Instacast 1.2 integrates Dropbox and Instapaper
We are happy to announce that Instacast 1.2 is now available in the App Store. We had a lot of feedback in the last 7 weeks since Instacast is now available. Yes, it’s only 7 weeks! And we learned that having a great user interface and making it easy for you to consume your favorite podcasts is great, but not enough. It also needs to be powerful and quick in getting data in and out. So we listened to you and worked hard to add those features. I like to highlight some of them here.
OPML Dropbox Integration
This was one of our most requested features. Instacast is now able to read and write an OPML file from and to your Dropbox account. An OPML file is basically an XML document that can hold all of your subscriptions. You can export this file from iTunes on your Mac or PC and import it into Instacast and thus subscribe to all your podcasts with only one action. This saves you a lot of time if you have a lot of subscriptions. And with the Dropbox integration, you can move files in and out quickly. If you do not have Dropbox, Instacast can also read OPML files from and write to email.
Instapaper and Read It Later
Now, this is great. We love Instapaper and having the ability to store links and show notes for later reading is awesome. If you are sitting in your car and listen to the latest show of your favorite podcast and the guy is saying: “And we have this in the show notes as well.”, don’t try to check them out while driving! Instead sent the show notes quickly to Instapaper or to Read It Later and check them out at home on your iPad for instance.
Auto-Refresh in Background
We also added refreshing subscriptions automatically at a period of 30 minutes. Now, as soon as you open Instacast, it starts refreshing and looks for new episodes. Once it started refreshing you can exit the app and it continues to refresh in background. If there is new content it will send you a notification.
Download in Background
Downloading in background was possible all along. However there is a limit of 10 minutes that an app on iOS can do stuff in background until it gets freezed. If you needed to download a lot of stuff and you came over those 10 minutes, Instacast stopped downloading and canceled everything. From this version forward Instacast can now pause downloads and notifys you when the 10 minute period expired. This way you can start Instacast again and resume downloading in background for another 10 minutes.
There is a lot more and I encourage you to have a look at Instacast’s Change History for all changes and improvements.
Get it from the App Store.
Follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date on the development progress.
April 14th, 2011 • Permalink
More articles about Blog Posts
05/09/2012 - New Specs on Podlove.org
05/09/2012 - Excellent Write-up of Instacast 2.0
05/07/2012 - Instacast 2.0 Available
05/06/2012 - Instacast HD Rejected over Flattr Integration
05/02/2012 - Multi-Format Podcast Feeds
04/26/2012 - Instacast 2.0 First Impressions
04/05/2012 - Patching iCloud Sync
03/29/2012 - The Podlove Initiative
03/28/2012 - Auphonic now Open for the Public
03/26/2012 - What's next with Instacast?
03/26/2012 - State of Support and iCloud