gPodder UX poll
John Veness is looking for feedback on a new UI proposal for Thomas Perl's podcast application, gPodder. My proposal is that instead of a dialogue popping up from the bottom, a "stacked window" (i.e. one that and has a back arrow in top-right) slides in which contains the shownotes immediately, and has the remaining buttons at the bottom [...] I have made this suggestion to thp using bugs.maemo.org (see the feature request at https://bugs.maemo.org/11501) and he suggested setting up this poll to see what the rest of the user population prefers. It is worth reading that bug report for more information. If you use gPodder and are interested in this issue, check out the Talk thread and vote.
MaePad updates
Thomas Perl has another round of updates to his MaePad, MaePadWeb, and Trophae applications: Version 1.9 of MaePad is out, with a new translation into Catalan, updated Finnish (thanks to Marko Vertainen) and German translations, a "No items" indicator in empty checklists and full auto-rotation support (detailed changelog). [...] Also new is MaePadWeb 2.1, which adds a missing dependency on python-simplejson. The app worked fine for me since the initial release, so I'm also promoting it to Testing now. [...] And as a third release this week, I noticed that Trophae, the PS3 Trophy Viewer app, didn't get its newest release (6) uploaded to Fremantle Extras-Devel for two months, so I've re-uploaded it, and also put it up for testing. And even though the code is lame, it's now published in aGit repository if you want to hack on it. All updates are currently available in Extras-testing. The adventurous among you will want to test and vote.
Moving Maemo 5 app UIs to MeeGo, Harmattan & Symbian
Thomas Perl has started looking at how to move gPodder's user interface to Qt - and, more specifically, Nokia's preferred UI development technology; Qt Quick: Sooner or later it will be necessary to create a QML UI for gPodder if it is to integrate nicely with devices on which Qt is the "native" toolkit for third party apps. At the moment, the reusable UI elements that can be used with QML (Qt Components) have not yet been officially released (the Git repository is available on Gitorious, though), and there are no UI style guidelines for Harmattan out (yet?). I'm also not able to locate UI style guidelines for QML apps on Symbian^3, and there are only a few small sample QML apps out right now. Thomas goes on to ask for input on how it could be put together, until the common widget set of Components arrives. Ville Vainio has commented on the post, pointing to Colibri - a community-developed set of widgets and components for use with Qt Quick.
gPodder running with desktop UI & Maemo-style pannable areas on IdeaPad
Thomas Perl has a new demo up of gPodder running on his MeeGo Conference IdeaPad: This is gPodder (Git master branch as of 2010-11-24) with Touch UI enabled (Diablo-style context menus + Hildon 2.2 PannableArea + Finger Friendly buttons) running on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-3t (running Ubuntu Netbook). Needs a recent version of python-hildon (from Maemo 5) for PannableArea. Set enable_fingerscroll = True in the config to enable this UI mode.