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Posts tagged with "podcasts"

Castro Makes Accessing Podcasts Easier Than Ever and Drops Price

Castro is designed around the philosophy of making it easy to access the podcast episodes you want to hear. The focus of Castro 2.0 when it launched in August was to make it simple to assemble a single queue of podcast episodes using an inbox to triage episodes from your podcast subscriptions.

Version 2.2 of Castro leverages its flat inbox/queue hierarchy to its advantage with new ways to get at your favorite podcasts. On the iPhone, Castro adds a new widget and 3D Touch support. By default, both display the first four podcast episodes in your queue with buttons featuring show art that can be tapped to start or resume an episode.

Castro’s widget can be expanded to reveal up to twelve episodes at the top of your queue. The use of show art makes identifying and playing an episode easy. The one downside of this approach though, is that there is no way to distinguish between different episodes if you have multiple episodes of the same show near the top of your queue.

In addition to displaying the first four episodes in your queue, 3D Touch adds shortcuts to other functionality, including the ability to kick off a search for new shows in Castro’s Discover tab using text on your clipboard, a feature that is handy if you read about a podcast somewhere that doesn’t include a ‘subscribe’ link. You can also set a sleep timer or jump directly to your inbox or queue with 3D Touch.

Finally, Castro 2.2 adds CarPlay integration, which I previewed in my CarPlay review last week. With just a queue and inbox to contend with, Castro makes navigating podcast episodes in your car a breeze. Instead of drilling through layers of playlists to find what you want to hear, you can go straight to your queue, or jump to your inbox if you’ve exhausted the queue, using the tabs at the top of Castro’s CarPlay interface.

Castro 2.2 is a free update for existing customers and $3.99 for new customers, a $1.00 price reduction from its launch price.

Kickstarting Season 3 of Welcome to Macintosh→

Mark Bramhill, the creator of Welcome to Macintosh: a Tiny Show About a Big Fruit Company, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Season 3 of his highly-regarded podcast about Apple and the community that surrounds it. Bramhill’s show seemingly came out of nowhere in early 2015. In a sea of Apple-themed podcasts, Welcome Macintosh set itself apart by being short and tightly edited. Each episode of seasons one and two focused on a single story or theme from Apple history like skeuomorphism and the time Song a Day Mann made Steve Jobs dance onto stage at the antenna-gate Apple event.

Bramhill previews some of what he has planned if the Kickstarter succeeds:

In one episode, I pitch an emoji for adoption in the international Unicode standard, following it all the way from a concept through the bureaucracy of the emoji-industrial complex. In another, I trace the surprisingly dramatic past of an app that was on the forefront of the MP3 revolution. And there are a whole bunch of others. Beginning next summer: eight brand new episodes for Season 3.

The kind of show that Bramhill produces is time consuming, hard work, and it takes money. So for Season 3, Bramhill has launched a Kickstarter. He is trying to raise $10,000 to cover everything from file hosting, to travel expenses. The campaign is off to a good start and includes some nice perks for backers like vinyl stickers and t-shirts. Mark is a natural storyteller. Check out the past episodes of Welcome to Macintosh and the short episodes he will be releasing during the Kickstarter campaign. I bet if you do, you’ll find yourself on his Kickstarter page backing Season 3.

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Castro 2 Review

Castro 2 from Supertop demonstrates that there is still plenty of room for innovation in podcast apps. Although every podcast app starts with the goal of helping listeners find and play podcasts, the path each app takes varies as widely as the listening habits of users.

Castro 2 eliminates much of the complexity of other podcast apps by focusing on a single podcast queue. The result is a focused listening experience that emphasizes episodes over shows, playlists, or feeds. It’s not an approach that will appeal to everyone, but if you find yourself looking for a simpler way to manage podcasts, or listening to some, but not all, episodes of shows, Castro is worth considering.

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Pocket Casts 6

When it comes to podcast apps on iOS, we are really spoiled for choice. There are many options, but I would say that there are four podcast apps in particular that rise above the rest; Apple’s own Podcasts app, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and Castro. Narrowing that field of four to determine which is objectively the best is an almost impossible task from where I stand. Instead, which one is best will depend entirely on which app’s design and feature set most closely aligns with how you want to manage and listen to podcasts.

Keeping that in mind, just over a week ago was the release of a major new version of Pocket Casts. Now on version 6 for iOS, Pocket Casts is the podcast app that has been around the longest (out of those four listed above), first launching in January 2011. It’s also the one with the most cross-platform support, running on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and on the web.

So, what’s new in Pocket Casts 6? The tl;dr version is that the user interface has been redesigned in various ways, most notably with the addition of a dark theme and “up next” queue improvements. There are new audio effects to trim silences and volume boost for those podcasts which sound too quiet. The iPad version now supports multitasking (Split View and Picture in Picture), and whilst it isn’t noticeable to users, almost the entire app has been re-written in Swift.

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Overcast 2.5.2 with Quicksync→

Marco Arment on the latest update to Overcast:

In the last few Overcast releases, I’ve been optimizing the sync protocol and decreasing the burden of each sync to both sides (my servers and your iPhones). In 2.5.2, we’ll reap some of the benefits with the first version of what I’ve been informally calling “quicksync”.

In short, syncing Overcast between multiple devices — say, an iPhone and an iPad — is now much faster and more accurate, making multi-device usage much more practical and compelling.

“I’ve been testing this for a few weeks…”, the saying goes, but it’s true. In my tests during the beta, quicksync made switching between podcast episodes on two devices faster and less annoying than before.

Quicksync worked well in my typical use case: I’m washing dishes and Overcast is playing through the iPad Pro’s speakers, which are louder; then, I have to go out and connect my iPhone to my car’s audio, resuming Overcast to the same episode. With quicksync, I no longer have to skip ahead to catch up with the iPad’s progress. Marco did good work here and I hope the servers hold up well.

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Overcast 2.5 Adds Dark Theme, File Uploads

Overcast's new dark theme.

Overcast’s new dark theme.

When it launched in October with support for streaming and chapters, Overcast 2’s patronage model was positioned as a way to directly support the app without the promise of anything exclusive in return. With Overcast 2.5, launching today on the App Store, Marco Arment is introducing the first features available only to Overcast patrons: a dark theme, and the ability to upload audio files to Overcast’s cloud.

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Introducing Canvas and Remaster on Relay FM

Over the past year, I’ve been thinking about ways to expand the scope of my podcasts at Relay FM. In addition to our weekly coverage of all things Apple and technology with Connected, I wanted to cover the changes in my iPad workflow more in depth, as well as revitalize our discussion of games and the gaming industry with Virtual.

After a few months of work behind the scenes, I’m excited to announce two brand new shows where I’ll try to do just that: Canvas, with yours truly and Fraser Speirs; and Remaster, where Myke, Shahid Ahmad (former head of Strategic Content at PlayStation), and I will discuss what it means to play videogames and be a game maker today.

Both Canvas and Remaster are two projects I truly believe in, and they’re the kinds of podcasts I’ve been meaning to co-host for a long time. I’m incredibly thankful for the support by Myke and Stephen in providing a terrific infrastructure with Relay FM, and I feel like all the work I’ve been doing with podcasting over the past three years has led me to an exciting new starting point today.

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