TechgnosisWeb Prime

So, the big news on everyone’s blog these days is, if course, the new iTunes 4.9 with built-in podcasting support. And while that’s great and all, and is a huge move forward in bringing podcasting to the ‘masses’ as it were, there are still some of us who don’t use iTunes. I don’t have an iPod, nor could I justify spending the obscene amounts of cash they ask for one when I am perfectly happy with Glitch for all my portable computing/music/entertainment needs, so the iTunes Music Store really holds no attraction to me.

Instead, I manage my podcasts using the truly excellent (and free) iPodder app. The latest version, 2.1, came out, with some really nice features: a tab to manage cleaning up of old downloaded podcasts, better bittorrent support to ease the bandwith use of podcasters, and a lot more. It works pretty flawlessly too: once a podcast feed is subscribed, it handles the downloading automagically, and every morning I just sync Glitch with my PC and it gets loaded up with the latest shows. There’s a few more things I’d love to see, like, for example, being able to mark a podcast as ‘listened-to’, so the sync program knows its safe to delete shows I’ve already heard, but not shows that I haven’t heard yet, and a few other thigns, but I’m sure that stuff is in the works.

One of my few complaints with podcasts, however, was this: I would often find out abou a new podcast either on the road while I was on my way to work, or actually at work, where I didn’t have access to my home computer with its iPodder installation. So I would try to write down the name of the podcast somewhere and hope I remembered to add it into iPodder when I got home at night. Then the iPodder developers came to the rescue: one of the new features is the ability to sync an external OPML file listing all my podcasts, with an external service. What does this mean? It means I can go to a place like PodNova, from any net-connected computer, add in the podcast I discovered there, and when I get home at night, iPodder’s already got the podcast in its subscription list and has the latest episode downloaded and ready to listen to. Sexcellent. Very, very cool, and I’ve already added a few new podcasts to my regular listening schedule with it, works great. Thanks iPodder guys!