Meedio Essentials 1.15.22.0, Part 2 - A Sleek and Clean HTPC Interface

Name: Meedio Essentials 1.15.22.0, Part 2 - A Sleek and Clean HTPC Interface
Item: Meedio Essentials 1.15.22.0, Part 2 - A Sleek and Clean HTPC Interface
Author: Andrew Ku

by Andrew Ku on September 11, 2004 11:25 AM EST

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Meedio Essentials - News, RSS, Disk Space, Meedio TV Metadata, WMP9

There are a lot more plug-ins available for ME, most of them freeware. We are going through a handful of the most relevant plug-ins to give a sense of how far ME can be expanded.

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The RSS Importer and NewsFeed plug-ins are useful if you want to keep up to date with the latest news. The NewsFeed plug-in seems to pull stories automatically from AP.org (Associated Press), while the RSS Importer plug-in is set by the user.

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NewsFeed v2.1 plug-in

The way in which the plug-in is programmed is that it seems as if it simply strips straight text and uses tags to distinguish titles, story image, and story text.

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The RSS Importer plug-in follows the same principles, though with your own manual RSS feed input. Additonally, the RSS feeds usually only contain a small clip of the original story/text, so the solution for this coder was to implement a Full Story button that opens the link up in a full screen IE window. We found this a bit cumbersome for the user interface, and we would have liked to see it strip text like the NewsFeed plug-in.

From what we understand, the coder for the NewsFeed plug-in is working on a method to give users the ability to input their own source, which should be a welcome relief. The whole concept of an HTPC is to stay in the UI as much as possible. Going to a full screen IE window to view a news story is harder than actually browsing the web directly from IE. Stories should be read straight from the user interface, which the NewsFeed has done correctly.

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RSS Importer v1.0 plug-in

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The only weird quirk we noticed with the RSS Feed plug-in was that it didn't seem to associate months with their corresponding numbers. In the picture below, we programmed it to sort by date (most current date at top), but July 31^st was listed before August 9^th.

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Like the other search functions, the RSS Importer provides you with the ability to search based on partial phases, i.e. "TECH" will result in every AnandTech.com RSS entry plus any entry containing that letter sequence.