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.
Textual RSS news is now also being supported. For a given textual newsfeed, the latest news item will be displayed in the "List" window, and a new "Player" window has been created to display the full set of news. There will undoubtedly be more changes in the future to better support text.
The "List" window provides information on the available list of podcasts (or textual news feeds); generally, this will include a small image and the title for each feed, 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.
The feeds are organized into categories, and these categories are displayed at the top of the window as a set of tabs. You may need to scroll the tab bar left or right to see all the tabs. Tapping a tab will show the feeds associated with that 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; "Reset Newsfeeds", which will reset the newsfeeds to the default set; "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. In the audio player, there are three control buttons available; a play/pause button, a "seek" button, and an "info" button. The seek button brings up a dialog box allowing you to quickly move forward or backward through the media. The info button provides some general information taken from GStreamer.
In the video player, the seek slider is always displayed at the bottom of the screen, so the seek button has been removed.
There are currently no controls in the text RSS display.