Launching Tiny tiny rss and Pocket client for Plasma 5

Managing the sources you are informed of will determine the "press" you are going to read in your daily life, which sections and topics, which authors, columnists ... will ultimately shape you as editor of yourself. To maintain autonomy, and not depend on third parties and the economic viability of news providers, often linked to advertising, there is some software that can help us.

Although for desktop there are several programs, kdepim Akregator , FeedReader , Liferea ...In my case I am subscribed to various atom / rss sources, which I manage with tiny tiny rss , a powerful web feeds manager that acts as a backend, for obtaining, updating and sorting the feeds (similar to deprecated google reader).In such a way that I have in my own server the management. It also offers the possibility to create your own channels of the published and marked as favorites elements.

With this tool we can get a constant stream of news, which is personalized and has no advertising artifacts or third party tracking through. Nothing to do with google plus, facebook, twitter, google news ...

Speaking of ttrss front ends, there is the web itself, a reader for mobile, and on the desktop, Liferea and FeedReader offer the possibility to link the account.

Until now everything would be resolved. However, having tried other newsreaders on tablets (such as Flipboard, Google Play Newsstand or MSN news), there is a user experience that is missed by GNU / Linux desktops. Having breakfast reading the new articles is a bit heavier if it is done with existing clients and I have the feeling that the reading experience is too heavy and there are too many distractions; They lack focus. It would be nice to have the possibility of reading with your eyes looking for items with your hands.

With this intention, in 2014, I started developing a client for ttrss. It is created in QML , since this offers a lot of potential for touch and gesture interaction, in addition this declarative language would be used in two new desktops; Unity 8 (which has recently been discarded by canonical ) and KDE Plasma 5, the free desktop that I use and in which I feel more comfortable.

The project initially was an attempt to make a panel for touch screen devices (a desert 2014), as I had recently bought a laptop with a touch screen and despite the potential of QML for tactile interaction, there was no desktop that allowed the famous "convergence", and I did not dislike the idea of ​​being able to use the laptop in different ways, whether on the sofa, on the train, in a coffee shop or in the office.

The fact is that it became complicated and it was put away in a drawer.But I have used it everyday since then, and despite having spent three years the base is still working, and has been resisting the versions of qt and kde (even went from kde 4 to kde 5). Seeing the stability I think it can be useful to others and can enrich the experience of the articles reader user of Plasma and floss in general, since in my opinion it provides an agile and pleasant navigation of the distributed news streams. Fifteen days ago I thought about pruning, removing windows management components and stabilizing the basic features. The result is published in https://github.com/aleixq/ttrssPocket-plasmoid .

Pocket

Apart from TTRSS, I have added another client in the same program, it is a pocket client, despite the service could be categorized as a silo, and it could be put in the same bag as other newsreaders that act as centralizers, with the acquisition of pocket by mozilla, this could become open source : "The plan is to open source the Pocket code as part of the Mozilla open source project, consistent with our licensing police."

The integration of pocket in the browser, is a feature that I have to recognize that I use, since it also synchronizes with the Kobo ebook, closing the circle and offering me a comfortable reading in digital ink of the articles that interest me.

So the tiny tiny rss stream to desktop with a more pleasant UX, mobile and ebook is intertwined. So now I can start breakfast reading what interests without distraction, call it advertising, or standard desktop toolkits.