Nibbles - a feed reader for Maemo

Nibbles is an alternative feed reader for your Internet Tablet. Compared to the default OSSO News Reader, Nibbles works more like traditional desktop feed readers, but aims to have more mobile features, like offline viewing of linked articles.

The first release, version 0.1, of Nibbles is done. Yay! Big thanks to the adventurous souls who helped out with some pre-release testing. Just now, Nibbles is still very young. Here are some highlights:

• It works - Nibbles can parse a wide variety of feeds
• Finger-friendly - fatter list items and drag scrolling all around
• Auto-purging - you can tell Nibbles how long to keep articles
• Flag articles for keeping, no matter how old
• Pretty bandwidth efficient
• A developer who reads the bug reports and feature requests on the tracker

How can I get Nibbles?

Just click on the image on the top right of this page from your Internet Tablet.

Note: Nibbles has only been tested on OS2008, but it shouldn't be too much work to get it running on OS2007. If you're interested in helping with some OS2007 testing, please get in touch.

How can I make Nibbles the default feed reader?

Right now, this isn't as straightforward as I'd like. To set Nibbles to be the default feed reader, you can edit (as root) /usr/share/applications/defaults.list - set hildon-news_reader to hildon-nibbles.desktop. That is, you want this line:

application/hildon-news_reader=hildon-nibbles.desktop

Then run:

update-desktop-database

Hopefully this will become easier (and not require root access) sometime soon. Once you've done this, you can click on the little orange RSS icon that appears in the browser to add that feed to Nibbles.

What does the flag symbol next to an article mean?

On exiting, Nibbles will delete any articles that are older than whatever you have set the maximum age to be (the default is five days). By setting a flag against an article, you're telling Nibbles not to delete it.

How can I hide and show the list panes?

Either via the 'View' menu or by using the hardware zoom in and zoom out buttons.

What about offline viewing?

The content that comes from the actual feeds themselves is always available, on or offline. I have some working code for viewing full linked articles (yes, including images) offline too, but it's not quite ready for the public yet. Hopefully it will make version 0.2.