Aye, folks! Some time ago, we had some movement regarding the News app. It was so. freaking. cool! Finally a good alternative of the now-dead Google Reader. Time has passed and, with my heart bleeding in sadness, we saw no further development of it.

Sad.

Following my bad habit of necromancy, I managed to dedicate my whole weekend to work on it. All the work is pushed to a branch – since I’m not the maintainer, I obviously didn’t do it on master branch. The results are exciting.

Search

GNOME News had an implementation of search in it’s engine, but exposed no UI to do that. Well, not anymore:

Starred News

Following the mockups, GNOME News had a non-working implementation of Starred News. It works now:

Empty States

Like all GNOME apps, News now has improved feedback when no feeds/starred news/search results are displayed. Check this out:

Now it’s at least in a usable state (well, usable for my needs). Tracker is the data backend for News, takes care of automagically update the feeds. I hope this work is good enought to be merged on master, so everyone can easily test 🙂

Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Don’t hesitate to comment!