My News 0.5 release (1 Viewer)

[Anonymous]

Hi all,
I'm getting ready to send to sourceforge a patch for MP that is the My News RSS Feed reader I talked about in the requested features section. Here's what it can do:

- It's a plugin, so you can choose whether to view it or not
- Add/edit/delete site info from the Tools->Plugin dialog (info stored in MediaPortal.xml). Be sure to enable and enter some sites before going to the My News screen.
- Include a logo for the site, which is display on screen
- Enter up to 20 sites, and the display will show the top 10 stories for each site
- The stories scrolls in a vertically scrolling text box
- Can handle RSS 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0 feeds (I think)
- Overlay is possible, so you can watch your TV/videos while reading the news

Here's what I need to make this complete:

- Background images for both the MetalMedia and CrystalCenter skins - something like a newspaper would be fitting
- Strings 13000 and 13001 in strings.xml converted into the various languages other than English (these are displayed in a progress window)
- Your feedback!

Future plans:
- Some sort of news OSD that can run over the video or other windows. Think CNN news ticker.
- Refresh timer (similar to the weather app)

Please give it a try when Frodo pushes the required files to CVS, and if you'd like to try it yourself before then, you can go to the sourceforge patch page and grab it from there. (I'm going the sourceforge route by Frodo's request).

Gilthalas

 

[MrMario64]

Great,
Will surely be checking this out asap.

How does this look for you?

 

[Frodo]

I tried it and its a very nice plugin
but i'm missing the sources :roll: :roll:
which will be needed if i'm gonna include it in cvs
Frodo

 

[Anonymous]

looks good

Mr Mario,
That graphic will do! Thanks!

Frodo,
Submitted sources to sourceforge - wasn't sure you wanted those up front.

Let me know if anything else is needed!

Gil

 

[Frodo]

k, i added this 2 cvs now
Frodo

 

[Mr.Mitchell]

Feedback

The last couple of days I have been running the .dll that was posted on SF with the Crystal skin. I think it is a nice plugin, but it needs some tweaking to be a great plugin. Here is my list with suggestions.

• It would be nice if the image for the feed would be taken from the feed if the image element is available.
• I am a bit confused about the description for the feed, where is it used for?
• I have now 7 feeds added and it is very clumsy to select for example the 5th feed. It takes a lot of actions to do so. It would be more convenient if the feed could be selected directly without having to go through all the feeds before. This could be done with some kind of combobox (which is not available in MP I think) or with a button like that is used for the "View as" in "My Movies" or "My Music".
• When adding a wrong url as a feed an exception occurs.
• "My News" can not be translated.
• I would suggest replacing the word "rss" with "news" or so. This will make the plugin more future proof, because it could be that for example Atom feeds will be supported in the future.
• The area for the description is currently smaller than the listbox. It would be nice if it was as wide as the listbox. This will make the text fit easier.
• The page scroll arrows are at the bottomright corner instead of at the bottom right of the listbox.
• An rss feed can have a title, description or both. If it only has a title it would be nice if the trailing ":" would not be added.
• It would be nice if there was a a newline after the title in case there is a title + description. Right now it is hard to see what the title is and where the description starts.
• When you have selected an article and navigate to "Refesh" then you can not navigate back to the list with articles.
• I noticed that there was an & was visible in an article. It looks like the html entities need to be converted (but could also be an error in the feed)

It looks like a lot of changes, but I think it will make "My News" a better plugin.

 

[Anonymous]

thanks

Thanks for the feedback. It's a very early piece of work, so I knew it would have some shortcomings. Let me try to answer some things here:

- I'll look into the image from the feed if possible. ---DONE (MM)
- The description was just intended to be a longer description for the site. For example the name may be "Slashdot" while the description may be "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" or something like that.
- The idea to choose the feed to view like the My Music view is a good one - I took the layout for My News from the My Weather plugin, since I hadn't made a plugin before. I'll look into this. ---DONE (MM)
- I still have to add error checking. --MOSTLY DONE (Gil)
- I'll look into the desc box and getting "My News" to read from the specific language file (DONE (MM)). Suggestion for RSS to News is taken.
- I'm not sure what you mean by the colon, but I'll look into it. I'll also play with the formatting of the title/description/feed -- DONE (MM)
- The navigation is just a tweaking of the skin. -- DONE (MM, Mario)
- I make no claims to how well the RSS feed fetcher works - it's someone else's creation. But I'll be happy to nose around.

I may not get to this for a while, I'm working on my website and the such, but will eventually look at some of these things.

Gil

Edit: Updated the todos with who did them - MM=Mr Mitchell, Mario - MrMario, Gil = Me

 

[Mr.Mitchell]

Since you are busy, I can take up a few things already. I could improve the skin. Play around with the layout in the description field, have a look at the & thing and make "My News" translatable. Maybe I can do the other things also, but these are the topics I know I can fix.

Let me know if I can start on this or that you already started on some things. I want to avoid that we are both working on the same issues.

 

[Anonymous]

sounds good

Doing those things would help out a bunch! When you get updated files, just send them to sourceforge as a patch. Keep me updated!

Gil

 

[Mr.Mitchell]

OK, started working on it. I will post progress here.