Podbird reignited

[geekvine]

@theare27 surely it might be simpler use content-hub and set the Music app as an external player, i'll have to look into it. i know sailfish os has this option.

[theare27]

@geekvine I know what I've done isn't ideal in any way - but it's let me work around things for now
The ideal would be for Podbird to be able to remember the queue, it's position within the episode and be able to resume playback on restart

Using Music App as a player is not without it's drawbacks, if I play any actual music now I lose my position in the podcast episode so my setup isn't ideal by far - it's just a bit more livable than where I was before

I don't think I have the skill to hack on Podbird, not in terms of the code itself but in building & debugging and knowing how it interacts with the OS, but if I could here would be my to-do list

1. Add a link to the "Now Playing" screen to the hamburger menu so that one can navigate back to that screen with ease
2. Either remove the code that clears the queue on exit, or, add a "Remember Queue on Exit" config flag and make that code conditional on that flag
3. Make sure that Podbird is now capable of remembering both the Queue and the position within the episode between sessions
4. Currently, when a new episode is tapped it wipes the Queue - add a dialog here to ask "Replace current queue and play this episode" or "Append episode to current queue and play"

Those changes put together I believe would eliminate my issues and then there wouldn't be a need to involve the Music App at all

[arubislander]

@theare27
Those are some.fine requests. If implemented, some would improve Podbird or a range of users.

@theare27 said in Podbird reignited:

4. Currently, when a new episode is tapped it wipes the Queue - add a dialog here to ask "Replace current queue and play this episode" or "Append episode to current queue and play"

This one though, I think a dialogue at every tap would quickly become annoying.
The Kodi Media player has a settings option where the user can set the default action to selecting audio as either being: play (which would be what Podbird does now) or add to queue (which is the proposed functionality).
Something similar could be added to Podbird. I feel that the trailing action, when you wipe to the left on an episode would then also need to change, based in the default. So when default is play, then the action should be queue as it is now. And when the default is add to queue, then the action should be play.

[theare27]

@arubislander that'd be fine too

[geekvine]

@theare27 all trivial and fixed on a personal build. Currently looking at the track position problem.

[theare27]

@geekvine Sounds fab
Happy to help with testing etc

[CiberSheep]

@theare27 said in Podbird reignited:

The ideal would be for Podbird to be able to remember the queue, it's position within the episode and be able to resume playback on restart

I agree this is the ideal: fix Podbird.

[geekvine]

anyone have a working email for Michael? The one i found just came back to me as no good (like 3 days later).

[Giiba]

Care to share the build for testing?

I'd be happy to poke about and test a bit.

[geekvine]

@Giiba there is a build in testing in the wild...but to amswer your question - soon (tm)

[domubpkm]

@geekvine Working, i don't know but not secret and found in UTTT :

[danqo6]

@geekvine He is on telegram too, as @MikeSheldon

[wilson]

@geekvine Any updates on sharing your personal build? With the PinePhone shipping soon I'd be more than happy to test the fixes you've implemented.

[geekvine]

@wilson i will post a build for download possibly this weekend. working on a couple fixes based on feedback from the current build. that build will be available on the gitlab repo (not yet public).

[Elleo]

Heya,

Just stumbled across this (if you need to contact me in the future my email address is mike@mikeasoft.com)

Feel free to fork the project if you'd like to take over maintenance of it, I'd rather it saw active development than languished due to my lack of time.

A major reason I'd stuck with Launchpad was for the translation integration and the excellent contributions from the Ubuntu Translators group. I think internationalisation is extremely important for usability (if something's not available in a language you speak it's pretty much unusable regardless of what else it offers), so if you do switch to a git hosting platform I'd appreciate it if you could set-up equivalent translation infrastructure.

Best of luck
Mike

[Elleo]

Oh also, I own the podbird.org domain, if you'd like me to point the DNS towards somewhere else let me know.

Back before Ubuntu Touch was dropped by Canonical I had been working on some network services to sync subscriptions between devices, offer charts and recommendations, and to provide push notifications for new episodes; if you'd like to carry on with any of that work I've uploaded the site source code here:

https://github.com/Elleo/podbird-web

And the corresponding client code is in this branch:

https://code.launchpad.net/~michael-sheldon/podbird/sync-settings-devel

Cheers,
Mike

[CiberSheep]

@Elleo said in Podbird reignited:

[...] I had been working on [...]

That sounds really cool...

[CiberSheep]

@Elleo said in Podbird reignited:

Feel free to fork the project if you'd like to take over maintenance of it

Isn't it better to push changes to your repo? Or do you prefer to step back from the project?

You did a great job and we really appreciate your app, remember that

[Elleo]

@CiberSheep I'm happy to continue maintaining my bazaar branch if that's what people would prefer; although you may want to arrange code reviews amongst yourselves, so that you're not so held up on my time availability for reviewing (i.e. someone besides me can review and approve a branch and then I'll just merge it, trusting their judgement)

Or if you'd like to shift to git with someone else as the primary maintainer I'm still happy to publish builds for you, that way existing users will get upgrades directly from the open store and we can avoid having two different versions in the store.

[Elleo]

Actually I think we shifted ownership of Podbird trunk to the Podbird Developers group back when we were still actively working on it, so I'm happy to add any of you who wish to continue work on that branch to that group and you'll be able to merge directly into it yourselves then (although I'd recommend you still maintain some code review amongst yourselves if there's enough of you).