Mini-update

Just a quick update to say two things:

1.- If you try Dianara, the Diaspora App, in its 0.2 version from nonGNU or Qt-apps, it won’t get any posts in the timeline. Some stuff has been changed in Diaspora, so you’ll need to test the development version of Dianara directly from Git.

2.- If you have problems running Auralquiz, my music guessing game (if it doesn’t play sound), check if you’re using Phonon-backend-gstreamer in your Phonon configuration. If so, try using Phonon-backend-vlc.

Auralquiz does not work right with the Gstreamer backend at this point, I don’t know yet if it’s some regression in the latest Phonon-gstreamer or a problem in the way Auralquiz handles things. Switching to the vlc-backend should help. Or the xine-backend, if you still can.

Cheers!

Dianara’s progress, take 2

It’s been over a month since my last post about Dianara, so I guess it’s time to blog about its progress again. With screenshots, of course! (excuse the dark color scheme, that’s just my system configuration)

First, the posts now display the avatar, the markdown-inserted images, and the “fuzzy date”, like “10 days ago”:

Second, I’ve implemented a basic contact list:

But there’s a catch: the contact list data works using Pistos’ Fake API, something temporary he added to his Diaspora fork, for developers to play with. This means you’ll only be able to see your contacts if you have an account on one of the pods using Pistos code. But then you won’t have the timeline posts.

And third, I’ve started a prototype for the Messages tab, the private conversations, but it still doesn’t handle any real data. It’s a mockup, basically:

I have a 0.1 “demo” version in Qt-apps.org, but there are many changes in the git/development version, including all the above.

Dianara also has a main website now: http://dianara.nongnu.org/
Simple and ugly right now, but hopefully, it will be nicer in the future!

Dianara’s progress

With Auralquiz 0.8 out the door, I’ve now turned my attention back to Dianara, my Diaspora app, for a while.

There’s a lot more API available now, so Dianara can fetch the first page (15 posts) of your public timeline, and display it.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words, they say:

Colors are just my system configuration 🙂

There is some basic Markdown rendering (bold, italic, and headers), and basic information about the post: Author, creation time, number of likes, number of comments, and, if it’s a reshare, the name of the original post’s author.

There is no OAuth authentication yet, so it is not possible to see your stream, aspects, contacts… well, anything not public.
In the Account dialog, the “access token” field can be filled with anything, it’s not used at this time. But hopefully soon!

Dianara, a Diaspora client

I’ve started developing a new program.
This time it’s a Diaspora client, an application for GNU/linux that will allow users to manage their Diaspora accounts without the need to use a web browser.

September 2013 update: Dianara has been turned into a client for the pump.io social network, a powerful system that can be considered an evolution of StatusNet, which includes identi.ca and many other servers. Read more about current Dianara status here: https://jancoding.wordpress.com/dianara/

At the moment, it’s basically an empty shell. The only thing you can do, is enter your Diaspora ID (username@podname) and password, and see how your avatar and full name are fetched from your account information.

Diaspora‘s API is not ready to use yet, so there’s not much that can be done at the moment. Meanwhile, I’ll keep improving the interface, and the little network control there is now.

The code is, as usual, in Gitorious, at http://gitorious.org/dianara

It is, like my other projects, based on Qt, and as an aditional dependency, QJSON. It also supports FreeDesktop.org notifications, so you get nice notifications in KDE Plasma Desktop, Gnome, XFCE and other environments which support that specification.