A GUI for WLCP

andrew_c
August 22, 2008, 11:32 AM posted in General Discussion

JJCarsen has been working on a GUI for WeLoveChinesePod.  Feel free to make any suggestions for it here, whether you like the design or anything else you want to point out.

 

 

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andrew_c
August 22, 2008, 11:44 AM

So continuing our discussion JJCarsen, I checked and it seems that PyQT does indeed support the latest version of QT.  Am I missing something?  Hopefully this can be kept pure Python; I'd definitely like to help with this GUI.

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jjcarson
August 22, 2008, 01:01 PM

I could have sworn I checked since August 8th, but what do you know. Now that I know that this exists, development shouldn't take too long. The man thing I need help with now is with getting all of the lessons. It can be in a basic txt file, a fancy xml, whatever. I just need someone to get me some sort of easy to parse list of all (or just lots) of the lessons. Or some way for me to query ChinesePod so it will tell me what lessons are avaliable.

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andrew_c
August 22, 2008, 01:09 PM

How about: http://chinesepod.com/<user-name>/lessons/feed/

This way it will present each user only with their subscribed lessons.

(Sorry about the misspelling...)

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andrew_c
August 22, 2008, 01:53 PM

It would be nice if there were a way to set preferences.

For the HTML document:

  1. Traditional vs. simplified.
  2. Pinyin vs. Bopomofo
  3. Whether or not to include the literal translation

Also, whether or not to save the login information.

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jjcarson
August 28, 2008, 11:29 PM

I've been lazy this week, so I haven't gotten anything done. I did check up more on what PyQt actually does. It will translate the ui file I made (and you're showing screenshots of) into Python code that you could tie everything in together with. I don't know Python and I am learning so much new crap right now I don't really have time to learn Python. So if you want, one of us can figure out how to turn ui files into python code (should just be a commandline thing) and then you can continue on with the python side of life. And anytime you need the ui updated, I can do it really quick. It's not hard and I have quite a bit of experience in that, so it'll be even less hard for me to do.

Edit: You should see when the non-peak hours are for ChinesePod. We could then have an option for users to let the program wait to download the stuff until the peak hours are over. Help save Praxis a little bit of money.

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andrew_c
August 29, 2008, 12:17 AM

Hi JJ,

I don't plan on working on the GUI in the near future anyway, so please take your time learning Python.  For me further improving the HTML documents and a few other things have a higher priority for me. About waiting to download during off-peak hours, there's only ~15 members of the WLCP group, out of hundreds of thousands of CPod users.  I doubt it will make any tangible different until there's at lot more users.

 

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klortho
August 30, 2008, 04:13 AM

Besides, they use Amazon Simple Storage Service: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261 which charges per byte downloaded, and doesn't depend on peak/non-peak hours.

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klortho
August 30, 2008, 05:12 AM

The RSS feed won't work.  It only lists the most recent lessons, and, as you mentioned, only those that the user has subscribed to.  What JJCarsen asked for is a comprehensive list of all lessons.  I haven't found that either -- I have discovered that the /lessons page uses /lessons/getlessons to fetch the content, but that must be via a POST URL, I think, so I don't know how to control which lessons are delivered.

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andrew_c
August 30, 2008, 01:13 PM

Well he did say  "I just need someone to get me some sort of easy to parse list of all (or just lots) of the lessons.".  But that's besides the point.   As a user, I would suggest that I only be presented with a list of lessons that I'm interested in, not every single lesson that CPod has made available.

As a developer, I do agree, that the RSS feed won't cut it since it only shows recent lessons.  I found something else that might be useful. The website http://chinesepod.com/<username>/archive/api?page=N provides XML containing the N-th page of 20 lessons in username's archive.  If I open this web page from page=0 up to 3, I get a complete list of lessons in my archive.

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klortho
August 31, 2008, 02:46 AM

Interesting.  It only lists lessons that you've subscribed to or that you've bookmarked, but not if you've already marked them as "studied".

The link http://chinesepod.com/lessons/getlessons?page=n returns an HTML fragment with ten lessons per page, including all past lessons.

Anyway, it would be nice if John (he does the website, right?) would give us a link to a complete XML list of lessons -- there can't be any harm in that, right?  I'd think they'd want to promote user-generated tools to help make the material more useful.