If you’ve read this you can probably assume that it’s not because of the neat new icons I see for podcast episodes that I’ve yet to download. No, it’s the fact that this screen, and it’s icons appear—and are live and ready for action—pretty much instantly the moment I select “Get More Episodes...” in the “Music” app on my iPhone.
I’m glad to see that Apple’s top brass are still reading my blog on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, I discovered this entirely by accident. Fact is, I’ve already stopped using the “Music” app and the iTunes Store for podcasts. Instead, I’ve discovered and am now using the awesome Instacast for all my podcast downloading/managing/streaming needs. Now this is a product with a soul. This brilliant little app has considered everything that’s special about listening to podcasts as opposed to listening to music and designed the app to all those things intuitively and automatically. What things, you ask?
First, let’s talk about what I’m calling “The Continuity Feature.” If you listen to podcasts daily, as I do, you probably spend a lot of time listening in the car on your commute. So you get to work, pause the podcast in the middle of two nerds going off on a tangent about the relative merits of PHP vs. Perl, and go into the office. Then, at the end of the day, you’re back in your car to drive home, and you plug in your iPhone, and press play for the podcast. What the hell are those people talking about? You’ve completely lost context, so you do what everybody who listens to podcasts probably also does in the same situation: you click the little “go back 30 seconds” button and listen to the last 30 seconds before you got out of the car in the morning.
Guess what? Instacast automatically gives you the last thirty seconds from your previous episode whenever you leave the app and return later. I don’t know what the trigger is, but it always works. Perfect continuity every time.
Also, just as I often want to go back 30 seconds (either for the reasons above, or because I missed something), sometimes I want to skip forward 30 seconds if I’m listening to something again and want to move forward in controlled bursts. “Music” app doesn’t support that, and Instacast does, right in the main controls.
And this doesn’t even begin to cover all of the podcast management, download and streaming features. Instacast is just packed with all sorts of lovingly crafted features that make it such a joy for podcast weenies such as myself. And if you, too, are a podcast nerd, you can’t afford not to spend $1.99 on this app that they could easily charge $9.99 for.
Buy it.
Now.