News from the development labs
After months without releases or news from Akregator, you could have come to the conclusion that nothing is going on in Akregator development. This is far from true, so here is an update on the exciting things going on:
In the last weeks, several new contributors joined us. Eike Hein implemented the delayed mark as read feature, Heinrich Wendel fixed a lot tons of bugs, and our bug tracker manager Eckhart Wörner submitted his first patch (and probably more to come). This is great, as it gives new momentum to Akregator development, after it was slowed down a bit due to lack of developers and their spare time.
A major feature for Akregator 1.5 (released as part of KDE-PIM 3.5) I implemented is “tag folders”, which means you can create tags like “Interesting”, “Funny”, “Programming”, “Basketball”, whatever, and assign them to articles (very similar to tags in Digikam). At the moment, tagging can be done only manually, but automatic tagging by KMail-like filters is planned (Like “if article contains ‘KDE’, assign ‘KDE’ tag”). Here you can see how it looks right now (click the image for the full screenshot):
Related to tagging, Dennis Nienhüser is experimenting with text classification tools like bayes filters and the like, to filter articles for the stuff the user finds interesting. Another use for classification would be to suggest tags for articles based on similarity to the already tagged articles. We plan to plug in several classification libs via DCOP and look how they work for our purposes. Who knows, maybe we even get something working for KDE-PIM 3.5.
Last but not least, RSS 2.0 enclosures are now supported by the backend, so you can expect at least very basic support for podcasts soon. Showing them attachment-like will be easy, but I am not sure if we get more sophisticated support implemented until feature freeze (August, 1st). If you want to help here, dear reader, you are of course invited to join us 