Ramblings of a Programmer

It is with great sadness that I post about the passing of “Digital” Bill Douthett, the ever present, exciting, and knowledgeable voice behind the Wizards of Technology podcast. Bill's way of applying some humor to our everyday headache of technology was the reason that I subscribed to the podcast originally and as Bill always said, I did “stay subscribed”.
Learn more about Digital Bill's passing on the Wizards web site.

Technorati Tags: Digital Bill, Wizards of Technology, podcast

While listening to the latest TWiT #71 today, I heard Ray Slakinski, of iPodderX fame, talking about the future of Transistr. He mentioned that he and August plan to have something released by the end of the year. They have been working on bugs and trying to make it a “piece of software you would want to download and use”.


I guess we will have to wait and see what happens.

Technorati Tags:
Transistr, iPodderX, podcast, podcatcher

August and Ray have released the latest version of iPodderX
today.  Version 3.0.2 has several stability updates.  I have
been playing with it for the past 30 minutes and so far everything
seems to be pretty solid.

The Death of Podcasting by ZDNet's Steve Gillmor — Podcasting, the underground movement begun by VH1 DJ Adam Curry and the irascible Dave Winer, is no more. The fledgling technology, actually nothing more than a bootstrap of the failed XML ASCII text scripting language, was dealt a fatal blow when Apple Computer, the Beatles' record company, released a version of it's iTunes copy protection […]

Wharp-Whistle.com has a great article on the inefficiencies with the podcast interface in iTunes 4.9.

I mentioned Friday that I had just about had enough of iTunes 4.9 and its miserable podcast support. That is in fact the case now. As of tonight, I am back to using iPodderX for all my feeds. To quote Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central, the podcast support of iTunes 4.9 is “a little hokie”. Check out his first impressions of the podcast support in iTunes.

In my personal opinion, I believe Apple rushed this out the door. It was originally thought this was going to be out around the end of July and then all of a sudden, they came out with it this past week. I wish they had waited, gotten a bit of feedback from members of the podcasting and podcast consumer community before they just threw something out the door.

It is nice to have full control over the management of my podcasts again. Yea, they are not in the Podcasts area of the iPod, but no biggie. The Podcasts section of the iPod would not let me listen to them the way that I wanted to anyway. I want to be able to just start listening to podcasts now matter who they are from and not worry about having to switch a playlist.

Anyway… now if we could just get some feedback from the guys at iPodderX.com regarding their forums. Unfortunately, they have been down since the day that iTunes 4.9 was released last week.

Unfortunately for me, and my iTunes library, I know just enough about AppleScript to be very dangerous. I recently updated to iTunes 4.9 on my Mac so that i could try out the podcasting support. I found that there were a few issues with the new podcast support on the iPod that I did not like.

So, I set out tonight to create an AppleScript that would duplicate the podcasts to a new playlist that I could then update genres on and play as a single playllist. To my horror, I have totally messed up my iTunes database as far as podcasts go.

I have one big mess of podcasts in a single playlist now and they are no longer in chronological order. Why did I ever do this? Because I am a programmer, a computer addict, and I cannot leave well enough alone. hahaha

It looks like I am probably going to go back to using iPodderX until Apple does some tweaking on iTunes to give us a little more control over how podcasts are managed in the iTunes database.

Apple has released their official specifications on what you need to do in order to publish your podcast in the iTunes Music Store. Dave Winer has more on his Really Simple Syndication site.

It appears that Apple's release of podcasts via the iTunes store has been more of a hit than people would have expected. I have not seen any numbers on the situation, but I have started to see some of my favorite podcasts like Apple News Log having to look for more bandwidth in otther places due to the unexpected increase in bandwidth usage.

The question now is whether or not Apple's release of podcasts via the iTunes store is going to have such a negative affect on some of the smaller podcasters that we will see some of the good podcasts disappear? I hope that is not the case.

To prevent such a matter, however, maybe people should start donating to some of their favorite podcasts to help with the bandwidth costs. If not, then we might start seeing the very thing on podcasts that we were trying to get away from on the radio… commercials!

Updated: Changed the article link that is pointed to on the Apple News Log.