Re: RSS Screensaver for GSoC

[Neil Loknath <neil loknath gmail com>]

Hi Jon, 

I wanted to incorporate both cases into the screensaver: get news from a list of feeds and for current music playing.  What do you think?  Too much to do?  If I had to choose one case, I would prefer the RSS feed case. 

I've played around a bit with embedding a Clutter stage into an undecorated, fullscreen GTK window.  It would be interesting to use Clutter for this project.

I have written up a proposal for GSoC. I was going to be submit it today.  But, it would be great if you could take a look at it first?

Let me know and I'll e-mail it to you.

Thanks,
Neil

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 1:09 PM, William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:

Hi Neil,

2009/3/20 Neil Loknath <neil loknath gmail com>:

> Hi all,
>
>  I've got a cool idea for a new screensaver I'd like to propose for GSoC.
> Here is the gist of it:
>
> - something similar to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqEe6g7SWY (Apple RSS
> visualizer)
> - use OPML doc (can export from Google Reader) as source of feeds
> - use Glib-RSS or feedparser libraries for handling feed parsing
> - create a new screensaver using xscreensaver FlipText as reference (of
> course, other cool effects are possible..Clutter is awesome at this)
> - use OpenGL, and maybe Clutter or Cairo for some cool saver effects!
> (leaning towards Clutter, as it already depends on OpenGL)
> - the feeds will be assigned to a number key so that when they fly across
> the screen you can press a number key to jump to the feed and stop the
> saver.
>
> In addition, I think it would be really cool if we could interface with
> D-Bus, as media players like Banshee export interfaces for determining the
> current playing track. Then we could add news on the artist currently
> playing!  Using
> http://news.google.ca/news?um=1&ned=ca&hl=en&q=rihanna&output=rss, where
> rihanna is the artist.  Could even expand this to news local to where you're
> currently at, etc.
>
> Any thoughts? Would be great to discuss with some potential mentor(s) before
> submitting my proposal.
>
> I appreciate you taking the time to read this.  Looking forward to your
> comments.  Also, here is a thread of some previous discussion:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00339.html

The idea sounds really neat.  It may be easier to concentrate on the
Music player integration instead of trying to solve the general RSS
feed case though.  Not sure.

I also have heard that someone was thinking about doing a weather
report / forecast screensaver which I imagine would need to parse RSS
data as well.

Anyway, sounds interesting.  Is there something you need me to do for this?

Thanks,
Jon