Instacast 1.3 Available
I am pleased to announce that Instacast 1.3 is ready to be released. Initially I was working on Cloud Sync for this update, but after attending to WWDC and hearing all this stuff about iCloud, I decided to drop my Cloud Sync solution completely and go all in with Apple. You can read more about it in my last post "Killing the Cloud". Nevertheless I've put some great stuff into this release and I think it makes up for the missing sync.
Dropped Support for iOS 3
First off, like Marco of Instapaper, I need to drop support for iOS 3. I think it is time now to move on. If you read the iTunes description about Instacast, there was a table on the bottom which listed great features only available in iOS 4 and up. I had to make a lot of sacrifices to maintain the backward compatibility and the upcoming iOS 5 would have made everything much more complex. A few releases ago, I added some version tracking to the podcast web service to get some sense, if support for iOS 3 is that important. And the latest statistics show that Instacast is used on iOS 3 only by 0.6% of all users. To those 0.6%, I really apologize. You should not update Instacast on iTunes, because this will render your copy of Instacast unusable as long as you don't update your iDevice. I can't do anything about that due to Apple policy. Let's move on and look at some features, I could add for iOS 4 users.
Download Waiting List
I really like that feature. Up until this version Instacast had the problem, that when you were downloading an episode on WiFi and left your house, the WiFi connection dropped and the download canceled. Another problem was that when you were updating your subscriptions on 3G, Instacast would not automatically cache the episodes because this would have used mobile bandwidth. Both problems have now been solved quite elegantly. Instacast introduces a waiting list for downloads. Canceled downloads due to connection loss and new episodes when you're on 3G and have 3G caching not enabled, are put on that waiting list. Once you're on WiFi again, Instacast asks you to start caching those episodes. On top of that, Instacast is now able to resume canceled downloads. Let's say you have already downloaded 20 Megs and want to continue downloading later, just cancel the download and restart later to download the rest.
Chapter Lists
Instacast 1.0.2 added support for chapters and chapter artwork. However this feature was quite automatic and you were not able to select a specific chapter to jump to. Instead you could use the jump buttons to jump to the next or the previous chapter but lost the seeking and scrubbing behavior. Instacast 1.3 now adds a chapter list like the one in the iPod app you are possibly already familiar with. Just tap the list button in the upper right corner of the player window and the podcast artwork or the video rotates and reveals the chapter list. Tap on any chapter and Instacast will jump directly to that chapter.
Video AirPlay
For those of you who want to watch video podcasts on your Apple TV, it was quite a hassle up until now to send the video via AirPlay. You first had to switch to the system player in the settings. But no more! I've rewritten the player completely (and I will have to do it again for iOS 5 seigh) to get the Video AirPlay functionality into the enhanced podcast player. And since I dropped support for iOS 3 (see above), I got rid of the option completely. From now on, if you want to send your video to your Apple TV, you can simply use the AirPlay button located in the playback options of the main player. Just double tap the video to reveal them and tap on the AirPlay button. It just works :-)
New Auto-Cache Options
Another thing that bugged a lot of you was that once you've finished playing an episode the cache of that episode got removed. And if you listened to your podcasts just before sleep, you may woke up in the morning with some anger in your face. Not a great way to start your day. Now you could of course disable this behavior, but somehow you want to get rid of the cache in a meaningful way and don't want to manage it yourself. That's why I added an option to remove the cache of an episode automatically only if a new episode just got downloaded. This way you are having all your current episodes with you and have a smile in your face in the morning. This option is enabled per default, but if you are an updater you might need to enable it yourself. Open the Instacast settings, navigate to the 'Auto-Cache' options and make sure you have 'New episode loaded' enabled and 'Finished playing' disabled.
New Web Service for Images
One of my philosophies has always been 'Performance is a Feature' and Instacast is quite responsive, which is great. But the one thing that has never been that fast was image loading. The reason was that Instacast needed to load the images from their original location where they most likely have a quite big size. After downloading this big image, it needed to be scaled into a couple of smaller images, which itself took some time. With Instacast 1.3 I am improving this vastly. I set up a web service that hosts the podcast images of now 26.000 podcasts in various images sizes. And if new podcasts are being added the web service automatically creates the small image variants automatically. This way, Instacast can just load the image that it currently needs to display in just the exact size. This improves performance in all places a lot .
And what about Playlists?
I get that feature request a lot and I realize that some competitor apps have this feature. Nevertheless, I don't really believe in it. Most of you won't make playlists and move individual episodes one by one. It's just too time consuming and too clumsy to do on an iPhone. Instead I am going into another direction. Much like iTunes, Instacast now plays episodes continuously. As an example: if you select "All Episodes" and start playing the 2nd episode in the list, after it has finished playing Instacast starts the 3rd episode, etc. This works with every episode list and also respects your sort order options. On top of that I added a new sort order option called "Sort Grouped". What it does is, it sorts the "All Episodes" list after your subscription sort order and chronologically after that, also respecting your setting for "Sort Order". The result is that you have all episodes of a particular subscription grouped together and you play all episodes of the "Talk Show" and then all episodes of "Build and Analyze", etc. I think this is a much more usable way than manually managing playlists. Please give me some feedback on the sort options and if you want something sorted differently in a future update.
Ok, this post is long enough. There are a few more small improvements which are listed completely on the Instacast Change History. I think this is one of the best updates Instacast had so far. Don't miss out on it and update today! But not you iOS 3 users!
If you don't already have it, get it from the App Store and make sure you follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date on the development progress.
June 30th, 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