Tom Swindell (AKA alterego) created the Maemo bindings for Ruby and they're great. I'm writing a couple of programs with them, including Nibbles, my feed reader. Unfortunately, Tom seems to have vanished and I've not been able to find the source code for the bindings anywhere. Does anyone have it? I'd really like a copy.

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.

I don't really get on with the supplied RSS reader on my N800. It doesn't work like I expect and it lacks mobile features like offline reading that I'd like. So, I'm writing a feed reader for Maemo called Nibbles. It's still very early stages, but there's enough for a development release now, I think. Below is a screenshot of the current preview version, 0.0.4:

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.

I'm writing an application (more on that sometime soon) using the very nice Ruby bindings for Maemo. I've got some dependencies that are packaged as RubyGems that I wanted to be managed through the Application Manager, so I created some .debs for them. <strike>Here is their temporary home</strike> The rake, hpricot, feed-normalizer, simple-rss, atom and htmlentities gems are available in my repository. I didn't create the rubygems and librubygems packages themselves - I was sent them, but couldn't find them hosted elsewhere.

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/.