Zocalo Web Feed Reader (sharp Rom)

[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:
[img]http://www.lyndonhill.com/Projects/Zaurus/Images/Zocalo/feed-view.png\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]

[speculatrix]

woo, looks very smart, am impressed!

am interested in what you used to write it. just the regular qtopia kit?

[koan]

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.

[MaBo]

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

[matthis]

Wooh, nice to see new & good software for the Z and sharp rom.
Thanks!

[koan]

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.

[MaBo]

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

[koan]

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.

[koan]

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. 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.

[koan]

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.

[koan]

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 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.

[xamindar]

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.

[koan]

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.

[koan]

You can get a nice RSS feed from Google News

1. Go to Manage/Add Feed and enter 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.

[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)