Monday, 16 December 2013

Send to Pocket using GNOME

I'm a big fan of Pocket, the "Read Later" service.

I regularly save blog posts, videos, tweets and articles to read later, and then consume them on my iPad 1 (I hope they don't cut off the old app yet), my phone, or using the Kobo e-book reader.

So it's only normal that I'd try to make my experience of using it with GNOME, a bit more integrated than a simple Javascript bookmarklet in my browser.

Online Accounts support

The first step was writing the GNOME Online Accounts support for Pocket accounts. This isn't quite finished, and there was some ugliness due to the way Pocket's authentication works. It's not complicated, but it's neither OAuth 1, nor OAuth 2.

The patch also adds a new type of service that you can toggle on/off in the settings, see about that below.



Browser support

I don't really read articles on my laptop, and I'm Linux-tablet-less (the WeTab you might remember is now with gnome-shell developer Florian Müllner). So my main concern was saving articles to the service.

The UI is still a bit in flux, but this is what it looks like on my machine right now. In the future, we might want to try and show the status of the page (has it already been saved?) or a way to edit tags after having added the page.



Other services

There are other services similar to Pocket, such as Instapaper, or even the free and open source Poche.

The good news is that adding support for those services should be easier, as you'd only need to add a new gnome-online-accounts backend, and write a little bit of backend code in Epiphany (eg. 2 out of the 4 steps in adding support for Pocket).

The infrastructure is, or more accurately, will soon be there.

Update: The Epiphany/Web bug for the browser integration is here. Doh!
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9 comments:

  1. Unknown16 December 2013 at 17:45

    woooooooooooooooooooooo ! so cool! let me try this

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  2. Fábio Nogueira16 December 2013 at 19:48

    How to test (or install) this option from BugZilla?

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  3. nico_somb17 December 2013 at 07:16

    Oh, great idea for poche :)
    But we can't implement it today, poche needs an API (available with poche v2, still in development).

    Have a nice day!

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  4. Unknown17 December 2013 at 09:38

    Great! I'm working in a Instapaper library for GObject https://github.com/alvaropg/libginstapaper (not finished yet due to lack of time) and with your work I have found new reasons to continue with the work and I think that can try to integrate Instapaper in GOA.

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  5. David Nielsen17 December 2013 at 10:09

    Thank you, I have been wishing for better Read Later integration in GNOME for a year now.

    I greatly look forward to using this.

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  6. Bastien Nocera17 December 2013 at 12:25

    Fábio: you'll need to apply patches to gnome-online-accounts and epiphany. It's easier to wait for those being folded into the various projects.

    nico_somb: would be great if you replicate the Pocket API for authentication and item management, would avoid having to write new code on the GNOME side.

    Álvaro: would be great to include in GNOME as well, you'd just need to split it up. Authentication, access tokens in gnome-online-accounts, and item management in epiphany (and others).

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  7. hadrons12318 December 2013 at 16:08

    Hardly a feature!

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  8. Bastien Nocera18 December 2013 at 16:23

    xfoss: Hardly a useful comment! :)

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  9. jimmac19 December 2013 at 14:26

    Somebody invests their free time to hack up and communicate a nice feature, push their patches upstream and that doesn't meet your worthy threshold? Go back to looking at cat videos, you ungrateful brat.

    ReplyDelete