Tag: podcasts

Podcatch.com. A collection of podcast feeds via friends and friends-of-friends of Dave Winer. It’s a neat idea for discovering something new to listen to. There’s more background, too, on what led to building it.

Seminars About Long-Term Thinking: Thinking, Fast and Slow. I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” lately. It’s a fantastic book and this lecture acts as a high-level summary to it. If you dig the lecture it’s well worth picking up the book.

I’ve solved my podcast problem

Since I started using Rdio I’ve run into a problem: I never open iTunes. This is mostly okay as Rdio replaced my local iTunes library. The downside is that my podcasts live in iTunes. By not opening the app the podcasts never update and I forget they exist.

A few days ago someone, I have no idea who to credit because Twitter search is a clusterfuck, who I follow on Twitter mentioned Instacast. It’s fantastic.

Instacast gives you a native iOS app that is built around one thing: subscribing and listening to podcasts. It’s a great example of a focused app that does one thing and does it really damn well. Best of all it’s not connected to my iTunes library. My podcasts now update every time I open Instacast. No need to be chained to iTunes.

The player is also tuned specifically for podcasts. The built-in Music app places a volume slider at the bottom, Instacast has a time slider. It still has all the necessary things like AirPlay and local caching.

Overall it’s just a really well-polished app. I’m excited to get back into podcasts now that they’re more easily updated right on my iPhone.