Linguine is an app that provides quick access to news and political opinion from around the world. The app retrieves and collates RSS data from numerous podcasters; it then presents a list of the most recent podcasts from these sources. When an item on the list is selected, the corresponding podcast will be streamed over the net and played on your phone.
Linguine has two main windows, the "List" window and the "Player" window. In general, the "List" window organizes and displays the list of available podcasts, and the "Player" window plays a podcast when it is selected from the list.
The "List" window will provide information on the available list of podcasts; generally, this will include a small image and the title for each podcast, taken from the RSS information retrieved. Please note that, when first starting Linguine, it may take some time for the list to be fully populated, as there may be many RSS files to download.
There are two combo boxes at the bottom of the window; the one on the left filters podcasts based on how frequently they are updated. So, if you select "Hourly", only podcasts that update every hour will be shown; if you select "Daily", podcasts that only update once every 24 hours will be shown. (Some podcasts, such as the BBC Newshour, update twice daily; however, they have been placed into the "Daily" collection as well.)
The combo box on the right allows you to choose the category of the podcast. For now, the only categories available are "News" and "Politics"; this will likely be expanded in future updates. You can also choose the "Any" option here, which will select all podcasts regardless of category.
Finally, there is a drop-down menu available for the app. The current options are "Load Newsfeeds File", which will allow you to load a custom XML file containing a different set of newsfeeds; "Documentation", which will display this file; and "About", which provides some general information about the app.
The "Player" window provides a very simple mechanism for playing audio and video data. For audio podcasts, an image and title for the podcast is displayed, as well as a percentage of how much of the media has been played. There are three control buttons available; a play/pause button, a stop button, and an "info" button that provides some general information taken from GStreamer.
Please note that, as of the current version of Linguine, there are several problems with video playback. The mechanism currently used to display video data is unable to work correctly when the N900 is in portrait orientation; you will need to keep the phone in landscape mode in order to see video. Moreover, this mechanism also has significant trouble dealing with changes to the size or location of its output window; in particular, the video may be dropped if the phone is rotated from landscape to portrait and back.
These issues are due mainly to the very old version of GStreamer in use on the N900. Future updates to Linguine may be able to address this problem.