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Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

castro.fm

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Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#11

Post by apozem »

leokennis wrote: post #2

I’m so happy Castro has new owners. For me it has the best interaction model of all podcast apps (inbox + queue), it had a beautiful design and now it’s also getting the backend + tech debt love it requires.

Same. It always had the nicest UI and interaction model, but the bugs ruined it for me over time.

There was a particularly annoying one where if I got to 31:20 on Show A on my phone, then play Show B on my Watch, the playback in B would jump to 31:20. This was brutal if you were somewhere around the 2-hour mark in Show B and have to find your place again.

Really hope the new owners can make everything work again.

Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#13

Post by isiahl »

When I worked at a podcast host I was tasked to implement WebPubSub support to our podcast feeds. This introduced a “push” updates rather than requiring an indexer to constantly recheck the xml file. The idea seeems to not have caught on. At the time I think Google was the only indexer supporting the feature and I’m not sure if that has continued with the switch to YouTube for podcasts

Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#14

Post by samcat116 »

isiahl wrote: post #13

When I worked at a podcast host I was tasked to implement WebPubSub support to our podcast feeds. This introduced a “push” updates rather than requiring an indexer to constantly recheck the xml file. The idea seeems to not have caught on. At the time I think Google was the only indexer supporting the feature and I’m not sure if that has continued with the switch to YouTube for podcasts

Castro recently implemented this I believe.

Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#17

Post by 1123581321 »

apozem wrote: post #11
leokennis wrote: post #2

I’m so happy Castro has new owners. For me it has the best interaction model of all podcast apps (inbox + queue), it had a beautiful design and now it’s also getting the backend + tech debt love it requires.

Same. It always had the nicest UI and interaction model, but the bugs ruined it for me over time. There was a particularly annoying one where if I got to 31:20 on Show A on my phone, then play Show B on my Watch, the playback in B would jump to 31:20. This was brutal if you were somewhere around the 2-hour mark in Show B and have to find your place again. Really hope the new owners can make everything work again.

I tried that one and it seems fixed. I know the new owner tackled longstanding, annoying little bugs right after buying it.

I almost left when the server outages happened, but the quality seems to have ticked up after hitting a low with Tiny.

Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#18

Post by zippergz »

thoroughburro wrote: post #15

Overcast lost me after months of waiting for its disastrous redesign to be fixed. Castro is, in my opinion, the best replacement for feature equivalence. However, I actually chose standard Apple Podcasts. The transcriptions are a game changer.

I have zero issues with the design of Overcast. But rebuilding from scratch introduced so many incredibly disruptive bugs many of which are still not fixed even though the developer claims that almost all of the major issues have been addressed. Something seems fundamentally wrong with the syncing or data store. That's what sent me looking for alternatives after many years as a dedicated user.

Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#19

Post by kemayo »

ttepasse wrote: post #4
leokennis wrote: post #2

I’m so happy Castro has new owners. For me it has the best interaction model of all podcast apps (inbox + queue), it had a beautiful design and now it’s also getting the backend + tech debt love it requires.

Me too. I switched to Overcast when Castro had its huge hiccups, but followed the new owners and the updates with great interest. The forward momentum seems great. I can see myself switching back home, when my new iPhone arrives. My ideal podcast client would be something like Castro with additional playlist queues. I never could build a good triage model in Overcast. But sometimes you'll want some organization. (And…

Similarly, I switched away from Castro when it was melting down, and I tried out PocketCasts and Overcast.

PocketCasts is pretty great, but has one crucial flaw that makes it unbearable to me: at the time I was using it it was fairly slow to update feeds automatically, and you can't force an update of a specific feed. This got really annoying with subscriber-only feeds, because I'd know an episode had been released and had to wait a few hours for them to decide to actually let me see it.

Overcast is good at what it does (the audio boost features are the best of any client I've tried), but it's opinionated about a certain workflow in ways that don't play incredibly well with people who want to subscribe to a lot of podcasts and only listen to occasional episodes that catch their eye. Previous statements by Marco suggest that he likes Overcast's workflow and doesn't really want to adjust it to support inbox/queue users. In some ways the recent rewrite helped (the UI no longer locks up regularly when you have a lot of subscriptions), but in other ways it hurts (there's no way to give it a global episode-limit setting, and the default limit now actively wrecks playlists).

I'm inclined to say that if Overcast's workflow fits you, it's probably the best client to use. But if it doesn't, you have to make some choices...

Re: Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

#20

Post by akudha »

thoroughburro wrote: post #15

Overcast lost me after months of waiting for its disastrous redesign to be fixed. Castro is, in my opinion, the best replacement for feature equivalence. However, I actually chose standard Apple Podcasts. The transcriptions are a game changer.

Currently paying for Overcast, but the recent changes (2-3 months ago?) are just annoying. They removed the ability to arrange items in a playlist (it has to be by date now), OPML export is gone, can't get to a podcast from an episode in a playlist... and so on.

All of this was working fine before the update.

When something is working well, what is the point in needlessly "improving" it and making it worse? I just don't get it. Gonna switch to Castro, though it costs 2.5 times as Overcast

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