Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] [PATCH] Podcast support

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin hn org>]

On Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 12:40:44AM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:

> Now...onto the user interface.  You'll have to bear with me because up
> until 30 seconds ago when I tried your patch I'd never actually never
> listened to a podcast.  It seems like from browsing the web, the
> "typical" way is that a web site gives a link, and tells you to copy it
> to your music software.  Is that right?

I've got about as much podcast experience as you, but I think copy/paste and
DnD are the common ways of doing this.  Getting browsers to run a helper
application after the user clicks on a podcast link isn't going to work,
since the RSS is probably sent with a 'text/xml' content-type header.
I don't think there are any other ways of getting the podcast URL into a
separate application.

> Just giving the user a URL entry box seems kind of unfriendly.  Is there
> anything we can do to make this better?  
> 
> It looks like some web sites support dragging an image from the site
> into iTunes.  I wonder how that works exactly?  Maybe metadata embedded
> in the image data?  Could we parse that?

I'm guessing the image is actually a link to the podcast RSS, so
dragging it transfers the podcast URL rather than the image URL.  There's
code in the iradio source for dealing with DnD from browsers (which I
stole from totem) - see stations_view_drag_data_received_cb in
rb-iradio-source.c.  The code for setting up the iradio source as a drag
destination starts at line 330 in rb-iradio-source.c.

-jonathan