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:

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


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



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!
How about reusing liferea and just giving it a UI refresh?
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Sometimes it’s easiest to start fresh….
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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.
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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,
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Link to TTR:
http://tt-rss.org/
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Yes, that would give us a sync feature.
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Feedreader has this functionality and is a great Gnome 3 style app:
https://jangernert.github.io/FeedReader/
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Is the Share functionality already implemented?
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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!
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looking forward to testing this nice app again. please please don’t abandon it
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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! 😀
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It would be nice if this could sync with “ownCloud news”!
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ownCloud news +1
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Your necromancy habits are awesome. Keep doing it.
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