• Podlove Deep Linking
• Podlove Alternate Feeds
  Formerly knowns as Multi-Format Feeds, but Alternative Feeds make more sense, I agree.

by Cody Fink over at MacStories.net.

Before I tell you about all the great new stuff, I first need to get something out of the way. The pricing structure for Instacast has changed. All versions prior to 2.0 have been priced at $2. While this was a great price it is not enough to sustain the development of a niche product over a long period of time. You may have read about the missing update model in the App Store everywhere on the internet during the last months. Many developers are struggling to get their apps funded for a second, third and whatever round. Instacast is not a mass product, it has found its niche among podcast lovers, but the majority of users is still using iTunes and I assume that this will remain so for the foreseeable future. There is a lot of stuff to be invented and developed in the realm of podcasts and I would like to play my part, but since Instacast is taking so much of my time, I need the funding to sustain it. I thought a lot about this issue and decided to change the pricing model. The first thing I will do is to lower the initial price from $1.99 to $0.99. I hope this will convince more people to try out the app. Second, I added an in-app purchase for features that novice users won't need most likely, but power-users will appreciate when using the app on a day-to-day basis. It's called Instacast Pro and it's for sale at $1.99. For now it includes the ability to manage playlists, add your own bookmarks, configure settings on a podcast-by-podcast basis and receive push notifications for new episodes. Every other new feature is going to be delivered to previous owners for free. This way everybody has the opportunity to stay up-to-date on the latest architectural advances, but opt-in for new features.

So what are these architectural advances I am speaking about? Over the passing months I was heavily involved in a project called Podlove.org. Brought to life by Tim Pritlove, blogger and podcaster based in Berlin, Germany, the project tries to improve technology around podcasts, from the production process over publishing platforms right up to podcast clients and I am playing my part solving the chicken and egg problem by adding new features to Instacast that podcasters can use to improve the overall user experience. As such, I added support for Flattr, Atom feeds, Multi-Format Feeds, Podcast Deep Linking and MP3 Chapters. There is much more in the pipeline. If you are a podcaster and want to take advantage of these new features, make sure you check out the Podcast Publisher FAQ.

So what else is new in Instacast? The first thing you'll notice is that the navigational hierarchy has been changed and optimized. The application now provides three main tabs for Subscriptions, Playlists and Bookmarks. The old Reeder-style navigation on the bottom is gone. Instead a handy summary of the content above is now being given.

The next thing you should check out is the player. Try to swipe the controller up and reveal the new playback options. From left to right, you get an AirPlay button, a button to change Playback Speed, a Sleep Timer, a button to enable forward and backward Continuous Playback and a button with new inline Sharing Options. The AirPlay button is pretty much the same as every other AirPlay button in iOS. The playback speed can be changed to 1.5x, 2x, 1/2x and to normal speed. Tap the sleep timer button multiple times to switch between 5, 10, 15, 60 min. Once the timer elapses, playback is being paused. You can now enable or disable Continuous Playback and set it to advance forward or backward in the current playlist. If a podcast provides chapter information, you can now navigate between chapters easily without going to the chapter list. Speaking of chapter list, behind the podcast image/video in the player, we also added 2 new tabs, one being Links and the other being Bookmarks. The list of links is an easy way to follow all links that have been provided with the show notes. The Bookmarks tab lists all bookmarks you added for the current episode and let you create new ones.

Another big new thing are the new sharing features. For the written word there are a lot of places on the internet where you can state an opinion or comment about a blog article. However for podcasts there is nothing. Partly because up until now their has been no technique to deep link to certain parts of audio or video content. Instacast is doing the first steps to improve on this situation. For that we added a sharing web service that Instacast can talk to. Right now there are mainly two sharing options. One being making a bookmark / deep link on a particular time of a podcast episode. This bookmark can be linked to via a short URL and can be posted on Twitter, Facebook or wherever you like. Behind that link is an HTML5 compatible audio/video player that plays directly from the time you gave it. The other option being the integrated Twitter discussion. It takes the deep linking technique a bit further and integrates directly with Twitter. You can tweet a comment right out of the app which adds a sharing link automatically. This link points to a dedicated discussion website (example) where other Twitter users can add their own comments. The website aggregates all comments behind the scenes and publishes the whole thread. It's a great new way to add user interaction and participation to the podcast universe.

Finally coming back to the Instacast Pro option I mentioned earlier. With Instacast Pro you can add playlists and smart playlists, manage bookmarks, configure automatic behaviors on a podcast-by-podcast basis and receive push notifications when new episodes are available. With smart playlists you can choose between Unplayed, Favorites, Downloaded, Partially Downloaded, Recently Played, and Most Recent episodes. You can change the sorting of a smart playlist and opt-in for sorting episodes based on the podcast order. With playlists you can add or remove arbitrary episodes and change their order. You can also configure a podcast subscription to automatically add new episodes to a particular playlist e.g adding 'The Talk Show' and 'Hypercritical' to a playlist called '5by5'.

Instacast 2.0 is now also fully compatible with VoiceOver, improves import and export options and is available in English and German. I am sure there will be a lot of questions. I will post more info and FAQs in the coming weeks. As always you can leave your comment on Twitter and get the app from the App Store.

Not much information has been provided besides rule 21.2 that "donations must be collected via Safari or SMS". To a knowledgeable person, this sounds exactly like what Flattr is doing, but Apple review staff seems not to know about that in great detail. I think what might be happening here is that the app communicated Flattr as though as the transaction is being done in Instacast itself, which of course is not true. If that's the case however there is a chance that we don't need to remove the Flattr thing altogether, which would be bad for a lot of people (see here).

I will try to redesign the feature so that it will be clear what Instacast is doing and will remove anything that vaguely says something about donations. I hope that this will be enough. I'll keep you posted on Twitter.

Most podcast publishers are using the MP3 format for their audio content, because they want to make sure that most potential listeners are able to listen without problems no matter what device or platform they use. MP3 is supported by nearly everybody. However some are using MP4 e.g. because they want to include chapter information and provide images during playback. This however frustrates users with older hardware that is not able to decode MPEG-4 audio. Others want to provide their content in different qualities to empower 48k modem users and iPad LTE users at the same time. The common solution is to provide multiple podcast feeds and give them a different title. This however is by far not the best solution! Podcast directories now include multiple entries with the same content and users often don't choose the version that is best suited for them individually.

The current podcast specification (the Atom variant at least) however allows for a linking between alternative feeds, however no podcast client is using this information to this date and thus no publisher is providing it so far – up until today.

Instacast 2.0 will include support for Multi-Format feeds. What do I mean by that? Publishers should not only add a self-link as a child note to the channel/feed tag, but also alternate-links to alternative feeds and give them distinctive titles.

Here is an Atom example:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
    href="http://podcast.com/low.atom"
    title="Low Bandwidth Feed"/>

<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml"
    href="http://podcast.com/enhanced.atom"
    title="Enhanced Feed"/>

And here is an RSS example:

<atom:link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
    href="http://podcast.com/low.rss"
    title="Low Bandwidth Feed"/>

<atom:link rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"
    href="http://podcast.com/enhanced.rss"
    title="Enhanced Feed"/>

Instacast 2.0 then uses this information to display the following dialog when parsing a podcast feed in the Online Directory:

With this feature, it doesn't matter anymore if the potential listener uses the URL to the low bandwidth feed or to the enhanced feed. He will get a dialog where he can choose explicitly which podcast feed he likes to subscribe to.

Now, I don't know of any publisher who does this currently. My only hope is that now as there is a client which offers this functionality, more and more publishers are changing their feeds and make the life of their listeners a little more pleasant. Ask your publisher to support it and let me know of podcast feeds that include these tags.

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.

I tackled a lot of issues with the recent updates, however a few problems remain. But first a short excursion about how iCloud works. Much like Dropbox, iCloud for 'Documents & Data' is a folder on your disc / flash memory. An iCloud daemon process registers for update notifications to this folder and uploads and downloads files to make sure the folder has the same content on every device. But unlike Dropbox, it is really not that reliable. It often happens that the daemon is not able to connect or simply stops working. To get a feel for this issue, you can do this:

1. Make sure you are using the same iCloud account on your iOS device and on your Mac.
2. Open the folder located at:
   ~/Library/Mobile Documents/J463EP3A58~com~vemedio~Instacast/Documents
3. You should see a file called 'Instacast.icast'.
4. Look at the modification date.
5. Change something in Instacast on your iOS device and wait around 30 seconds.

If the modification data changes on your Mac, everything works as it should. If not,

1. Open the Terminal and type: "sudo /usr/libexec/librariand"
2. Type in your administrator password.
3. If the modification date changes, then the synchronization works. If not, iCloud on your Mac is in a bad state.

This librariand command should not be necessary however. Everything should just work. There is a similar way of doing this with the Apple APIs, but in rare cases this does not work either. The result simply looks like an application error.

In Instacast 1.5.2 and Instacast HD 1.1.1 I tried to detect these circumstances, kick iCloud in the butt if necessary or alert the user if iCloud is simply not reacting in any way. I also added an option to reset the data in iCloud and upload the current state. This might solve the issue of iCloud being stuck.

But sure enough, I am still not convinced that I finally found the master fix. Apple should get its act together and do something. I will file the same bug over and over again until this situation gets better. I just hope that the current version is working a bit better for most users. Fingers crossed.

Another thing I added is synchronizing data of what has been downloaded. This option has to be enabled manually in the 'iCloud Sync' settings, since I am not sure if the behavior is what you expect. Just try it out and if it sucks, disable it again and let me know.

The initiative of advancing podcast technology called "podlove" has an international website now.

Podlove is an initiative by Metaebene Personal Media to improve the overall technical infrastructure for podcasting. Podlove is both a network for developers to discuss features and agree on standards as well as an incubator for software and file formats under the Podlove name.

The website already publishes an official format proposal for declaring simple chapters in RSS/Atom feeds and hosts a project for a universal embeddable podcast website player that's supports our deep linking proposal. Great stuff. We're happy to be a part of it and will implement a lot of "podlove technology" in Instacast.

The weekend before last I was attending a podcasting meeting in Berlin and learned about Auphonic. Georg Holzmann provided a fantastic overview. What I took out of it is that Auphonic is an online service that can take care of all post-production needs for podcasters as well as producers of audio book, lecture recordings, screencasts, etc. You give them a raw audio file, they are doing some magic and send you MP3, MP4 or whatever you need back. They also take care of metadata and already support MP3 chapters.

I say, if you are a podcaster yourself, you should take a look, try it out and save you some time in the future. They are now open for the general public.

• Playlists and Smart Playlists
• Settings for individual Podcasts
• Improved Player
• Sleep Timer
• Continuous Playback back and forth
• Multiple yet secret sharing options
• Bookmarks
• Support for Atom and Multi-format Feeds
• Archiving
• Push Notifications
• and a lot more.

The new version will be the basis to bring Instacast over 2012 well into 2013 and will form the foundry of new Instacasts for iPad and for Mac. I will also change the pricing structure a bit. More will be announced in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.