[tobijdc]

A little background why i want to do a GSoC project for XBMC:
A while back topfs2's dirty region work solved the single biggest issue i had with XBMC, trough a GSoC project.
I felt inspired to one day also do a project for XBMC trough GSoC and become part of the great community that is XBMC.

This represents a draft of my proposal. I wanted to get a little feedback before proposing over melange.

Name: Tobias Ibounig
Forum/IRC: tobijdc
Studies: 3rd year computer science and electronics student from Austria.

Summary: In effort to make XBMC a more complete experience I want to add a RSS-Reader to XBMC (as proposed in the wiki).
How will I achieve this: Writing an addon, with help of the library FeedParser, which is already in the official repository.
In terms of features i am thinking of:

• categories
  Not only supporting multiple RSS feeds, but also enable to divide them into different categories.
  This could be solved trough a XML-file for each category, where each XML-file contains the feeds.
  
• images and video
  An easy way to displayed images would be the multiimage-control. And have a sideshow of the images in the feed on the side.
  I still need to look more into how to add video.
  
• feed-catalog
  It would also be nice, to provide the user with a (small) catalog of interesting Feeds, that feature full text and not only short previews.
  
• Import functions
  Something that just came to mind, a import function for online feed readers.
  

What will the project focus on: Creating a feed reader with extensive focus on usability.
Benefits: Enabling the User to do his news reading through XBMC. This could mean the elimination of another reason to switch out of XBMC.
(Also making a pure XBMC-distro a even more viable option)
Goals: Create a user friendly Feed reader with Image and Video viewing capability.
What does it touch in XBMC: I currently think of it as an pure addon, so nothing much.
Requirements: -

A few questions:
Is this the way you envisioned the RSS reader to be implemented?
Is something missing that you want?
Have I overlooked something, that could make it necessary to touch something within XBMC?

[topfs2]

wiee I inspire people

[da-anda]

something like Google Currents might be nice

[phil65]

pieh almost did all the work already some time ago and coded a complete rss reader. adjusting that to frodo should be easy.
https://github.com/pieh/pieh-xbmc-addons
(the actual nox version supports that add-on and displays rss feeds as widgets for example)

[tobijdc]

@topfs2: ^^
@da-anda: you mean something like the feed-catalog?

@phil65: Oh, didn't know that already existed, just got the idea from the idea page. I will check your project.

[phil65]

if you have questions, feel free to ask. i also already basically "converted" the rss reader to a json reader (needs rss --> json conversion by yahoo pipes) in script.extendedinfo (available in skin dev area) since i much prefer to deal with json stuff instead of rss.

[da-anda]

no idea what you mean by feed-catalog. I probably should have mentioned that I meant the UI/display of the feeds. So some grid thingy with pictures and taglines, see screenshots. That would require the plugin to build it's own UI.

[tobijdc]

@da-anda Sorry the first thing I thought about was the possibility to select feeds to follow like in currents (because only a few feeds are available). But yes, making a similar UI is an awesome idea. Especially, if there is already so much foundation, I think i can focus on the UI even more

[unity1]

Forgive me if I'm being really stupid. I've just started migrating over to xbmc from MCE and media browser. Managed to get most things sorted but like the sound of this RSS reader.

I've downloaded both the rss client and extendedinfo add-on however when I try to install the RSS client I get a dependencies not meet message.

Can you tell me what I'm missing?

Using Frodo 12.2 with both Confluence and Aeon Nox skins

[tobijdc]

I think you should try installing the standalone version ('rssclient-standalone'), that worked for me.

[da-anda]

please don't hijack this thread, use our help section for this