Nibbles is quite stable, can parse a wide variety of feeds and is pretty bandwidth efficient. Nibbles is finger-friendly and does aim to be a good mobile feed reader, but things like downloading of full offline articles didn't make it into this initial release (I have some working code for that, but it's not working enough!). New users might want to know that the zoom in/out hardware buttons hide and show the feed and article lists.

Of course, since this is a first release, things aren't perfect. The biggest problem for me that I think people should be aware of is that Nibbles uses too much battery power. This is detailed in bug #2342 and is really a problem with ruby-gtk2 rather than Nibbles. As I said, with some luck, the next ruby-gtk2 release will fix this.

You can install Nibbles from the project page.

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In other news, I hear that a new release of ruby-gtk2 is near. This is excellent as it will hopefully fix the battery life problem with the current bindings where Ruby/GTK programs (and, therefore, Ruby/Maemo programs) wake up 100 times a second regardless of what they're doing. Happy days.

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It seems to cope nicely with a wide variety of RSS and Atom feeds, despite my proof-of-concept code somehow making it into the app ;).

Currently it's quite bare of features and can be considered the simplest app that could work (for example, the feeds update at a fixed 30 mins). It will likely stay that way until I get a few bugs worked out and 0.1, the first 'stable' version, released. After that, I'll work on some more interesting new features. I'm still very open to suggestions though and all feedback is welcome, so please don't be shy!

If you'd like to play along and help the development of a better feed reader for your internet tablet, use the .install file. Please report issues to the Maemo Garage tracker.

You can make Nibbles the default feed reader by editing /usr/share/applications/defaults.list. You need to set hildon-news_reader=nibbles.install. This will allow you to tap on the feed icon in a browser window and have the feed added to Nibbles.

I've only specified that the app will work in OS2008, but I'm pretty sure it'll work in OS2007 too. Since I only have an OS2008 machine, I can't test it easily. If anyone is still using OS2007 and would like to help, please do get in touch.

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It took me a little while to suss out how to create the .debs so I've included the steps here in case anyone finds themselves in the same boat. This works for native Ruby gems and compiled C extensions.

1. Install the gem inside Scratchbox. Irritatingly, "gem install example" doesn't always want to do very much, so you may need to dowload the gem file and "gem install example-0.1.gem".
2. Make a new directory with the rubygems-<package>-<version> syntax (the rubygems- prefix seemed to make sense to me): mkdir rubygems-example-0.1</lil>
3. cd rubygems-example-0.1/ ; mkdir gems specifications bin
4. cp -r /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/example-0.1/ gems
5. cp /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/specifications/example-0.1.gemspec specifications/
6. cp /targets/CHINOOK_ARMEL/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/example bin/ (if there are any bins)
7. Create a Makefile with this content (you will need to replace the spaces at the start of the lines with tabs):

   all:
   clean:
   install:
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/
           mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/     <------><------ />

8. dh_make -e you@example.com then choose the type of package.
9. Edit debian/control to suit. Make sure the section is something like user/Utilities, not just Utilities if you want the package to show in the Application Manager.
10. dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
11. The parent directory should now contain rubygems-example_0.1-1_armel.deb

As a final note, /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/ may not be in $PATH, so you'll need to deal with that if you have files in bin/.

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Edit: I've started a garage project.

To install python2.5-runtime I needed to add repository.maemo.org to the application catalogue to satisfy some dependencies. Tested with OS2008 beta on an N800 only.

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