealed when starting in portrait mode, a simple assumption made back in the days of 1.0. I fixed it but now there are other problems... it doesn't make sense to me at all, the program crashes when starting in portrait mode but I can't find a cause. So this is what I am working on now.
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Finally, I am pleased to announce version 1.8 is now available.
After a lengthy period of bug chasing I have determined that the reason for the program not running in all orientations is somehow due to QPEToolBar/QPEMenuBar. This is bizarre, it certainly worked fine in all previous versions of Zocalo and I was using what I thought was a legal method. I have now changed to a different method of mixing toolbar and menus and it seems to work fine.
You can now use the Cancel button to navigate views, as was requested previously. You can "enter" views with the OK button and "exit" them with Cancel or by the old method of pressing and holding OK. If you press Cancel on the Feeds view you will exit the program.
I located and removed some memory leaks as well as other bugs and errant behaviours so I strongly recommend installing this new version.
Finally, anyone using Zocalo to follow a password protected Twitter timeline will have found that it doesn't work any more. Twitter have now changed to OAuth, http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/twitter-ap...-and-oauth.html (http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/twitter-applications-and-oauth.html) I am sure that cURL will support OAuth soon, when it does I will make a new cURL ipk and Twitter support will then be available again.
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Great! Thank you! It seems to work great now. Will open in landscape and portrait mode for me now.
You can "enter" views with the OK button
Just a note, this has never worked for me. It's not really a big deal because I can just tap on the feed anyway. Just letting you know. Holding down the OK button does still exit a feed though as well as the cancel button you just addeed in. Thanks.
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Thanks, I can confirm that "OK" doesn't work on my 3200 too. I only tested on my 750. I will fix it shortly.
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Update: Zocalo 1.8.1 (http://www.lyndonhill.com/Downloads/Zaurus/zocalo_1.8.1_arm.ipk) with OK button fix, tested on SL-C3200.
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Woow!! It works great with the OK and Cancel buttons. Now it is *REAL* great feed-reader.
Thanks,
MaBo (SL-C3100 on cacko 1.23)
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Many thanks for an intriguing application. I'm having a hard time getting it started. Using a C1000 and Trisoft ROM, per your website instructions, I've installed 1.8.1 and the libcurl-light_7, libidn_1 and libz_1 ipks. However, in Terminal, using the command "zocalo," I get an error: "could not open translation file /home/QtPalmtop/il8n/en/libsl.qmid OGArray::at: Absolute index 0 out of range
If libsl.qmid is an actual file, I do not find it in /home/QtPalmtop/il8n/en
Any advice?
Thanks,
Jake
edit: I found a libsl.qmid at http://dragos.com/zaurus/ (http://dragos.com/zaurus/) but I still get the error "OGArray::at: Absolute index 0 out of range"
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could not open translation file /home/QtPalmtop/il8n/en/libsl.qmid
It's the translation file for Sharp's libsl. You can live without it or install the file as you've done already. It's nothing to do with Zocalo.
OGArray::at: Absolute index 0 out of range
I suspect this is something that has been fixed already for 1.9. I was looking through the code when I found an issue that probably no one would ever be able to trigger. It looks like I was wrong. I'll try to release it soon and we'll see if it cures the error.
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Thank you for your fast reply. I'm looking forward to helping troubleshoot 1.9 and please let me know what I can do.
Jake
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Zocalo 1.9 is now available.
The main enhancement for this version is support for IDN (Internationalised Domain Names). However, I only found one IDN feed to test with, at http://アニメ.com. It seems to work fine and I have no reason to believe that any other IDN will be different, but I would be a lot happier if I had been able to test with lots of other feeds. Let me know if it doesn't work for any other feeds.
Zocalo parses out useless HTML in feed descriptions. These tags are usually images that Zocalo doesn't download, advertisements or other things that QTextBrowser won't display anyway. This also saves on disk space. I added script, noscript and HTML comments to this version. I noticed that アニメ.com stuffs a lot of broken HTML and also tables into the description - it's not a good feed for testing unfortunately. Tables cause trouble with QTextBrowser so in the next release tables will also be parsed out.
This should also cure the problem jakfish was seeing - PM me if it doesn't.
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Success, success. SL-C1000 installs Zocalo 1.9 without complaint. It's a great program and thank you very much for it. It's fast, updates quickly, and I've gotten no errors.
One small thing: the Fn-U or Fn-D doesn't move the selected feed for organization. But the tap-hold-up or down does work.
Up until now, I've uses Mobireader, which downloads the entire articles from the feed for copying to PDAs/phones. Is it possible to do the same with Zocalo, download the full articles from a given feed? That would make off-line reading a real pleasure, since going to the full article through Netfront can take time to load.
Again, thank you for such hard work,
Jake
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One small thing: the Fn-U or Fn-D doesn't move the selected feed for organization.
It works on my 750 and 3200.
Anyone else having this problem ?
Could it be that the 1000 has different keycodes ?
[!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=jakfish)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(jakfish)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--]Up until now, I've uses Mobireader, which downloads the entire articles from the feed for copying to PDAs/phones.[/quote]
If I understand correctly, you want to scrape a web page: download the HTML, style sheets, javascripts, images and save it all ?
I think that sounds like a lot of work. Zocalo would have to parse an HTML file to work out which external files to download. I wouldn't even dream of writing an HTML parser, I would have to find an external library to do it. It doesn't really sound like it is in the scope of a feed reader.
I'm sorry, I have other Zaurus projects that need my attention and I'm not so interested in offline web browsing. I could look at writing a "bookmarks" file for links you are interested. You could write a Perl script by yourself to scrape each link when you are online again using curl. Or how about writing a scraper in Ruby/QT that could read this file, select a link to scrape from the GUI and then open it in NetFront ?
By the way, some websites don't like being scraped. They will serve a 404 and blacklist your IP address or even your IP block. It happened to me; I wrote a recursive scraping script some time before I realised that scraping was frowned upon. Fortunately for me I moved house and ISP, not so lucky for the next guy.
You can already send a link from Zocalo to another application by qcop. I could add a feature for copying the link to the clipboard or beam it via IRDA; if that would be useful.
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I think Mobireader is a much more basic program and downloads the text only, but in its entirety. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a Linux version, but on Windows, users install a desktop Mobireader, set up their feeds, then the whole article of a given feed is synced to the pda/phone in a *.prc file (OpieReader reads them perfectly)
It would be as if zocalo pulled in the complete article rather than the first paragraph or whatever the rss gives out.
Sorry not to be clearer,
Jake
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I think Mobireader is a much more basic program and downloads the text only, but in its entirety.
If you could get the link from Zocalo, you could download the HTML file using curl and then convert it to a suitable format for OpieReader (for example). Without style sheets it would probably be best to convert to some variant of plain text/rich text
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It's a dilemma, I think, with a lot of RSS Readers, maybe all--the source puts out only so much text, the reader picks that up, and then follows the source's prompt to go to the full article via browser. Anything more appears to be tricky, or not in demand. I was just playing around with an RSS feed reader for Nokia, a commercial application, and it takes the same approach.
For some reason, Mobireader, perhaps b/c it was designed for internet-challenged devices, is able to pull in all the text. I can still run mobireader on a Sharp Mobilon 4100, a CE 2.0 device from the 90s, simply b/c the reader does nothing but show the full article--on the device, mobireader cannot go on-line to update, etc. That all has to be done from the mobireader desktop, which then syncs articles to the device.
At any rate, yours is a great program and thank you very much for it,
Jake
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It's a dilemma, I think, with a lot of RSS Readers, maybe all--the source puts out only so much text, the reader picks that up, and then follows the source's prompt to go to the full article via browser.
By definition that is what a feed reader does. Feeds are summaries, the reader is for reading summaries. I'm trying to make it the best reader it can be. If I add too many features then it becomes the 'jack of all trades, expert at none'.
I think it's OK to redefine how a feed reader should work, but just as long as we are not talking about turning it into something different; like a web browser, for example. The other thing is, it has to work well as a PDA application.
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I think Zacolo is fine with the functionality it currently has. Jakfish is right that many sites' feeds have very short summaries but that is the fault of the website, not the program. Gizmodo comes to mind.
Thanks again Koan. One little thing I would like to mention. When I have it update all feeds and it gets to one that fails or times out, it will pop up a box asking if I want to continue or stop the update. While I do find it useful because I can stop the update if the cause is the loss of internet connectivity, it does require that I check it or watch it if I want it to be ready when I need to disconnect internet and head out. Is it possible to add a little timer to that pop-up box? Maybe like 5 or 10 seconds and then it will automatically select continue and finish updating? If not then no worries. I just have one feed that seems to update only 20% of the times I try and that pop-up stops it until I select はい.
Again, great program! It is stable and very useful.
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I agree completely: Zocalo is a wondrous app, making feeds accessible and readable and doing it quickly. My concern only comes from the website on the other end. For instance, I have to fly a lot, and I've figured out a way to connect my Nokia E90 to the C1000 via infrared GPRS connection--so just before take-off, it would be great to download completely a lot of news and sports.
But it's clear to me that this isn't what RSS readers do, and my feeds rarely give even decent summaries. From NBC Sports, I'll get something like "Against his brother's team, Peyton Manning threw for" and that's all she wrote
I wonder if there might not be feeds of feeds out there, meaning an RSS feed that has pieced together complete articles from other feeds. I'll search that out.
But I in no way meant any disparagement of Zocalo itself. It does what it's supposed to, and very nicely.
Jake
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I've figured out a way to connect my Nokia E90 to the C1000 via infrared GPRS connection--so just before take-off, it would be great to download completely a lot of news and sports.
Tethering via IRDA ? That sounds like it might be slow. But then GPRS is not that fast. I've done tethering by BT on a PAYG phone, it was usable for short sessions.
But it's clear to me that this isn't what RSS readers do, and my feeds rarely give even decent summaries. From NBC Sports, I'll get something like "Against his brother's team, Peyton Manning threw for" and that's all she wrote
Right, some feeds are better than others. You're lucky that Zocalo parses out the advertisements because at the end of that useless truncated line would probably be an unrelated image complete with tracking.
On the other hand, some feeds squeeze in everything, so it's no longer a summary. Personally, I don't want to download the whole article because it's slower and takes up more storage space.
@xamindar
I'll do something about that dialog. Thanks for reminding me.
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Re: GPRS--I've yet to figure out bluetooth (I don't have a usb host, for one thing), and I was amazed to find the ir connection so easy with the Nokia.
My browsing is almost completely to mobile sites (instead of cnn.com, I use netfront for m.cnn.com) so it's not dreadfully slow. But, yeah, trying to pull up the real nyt.com on an ir tether would take forever, I bet.
Jake
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Hi, koan,
I'd love to make a backup of my rss feeds that I've typed into Zocalo. I don't find them in zocalo.conf. Are they stored in another file that I can safely tuck away on the desktop?
Jake
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At the moment there is no convenient way to create a list of subscribed feeds from Zocalo. Each feed is stored in an individual file containing all the information about the feed and all the current articles. Feeds are stored in /home/zaurus/Applications/zocalo/*.xml.
To do a quick backup you could clear all articles via the Storage tab of the settings dialog and then copy the xml files to get all the meta data and URLs.
I would not recommend moving feed files around, i.e. renaming them, copying additional files into that directory or editing the conf file.
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This is a big help; thank you. I have about 20 feeds and they were a hassle to type in. Now, at least, I have a directory stored away, and in the event of a crash or failed recovery, I can copy over the directory and maybe get lucky.
Jake
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in the event of a crash or failed recovery, I can copy over the directory and maybe get lucky.
Jake
Tell me about it. I just got through changing all my passwords on all my important internet accounts and saving them in the kpassword manager on my zaurus a few days ago. I decided to reboot my zaurus yesterday and when it came up my background was back on default and none of my pim applications had any info in them anymore. Rebooted back into debian and ran an fsck on the hard drive and for some reason it was almost totally corrupted. It seems that every file that I modified in the past month was corrupted beyond use.
So now I have to hope most of those new passwords are saved in firefox on my pc. At least the email ones are so I should be able to use the reset services of my bank and such to get it fixed. But what a hassle, hours of organization deleted.
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That's a terrible story. And if your stuff is blown out a month back, I assume that you've got no viable backup to turn to.
Here's hoping you find what you need in your pc/browsers,
Jake
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Hi, koan,
Just a follow-up to our discussion about full-text rss feeds.
This site http://www.iwebrss.com/ (http://www.iwebrss.com/) does the trick. In Zocalo, I changed the beginning of my feeds accordingly and I can get full news articles.
http://fivefilters.org/content-only/ (http://fivefilters.org/content-only/) is also good. Its freeware limit is 4 complete articles per rss site. I will sometimes have to sync Zocalo via bluetooth (or IrDA) and my Nokia E90, so fivefilters is good for these types of slow data transmissions.
For a later version, I was wondering if you might change preferences in GUI to allow for 24pt font choice. I can change it to 24 in the zocalo.conf, but it might be nice to have the choice in the drop-down menu, too.
Too, is there a way to use Helvetica Bold in Zocalo?
Also, can I assume that ttf fonts won't work in Zocalo? I have an arial.ttf that I use in TextMaker without its conversion to qbf, but I'm almost positive that arial won't play nice with any other app.
Jake
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Just a follow-up to our discussion about full-text rss feeds.
There is no such thing as a "full text" RSS feed. It is up to the website editor or CMS script to generate the feed; they can put whatever they like into it.
Thanks for the links, I hope other Zocalo users find them useful.
I briefly considered adding support for Google Reader, as a way to back up subscribed feeds. However, their API is private so it's not possible.
For a later version, I was wondering if you might change preferences in GUI to allow for 24pt font choice.
Yes, I will try.
Another option for you is to link or rename the 240 QPF file with another size, then it will be available to the whole system.
Too, is there a way to use Helvetica Bold in Zocalo?
I don't know about supporting font styles. I will look into it. If you install a Helvetica Bold font I am sure it will appear. The font selector queries the system for available fonts.
Also, can I assume that ttf fonts won't work in Zocalo?
TTF are not supported by Qtopia (by default).
You can download or make your own QPF (http://www.lyndonhill.com/Projects/zaurusfonts.html) for the font you want.
I'm almost positive that arial won't play nice with any other app.
Why not ? I have made a QPF from the Arial Unicode font. Screenshot 1 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonhill/5004672139/), 2 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonhill/4783784659/)
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Thanks again for another fast response. Helvetica bold appears to be already installed in Trisoft ROM. In HancomWord, users can bold Helvetica (not true with the other qpf font choices), so there could be a handle to jiggle somewhere. In zocalo.conf, I tried changing "family = helvetica" to "family = helvetica bold" (an old Windows CE trick) which went nowhere.
My apologies for not being clearer: I mean that an arial.ttf font probably won't play nice anywhere except in TextMaker. I've made a diligent search, but haven't found a site that has arial fonts (qpf) for download. Could you point me in the right direction?
Jake
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In zocalo.conf, I tried changing "family = helvetica" to "family = helvetica bold" (an old Windows CE trick) which went nowhere.
It wouldn't work for applying bold style to an existing helvetica font.
I've made a diligent search, but haven't found a site that has arial fonts (qpf) for download. Could you point me in the right direction?
I think you have to make your own. Only Microsoft would be able to make a QPF version of Arial available. What is it about the font that you like so much, surely there is a free alternative that is good enough ?
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I guess since I use arial in all my documents, I look for it elsewhere as well. I've been looking at your nice tahoma qpf, but am a little worried about your warning of its memory-eating. If I don't use tahoma as a system font, is it still as intensive?
One thing about article-clearing in zocalo (SL-C1000/trisoft rom): clearing/saving will remove them, but the articles come right back after a restart of zocalo. In the /zocalo directory, I can see that the file size is unchanged despite the clearing.
Jake
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I've been looking at your nice tahoma qpf, but am a little worried about your warning of its memory-eating. If I don't use tahoma as a system font, is it still as intensive?
I don't think it will be a big problem for you. It takes up more space in storage. Unless you are already at the limits, you probably won't notice.
One thing about article-clearing in zocalo (SL-C1000/trisoft rom): clearing/saving will remove them, but the articles come right back after a restart of zocalo.
That should not happen. I will check this. The files will not be removed, but they should be the minimum size and there should be no articles after restart - only empty feeds.
Edit: Yes, it's a small bug. The memory is cleared but not the files. It'll be fixed in the next release.
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Let me know what I can test.
Jake
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Hi Guys,
Zocalo 2.0 is available. I was planning to do some work on the curl interface so that Zocalo would use multiple connections to download feeds. This would mitigate the problem with one feed failing causing the others to be blocked. However, I realised that this would take a lot longer to test and debug so in the mean time I have made this version.
I hope I have addressed all the points.
1. The Continue All dialog will automatically close after 10 seconds. (screenshot (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonhill/5269975990/))
2. Font size selector is dynamically updated to whatever sizes are available. (screenshot (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonhill/5269975980/))
3. Fonts can be set to bold and/or italic if the font supports it. The default Helvetica font will support these changes IIRC but some fonts won't. (screenshot (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lyndonhill/5269975986/))
4. Article store will be cleared from disk properly.
As I dug into the code I also found some other bugs or inconsistencies. Atom feeds are now better supported, previously I accidentally filtered out all HTML from articles in Atom but now I have enabled the articles to run through my parser so that only unsupported entities are stripped. Also I didn't realise that Atom category tags were being ignored so I have added those in.
One change that you should watch for: I changed the internal feed status code so that it now counts how many times a feed has failed to download. This means that the first time you run Zocalo 2.0 any feeds you added under previous versions will flag up as invalid and have the red status icon until you update them.
There is also a new version of curl and libidn. Contrary to one of my previous posts, I don't think the curl guys will add OpenAuth to curl. They consider it a layer on top; so if you were waiting for this it's not going to happen any time soon.
Finally, I started a proper Zaurus package feed that includes most of my software: http://www.lyndonhill.com/Downloads/Zaurus (http://www.lyndonhill.com/Downloads/Zaurus). In the Add/Remove Software application in QPE you can add this as a server for the Install via Network option.
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An excellent, excellent update. All is well w/ the SL-C1000.
1) Zocolo loads faster
2) updates feeds faster
3) new font menu works
4) articles successfully cleared upon demand
The only problem is that the links you post in your last thread generate a Forbidden when clicked. But that may be my browser's issue.
Congratulations,
Jake
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Thanks. I can't take any credit for any speed increases. I didn't notice it myself; perhaps if you installed the new curl then there is some optimisation in there. If you mean the feed link at the end of my post, yes it gives a 403 if you click it but if you enter the URL into the Add/Remove Software program on your Zaurus it will read it and list the packages available.
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Zocalo 2.1 has been uploaded to my website.
New features:
- Navigate next/previous articles in article view using shift & up/down keys
- Save an article to a file
You may have guessed this was coming after seeing my recent updates to curl and other packages.
Since the last release, I think at the end of 2010, I have continued to use Zocalo but mainly on my PPC Debian machine using Qt 3. A while back I got into static code analysis using a tool called CppCheck and discovered some minor resource leaks and a few other issues I tidied up for good measure. I didn't think of making another release but recently I was asked to add some other features. The code is in good shape, considering my style has changed quite a lot since 2.0. Anyway, I found some other bugs which have now been fixed.
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Zocalo 2.2 is now available.
There is a new option for automatic updates.
When you save an article, the link is appended to it.