--- author: '' category: '' date: 2010/07/23 02:50 description: '' link: '' priority: '' slug: BB904 tags: kde, open source, programming, pyqt, python, qt title: Desktop apps and clouds (with video) type: text updated: 2010/07/23 02:50 url_type: '' --- I enjoy creating desktop applications. That means I may be a member of a dying breed, since web apps are going to make us all obsolete next week, but I do enjoy doing it. The bad side of it is, of course that sometimes it's much more convenient to use a web application. For example, I have abandoned my own baby (`uRSSus `_) because google reader is just easier and more convenient to use. But then I thought... what bothers me of uRSSus? And there are quite a few things! 1. It's not in all computers I may use That means I will not ever be able to use it exclusively. 2. It's pretty useless without an Internet connection (but so is google reader mostly) 3. Since I can't use it exclusively, I end with feeds on uRSSus that are not on google reader and viceversa. 4. It's freaking slow So, I decided to see what I could do about that without giving up the good side of uRSSus: 1. It looks much nicer than a web app, because it looks like a desktop app 2. It does things like opening the site instead of showing the feed item (great for partial content feeds) 3. I wrote it (yes, that's a feature for me. I like self-made programs) So, this attempt at rewriting the desktop RSS reader produced this: .. raw:: html
As you can see in the above video, this reader syncs the subscription list to google reader. It will also eventually sync your read/unread posts. It still can open full sites instead of feed items, it has/will have a heck of an offline mode (full pages captured as images, for example), and... it's very very fast. It's **much** faster than google reader in Chromium, and **hella** faster than uRSSus. That was done via smarter coding, so it probably means I was braindead before and experienced a minor recovery. The code is not fit for release (for example, the database schema will change) but you can try it: http://code.google.com/p/kakawana/source/checkout