Mokotunes
———-
This can be considered just a little more than a nice mockup just now
since most part of the core functionalities are not implemented yet. By
the way, looking at its code (that mostly presents some skeleton
functions), I can say that is a very well written/structured C++/EFL
project that uses edje for designing the interface while Gstreamer to
play the media (actually impossible due to the missing interface for
retrieving the data, but the code for playing seems to be all there!).
So, also if what I’ve considered is still something of embryonal, the
core that has already written seems so good, and it could be extended to
get something of functional one day.
>From the GUI point of view, imho, it’s hard to do a consideration, since
actually it only shows a kind of “demo” playlist with some buttons for
controlling the media reproduction. However I don’t know how it’s
planned the management of the podcast feeds and of the downloads.
Finally, from a first test in my Freerunner, the interface seems a
little slow. Also if it includes only few elements in its list, the
scrolling is not so smooth (maybe due to the pixmaps used in the
theme!?) so I don’t expect it to be better in a real scenario.

My vote: 3/10.
In few words: Good start, nice code, but too immature into an unlikely
interface.

Gorshplayer
———–
It was the only project sent that was working “by default”, and
basically the author added a new podcast media importer feature to the
existent Neoqplayer/Gorshplayer code.
So, with it is possible to add a podcast url, browse its content,
download it and reproducing it from the playlist (as any other media
that is loaded there). This seems to work quite well also if I was able
to get only ogg files working, however the interface imho isn’t so good
for two reasons: first of all it is not so finger usable (yes, the
buttons are big enough, but there’s no finger scrolling, and
double-clicking is hard! Not to mention that the window is too big to be
used with a shelf, so it’s made for working in fullscreen), then to add
a podcast an user should go into preferences, paste an URL, go in the
podcasts list, load a podcast, double-click an item to download, go back
to the main window where he can select the media to reproduce. All this
is quite annoying.
The player is written in C++/Qt and that is a very good choice in
general, but unfortunately not for the openmoko applications yet. In
fact this toolkit doesn’t support by default some finger-friendly
features that could improve a lot the usability, and from the user point
of view, it is not so easy to be installed in the most part of the
distros available natively for the Openmoko devices (also if it works,
I’ve ran it also in Om2008). Of course this is not a developer fault,
and I guess that this player is a very good choice for distros like
debian (when I mean with it something of “non-telephonic”), but I think
that the toolkit choice is what mostly limited my judgment (that is
mostly focused for getting something of working in a touchscreen daily
device).
I hope, however, that it will improve making the podcast reproduction a
little bit more friendly.

My vote: 5.5/10
In few words: Good player, well written, works, but not focused for the
podcast playing, not so finger usable, not yet ready for any
“telephonic” distro (SHR/OM).

NeoReader
———
When I received the code it seemed neither compilable for an openmoko
phone (no problems in my PC, instead), however playing a little with the
Toolchain I got an arm binary. Unfortunately everywhere I’d run this
software, it simply crashed when I tried to fetch the podcast media.
So, if I’d judge its basic functionality, I should say that it simply
doesn’t work. However I liked the idea behind the interface, so I fixed
a little the code to get it working…
Looking at it a little more deeply, I found that it has a kind of C++
core that is used for retrieving the data, parsing the XML, saving the
results in a sqlite database (that stores the xml retrieved and
associates to them the downloaded podcasts), and controlling the media
playing the with mplayer.
All this is quite well done, however around this there’s a C/Elmentary
interface that looks quite cool and that is quite well designed, but
that is imho badly written and that doesn’t uses the E-libraries to
perform some basic tasks (like downloading the media). This causes that
the interface is often blocked while the core is performing some task
(like reading from the database or parsing the xml files). The author
said that he wrote the reader in few days so I can understand why there
are so much workarounds around in the code, but I think that they must
be absolutely fixed (with the bugs that they bring).
By the way the potential of this application is good since the it
already allows to listen multiple podcast sources (that can be added
pasting the feed url), saving the selected media in the phone and
allowing to listen it lately. All this is doable using a very well
finger usable interface (thanks to the tools that Elementary gives).
There are is also a nice interface for mplayer, also if it has some
speed issues when NeoReader is used in a real device.
So finally, I’ve decided to give my vote to this application because
also if it has many bugs, the interface must be improved, and the code
cleaned up, it represents imho the best starting point for having a nice
podcast player for Openmoko.
Some features I’d like to see in this software (after getting a stable
version that should use the e libraries facilities for getting the base
task accomplished, of course :P), are a kind of playlist that should
show all the downloaded media (per podcast and general), the ability to
use an plain file to save the podcast addresses (so it will be easy to
share list of podcasts or simply to import them without using the GUI).

My vote: 7/10
In few words: Good backed, nice elementary GUI but badly integrated with
the core, it’s developed for being just a podcast reader and it seems a
good first step.

Bye.

We were running it on 2008.12, that’s maybe the reason why the I was broken but we weren’t able to make it run on SHR. Anyway, we’re waiting to hear more from you :)

Thanks!

nezza-_-