Instacast 2.0 First Impressions

I've been developing Instacast 2.0 for 4 months now and it has come to a point where we have a release candidate. I'll be testing a few more days and then send the update to Apple. Thank you to all beta testers by the way. They're doing a great job.

I am really excited about this update. There have been a lot of feature requests in the past and some folks were saying that Instacast's feature set does not hold up to the competition. But if you look at competing apps and compare them to Instacast you can see why Instacast is still number one. Because it has never been about features at all cost. We are putting much more priority on the overall user experience. If you are coming from iTunes and thus are used to the simplicity of downloading and playing podcasts, you can be overwhelmed by the rich feature sets other 3rd party podcast clients offer. I don't want that. I want the learning curve for a first time Instacast user to be flat at the beginning. That's why I am very careful in adding new features. Everything needs to work great together and you should not be bothered by stuff you don't care about.

With Instacast 2.0 I think I found the right mix of giving power users more tools to manage their podcast habits while not shying away novice users from trying it out. Instacast 2.0 will be a free update for Instacast 1.5 owners. But there will also be an in-app purchase for features that are not essential to beginners or features that need extra server support like Push Notifications.

And here are some impressions that might sweeten your wait:

There is a lot more to write about which I'll do over the coming days. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS Feed or follow me on Twitter.

April 26th, 2012 • Permalink

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