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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

#21

Post by zerkten »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #10
ttepasse wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if Marco Arment will ever reconsider designing the Overcast app himself. He seems to be the only who is convinced that he doesn't need one. As a fellow indie I get wanting to do everything yourself, but as a Apple fan I feel he should value design way more than he does now. The Castro app is so much better, it's like comparing iOS to Windows Mobile.

Do you mean create a team behind the app? What element of design do you mean? There are things with the Overcast design that I like and dislike, but they fall into multiple categories.

Marco seems like a very independent individual who wants to minimize dependencies on other people. He has mentioned in the past that he does get outside help on things, but this doesn't extend to other people taking ownership. At that point, he is managing people which doesn't seem something he wants to do.

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

#22

Post by zerkten »

kemayo wrote: post #19
ttepasse wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

For people with large numbers of podcasts as well as many paid subscriptions there is a lot that can be done to better manage the situation, including deduplication. This falls into the power user bucket so it's less valuable to these apps than the basic and mid-level users.

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

#23

Post by jasonpbecker »

akudha wrote: post #20
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 do…

All of these are fixed in the latest version (possibly just the beta that is about to be released to the store).

That includes OPML export (which remained available online but has returned to the app), arranging items (always possible throughout, but there were some new sync bugs that had to be worked out, IIRC), Go To Podcast (click the three buttons, last option in menu) from an episode, etc.

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

#24

Post by deergomoo »

akudha wrote: post #20
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 do…

> They removed the ability to arrange items in a playlist (it has to be by date now)

You can drag and drop to change the order. Or are you talking about something else?

> OPML export is gone

Back as of literally ~30 mins ago

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

#25

Post by Hakkin »

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

YouTube still supports WebSub (PubSubHubbub)[0] via their own hub[1]. There's very little documentation on how to actually use it though, and it seems like it's been on life support for quite awhile, a lot of small oddities have crept in over time and recently there was extended outages where notifications stopped being pushed. The current documentation isn't even correct, since is specifies an incorrect topic URL (should be /xml/feeds/ rather than just /feeds/, the /feeds/ link is for the base atom feed, and while it actually does "work" if you supply it to the WebSub Hub, it won't send you correct notifications).

[0] https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/push_notific...

[1] https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/

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

#27

Post by hangonhn »

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.

Does anyone know how well it works on the Apple Watch? I have Overcast but am very frustrated with my experience on the Apple Watch because it doesn't sync properly even though the watch supports cellular connections. Nonetheless, it was the best of the podcast apps out there for that purpose. Has Castro made some progress on this front? It would be enough to convince me to switch if it works well on both the phone and the watch.

Thanks!

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

#29

Post by leokennis »

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.

It’ll depend per person, but I subscribe to around 30 podcasts. For some podcasts (like The NY Times Daily) I’ll skip 29 out of 30 episodes. For a select few I’ll listen to 9 out of 10. For the others, something in between.

Apple Podcasts is the absolute worst for this use case. Even if I listen to all released episodes, I’m still lost to where my unplayed episodes are and what my listening queue looks like. Let alone if I want to exclude episodes from said queue.

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