News about GNOME News

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 thoughts on “News about GNOME News

      1. 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.

        Like

  1. 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,

    Like

  2. 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!

    Like

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