https://agateau.com/tags/akregator/feedPosts tagged akregator2013-07-10T00:04:53+02:00Aurélien Gâteaupython-feedgenhttps://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pimPimp My PIM!2010-12-18T21:00:00+01:00<p>I worked a bit on some user-interface improvements for kdepim applications. So far I worked on KOrganizer and Akregator.</p>
<h2>KOrganizer</h2>
<p>Here is a screenshot of KOrganizer when I started:</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/korganizer-before.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_korganizer-before.png" title="KOrganizer - before" height="176" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-643"/></a>
<p>My first change was to remove all double-margins from the main window:</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/korganizer-event-indicator-over-agenda-before1.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_korganizer-event-indicator-over-agenda-before1.png" title="KOrganizer - no more double margins" height="175" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-646"/></a>
<p>This gives more room for actual content, but the event indicators (the green up and down arrows indicating some events are outside the view) was wasting some vertical space. I replaced them with overlayed indicators:</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/korganizer-event-indicator-over-agenda-after1.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_korganizer-event-indicator-over-agenda-after1.png" title="KOrganizer - overlayed event indicators" height="175" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-644"/></a>
<p>You might notice I got a bit creative here: I didn't use an icon for the indicators. Instead I used unicode characters representing arrows, namely "UPWARDS DASHED ARROW" or U+21E1: ⇡ and "DOWNWARDS DASHED ARROW" or U+21E3: ⇣ (Thanks to KCharSelect for making it easy to search for arrow characters)</p>
<p>I felt using characters like this would result in less invasive indicators. As can be seen in the following screenshot, if the indicator overlaps an event it does not prevent you from reading the event text.</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/korganizer-event-indicator-over-agenda-after2.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_korganizer-event-indicator-over-agenda-after2.png" title="KOrganizer - overlayed indicators over event" height="175" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-645"/></a>
<p>Finally, I changed the appearance and alignment of the time labels (the column on the left of the agenda) so that they are aligned with the agenda, making the two look a bit more like they work together.</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/korganizer-right-aligned-time-labels.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_korganizer-right-aligned-time-labels.png" title="KOrganizer - right-aligned time labels" height="169" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-648"/></a>
<p>I also did some message boxes clean up: I went through all of them and fixed those which used "yes/no" buttons instead of more descriptive verbs, as recommended by <a href="http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Messages">KDE HIG</a>.</p>
<h2>Akregator</h2>
<p>I picked up Akregator as an example of bad list view columns in <a href="https://agateau.com/2010/12/10/common-user-interface-mistakes-in-kde-applications-part-1-default-sizes/">my last article</a>.</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/akregator.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_akregator.png" title="Akregator" height="155" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-609"/></a>
<p>I improved the feed tree on the left: by default it now only shows the feed names followed by the unread count. If you add back the "Unread" column, the unread count disappear from the "Name" column.</p>
<p>I then reworked the article list in a few ways:
</p><ul>
<li>The list now starts with more usable column widths,</li>
<li>When a feed is selected in the feed tree the "Feed" column is hidden,</li>
<li>The title column expands to show as much as possible, using a <del>nasty hack</del> beautiful workaround to ensure it is can still be resized by the user.</li>
</ul>
Finally I changed the size hint for the article view to start a bit taller by default.
<p>Here is how it looks now:</p>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/akregator-after.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/pimp-my-pim/thumb_akregator-after.png" title="Akregator - after" height="196" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-649"/></a>
<p>Hopefully this makes the application more pleasant to use.</p>
2010-12-18T21:00:00+01:00https://agateau.com/2013/fixing-my-akregator-morning-routineFixing my Akregator morning routine2013-07-10T00:04:53+02:00<p>When I wake up, I often start the day with a few webcomics (yes, I am a slacker) which I read with Akregator. One of them is <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com">Penny Arcade</a>. This site also features articles, mostly about the game industry. One morning I bumped into an article about the <a href="http://www.ouya.tv/">OUYA</a>, an Android-based console. Unfortunately, the link from Akregator did not work. This was not the first time it has happened so I decided to look into it.</p>
<p>Downloading the RSS feed, it turned out some articles do not have a complete URL, instead, the <code><link></code> item contains only an absolute path. The RSS spec says the <code><link></code> is an URL, so the feed is not spec-compliant, but that is probably to be expected when the feed announces itself like this :)</p>
<div class="codehilite"><pre><span/><code><span class="cp"><?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?></span>
<span class="nt"><rss</span> <span class="na">version=</span><span class="s">"2.0"</span><span class="nt">></span>
<span class="nt"><channel></span>
<span class="nt"><title></span>Penny Arcade<span class="nt"></title></span>
<span class="nt"><link></span>http://www.penny-arcade.com<span class="nt"></link></span>
<span class="nt"><description></span>News Fucker 6000<span class="nt"></description></span>
...
</code></pre></div>
<p>Anyway, I made a small patch to add support for that spec deviation. Happy with my fix, I went bug-hunting on Bugzilla, wondering if someone had reported it before. I stumbled on <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117478">bug 117478</a>, which looked similar, but was actually about an ATOM feed. I thought the fix would be similar and dived into it. Turns out this new fix had nothing to do with the previous one... (by the way, <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/">the feed from the bug</a> is quite interesting, I added it to my feed list)</p>
<p>Having fixed two Akregator bugs, I decided this would be an Akregator day, and went to look into another one which had been annoying me for too long, <a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103216">bug 103216</a>: "Icons created by embedded browser remain in status bar". This one took me quite some time to figure out. I tried multiple approaches before setting on one which also required a small change in kdelibs. But it's fixed now, Akregator feels a bit nicer to use!</p>
<p>PS:</p>
<p><img alt="Akademy 2013" src="https://agateau.com/2013/fixing-my-akregator-morning-routine/akademy-2013.png"/></p>2013-07-10T00:04:53+02:00