gPodder 4.0.0 for Sailfish OS released

While we're supplying N9 users with fresh releases of gPodder 3 regularly (the latest version, 3.6.1, has been released last week, and the update is available on gpodder.org/downloads), of course we've also been busy working on a newer, Qt 5 and PyOtherSide-based version of gPodder. After weeks of testing, I think it's good enough for a first release now, so let's warmly welcome gPodder 4.0.0 to the world of Sailfish apps. You can download it and its dependencies from the gPodder downloads page.

If you haven't read last year's article about Python and Qt 5, now might be a good time to do so. PyOtherSide is a much more minimalistic approach to Python bindings, and - in my obviously biased opinion - works better for gluing together a QML UI with a Python backend. In fact, it lends itself to clearly splitting the frontend from the backend, and with the "asynchronous by default" design, you have to work really hard to block your UI thread with long-running Python code (or multithreaded Python code that's waiting for the GIL to be released). PyOtherSide these days is also well-documented, and some early annoyances and bugs have been fixed with recent releases in February. In combination with Qt 5 and Python 3, it works well on OS X, Blackberry 10, Linux, Sailfish OS and Windows. With Qt 5.2 having official support for Android, and a Python 3 port being available, it's only a matter of time before PyOtherSide lands on Android.

For all Sailfish OS users out there: Until the next Sailfish OS update, you might have to install some dependencies before gPodder will correctly start up, these are:

1. libpython3 (the Python 3 interpreter)
2. python3-base (the Python 3 standard library)
3. pyotherside (the Qt 5-Python3 bindings)

As these links point to the current version in OBS, they will break once one of these packages is updated. In this case, just look into the home:thp:gpodder armv7hl repository for the latest versions of these packages. With the next Sailfish OS update, recent-enough packages of PyOtherSide should be in the repositories, so you don't need to install the dependencies manually.