Aye, folks! Some time ago, we had some movement regarding the News app. It was so. freaking. cool! Finally a good alternative of the now-dead Google Reader. Time has passed and, with my heart bleeding in sadness, we saw no further development of it.

Sad.

Following my bad habit of necromancy, I managed to dedicate my whole weekend to work on it. All the work is pushed to a branch – since I’m not the maintainer, I obviously didn’t do it on master branch. The results are exciting.

Search

GNOME News had an implementation of search in it’s engine, but exposed no UI to do that. Well, not anymore:

Captura de tela de 2016-03-07 17-55-36
The new search feature

 

Starred News

Following the mockups, GNOME News had a non-working implementation of Starred News. It works now:

Captura de tela de 2016-03-07 17-53-05
Star button in the headerbar
Captura de tela de 2016-03-07 17-52-54
Starred news in action

Empty States

Like all GNOME apps, News now has improved feedback when no feeds/starred news/search results are displayed. Check this out:

Captura de tela de 2016-03-07 17-53-37
No feeds added
Captura de tela de 2016-03-07 17-53-59
No search results
Captura de tela de 2016-03-07 17-53-25
No starred news

 

Now it’s at least in a usable state (well, usable for my needs). Tracker is the data backend for News, takes care of automagically update the feeds. I hope this work is good enought to be merged on master, so everyone can easily test 🙂

Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Don’t hesitate to comment!


16 responses to “News about GNOME News”

  1. How about reusing liferea and just giving it a UI refresh?

    1. Michael Catanzaro Avatar
      Michael Catanzaro

      Sometimes it’s easiest to start fresh….

      1. Michael Catanzaro Avatar
        Michael Catanzaro

        That wasn’t a very good answer. Let me try again:

        The design we want is quite different from Liferea; the Liferea maintainers would have to be willing to allow drastic user interface changes. Even if they wanted to, it would probably be upsetting to many users who are happy with Liferea as it is now.
        We want News to be a core GNOME app. The Liferea maintainers would have to be willing to de-brand the app, as core apps need to have generic names (“News” or perhaps “Feeds”). They would also have to be OK with moving the project from GitHub to git.gnome.org.

        So there are pretty good reasons to have a separate project. None of the above is any justification against forking Liferea, but News is a very small Python codebase and Liferea is a large, old C codebase; I suspect it’d be easier to finish this with the current News codebase.

        P.S. Georges, you are on a roll now! I’ve been hoping somebody would pick this one up. News is abandoned so you could just take it over, but it should not be hard to get in touch with Igor, he’s active in Fedora still. Looking forward to the first tarball.

  2. Please bring Tiny Tiny Reader integration. I host my RSS on a self-hosted (on OpenShift) TTR instance. With TTR integration, I will be able to move around multiple devices and still access all the news easily.

    Thanks,

    1. Yes, that would give us a sync feature.

    2. loftly Avatar

      Feedreader has this functionality and is a great Gnome 3 style app:

      https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/

  3. Is the Share functionality already implemented?

  4. Francois Avatar
    Francois

    This is the beauty of free software. As long as 1 person in the world still wants it to improve, the software will be improved. 🙂

    Well done! I am currently using Liferea but this app looks beautiful!

    Please, News maintainers, do merge the updates!

  5. corebots Avatar
    corebots

    looking forward to testing this nice app again. please please don’t abandon it

  6. […] Now that we are in the middle of the various freezes in preparation for GNOME 3.20, and eventually Fedora 24, it is a good time to talk about some of the things that happened over the last six months. You might have noticed that a bunch of GNOME applications received significant improvements this cycle. If you haven’t, then go ahead and check out the new hotness in Documents, Maps (it is awesome), Nautilus (or Files), Calendar and News. […]

  7. Awesome! I also had high hopes for this app, and as you say, with these additions it should work great! Great work, thanks a lot! 😀

  8. It would be nice if this could sync with “ownCloud news”!

  9. ownCloud news +1

  10. Your necromancy habits are awesome. Keep doing it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.