Regarding Instacast for Mac, we think that a number of smaller changes and tweaks will really enhance Instacast on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. In fact, we have already begun updating the app, and the most recent version (1.0.1) takes advantage of the new App Nap feature of OS X 10.9. You can download Instacast for Mac 1.0.1 today, and we will continue to improve interoperability with OS X 10.9 until the public release this fall.

As for Instacast for iOS, it looks like more serious development will be required. iOS 7 marks a huge departure from what Apple has done with the operating system previously, and Apple has significantly changed how the system works internally in addition to its external aesthetic. The biggest difference is how multitasking works under iOS 7, and when Instacast is running on iOS 7 it will be much better at handling downloads in the background and notifying the user. Further, there are a lot of changes to the user interface of iOS 7. Since we consider Instacast to be the best podcast app on iOS, we want keep with the times and make a major update to Instacast's user interface, allowing us to make the app even more intuitive and user friendly.

The necessary changes to make Instacast work on iOS 7 are so significant that it will render it incompatible with iOS 6. However, we respect that a number of users will not want to update to iOS 7, preferring the look and feel of iOS 6. Due to this, we will release Instacast 4 as a new app with iOS 7 this fall, and users who will not be upgrading to iOS 7 can continue to use Instacast 3. We will continue to update Instacast 3 over the summer while working on Instacast 4 for iOS 7.

We hope that this gives you some insight into our plans for the near future. Thank you for your support.

If you didn't get chance to try the beta version of Instacast for Mac, please allow us to describe the application and highlight some of the final version's features: Instacast for Mac takes everything that was great about the iOS version and transfers the experience to your Mac. This means that you can expect to manage your podcast collection with ease, enjoy hassle-free playback, quickly download your favourite episodes, interact with your podcasts and synchronise your entire library with Instacast Cloud. Moreover, Instacast for Mac also has a number of unique enhancements not yet found in the iOS version. For example, you are able to easily search your entire library for specific keywords, use the Up Next playback queue to quickly manage playback order, access a large amount of storage for downloading episodes and financially support shows via Flattr.

We hope that Instacast for Mac is everything you hoped it would be, and we're working hard to improve and develop it on an ongoing basis. As always, please do get in contact with us if you have any feedback, suggestions and/or issues and we'll be delighted to help.

We want Instacast to be the premier solution for managing and consuming podcasts, and we hope that our applications are able to help define how the podcast medium develops in the near future.

Instacast is available for $19.99. Early bird pricing saves $5 until May 31st.

Thanks for being a part of this journey.

Configuring accounts

By clicking on the 'Sharing' tab in Instacast's preferences you will be presented with a list of different sharing services. You can log into each service from this area and, by selecting 'Enabled', choose whether you want the option to share via a service to appear in the sharing menu.

Sharing episodes

To share links to episodes, click on the share icon in the bottom right of the show notes. You will then be shown a menu with the sharing options you have enabled from Instacast's preferences.

Sharing links from show notes

You can also share individual links from within the show notes by right-clicking on a link and moving the cursor over 'Share'. This is useful when you only want to share one link without requiring your recipient to download the podcast's show notes.

We hope you've found these posts useful and that they've helped you learn more about Instacast for Mac. Please don't hesitate to send us any feedback and suggestions. Happy listening!

Local file sharing

Did you know that Instacast for Mac has the ability to share downloaded episodes to other versions of Instacast on your local network? This includes both the iOS version of Instacast as well as other copies of Instacast for Mac. This is useful for two reasons: first, it drastically reduces the time your second device takes to download episodes. For example, you can leave Instacast for Mac running in the background while you work at your computer or while you sleep overnight, and when you want to download these episodes on your iPhone, iPad or second Mac, the copy of Instacast installed on that device will check whether the episodes you want to download have already been downloaded on Instacast for Mac. If they are, then the version of Instacast on your second device will copy the file directly from Instacast for Mac instead of attempting to download the file from the podcast’s server via the internet. This results in significantly reduced download speeds – especially when you want to download HD video podcasts! Second, Instacast for iOS is unable to remain in the background for longer than ten minutes before all downloads are paused. This is a restriction that Apple places on all third-party iOS apps, and it requires you to re-open the iOS version of Instacast and keep it in the foreground if you want to download large files. However, when Instacast for Mac is running on your local network, the iOS version of Instacast will download the files directly from Instacast for Mac (when available) instead of using the internet. This reduces the likelihood of the ‘downloads paused’ notification appearing on the iOS version of Instacast due to the large decrease in download time.

AirPlay

You can use AirPlay to stream Instacast’s audio to external speakers by selecting the AirPlay icon from the media player controls and choosing your output source. When streaming Instacast’s audio to external speakers, the AirPlay icon will light up blue to show that audio is being streamed. At the moment, when choosing to stream audio via AirPlay, all audio output from your Mac will be sent to the external speakers – not just Instacast’s audio. This is because the latest build of OS X does not offer to stream to different audio devices in the system components we use to play media. Hopefully this will change when Apple releases a future update to OS X.

Playback using the Apple keyboard’s media buttons and the Apple headphone remote

You can use the media playback buttons on your keyboard to control Instacast in a similar manner to how they operate iTunes or Spotify. However, to use these buttons to control Instacast you must be sure to hold the Alt key while pressing them. This ensures that you are able to control your music app and Instacast simultaneously: press the media buttons as normal for iTunes/Spotify playback and hold Alt when you press the media buttons to control Instacast. This behavior might change in future releases though. Additionally, this also works with the remote control built in to Apple’s Earbuds and Earpods.

Thanks for reading part two of the ‘Tips and Tricks’ series – we hope that it enhances your enjoyment of Instacast for Mac! Part three will be added to the blog very soon, and it will discuss tricks and tips related to sharing via third-party services.

To thank and assist everyone who took the time to download and try out the beta we'll be producing a short series of blog posts designed to help you get the most out of using Instacast for Mac. This three-part series is entitled 'Tips and Tricks' and each entry will discuss different tips and tricks related to a certain category. To this end, today's entry will detail tips and tricks related to playback.

Up Next

Up Next is a new addition to the Instacast family and is intended to replace the 'continuous playback' feature that currently exists in Instacast for iOS. Up Next functions as a list to queue episodes for sequential playback. To add an episode to the Up Next queue, right-click an episode and select 'Play Next' to add the episode to the top of the queue or 'Add to Up Next' to add the episode to the end of the queue. Of course, you're free to use the Shift and/or Command keys to select multiple episodes to add at once.

MiniPlayer

The Instacast MiniPlayer is a useful way to control playback and keep track of what's playing without taking up much screen space. To open the MiniPlayer, select 'Window' from the menu bar, and then click 'MiniPlayer' to view the MiniPlayer alongside the main Instacast window. Alternatively, select 'Switch to MiniPlayer' to close the main Instacast window and use the MiniPlayer exclusively. Both these options have corresponding keyboard shortcuts, and you can also switch to the MiniPlayer by holding the Alt key as you click the green zoom button on the main Instacast window. Additionally, if you use multiple spaces or desktops, you may find it helpful to view the MiniPlayer on each different desktop. To do this, right-click the Instacast icon in the dock and select 'Options' > 'Assign To' > 'All Desktops'.

Drag and drop

Users have been dragging and dropping files on their computers for years, and this UI standard is included in the Mac version of Instacast. You can use drag and drop to drag episodes into playlists, the MiniPlayer or the Up Next queue, as well as rearrange the order of playlists in the sidebar or the order of individual episodes in a playlist or the Up Next queue. Finally, don't forget to use the Shift and Command keys to select multiple episodes to drag and drop at once!

We hope this post has been useful as you continue to use Instacast for Mac. Be sure to check back soon for 'Tips and Tricks Part Two', which will discuss features related to system functions.

Everything's there: subscriptions, show notes, playback and playlists, but also a lot of stuff that you can only get on the Mac: True Background Processing, Flattr, Search and an Up Next Playlist to only mention a few. Additionally there are a lot of small details you might only learn about over time, like support for Headset Remotes, AirPlay streaming or the built-in File Reflector that pushes downloaded files to your iPhone and iPad, instead of letting them download the same file again from the slow internet.

This is only the beginning and we hope one that leads to a bright future for desktop podcast management. Try it out for free and let us know what you think.

And if you really like it, you can purchase a license for $14.99 (early bird pricing) from within the app.

Download here

Concerning the Mac App Store, we don't have any immediate plans to put the app into the App Store. Instacast for Mac has some features that might raise concerns in the review process, like switching system audio output or integration of Flattr. If there will be a version for the Mac App Store it will most likely be one with a reduced feature set, like an "Instacast Light" if you will.

http://poodle.vemedio.com

I added support for complex search queries. Instead of simply looking for some keywords, you can now specify in which field those keywords should appear. You can use wildcards in the form of a "*" and also facilitate a fuzzy search by using "~". Poodle is basically supporting the full Lucene Search Syntax. I will publish a full description in due time.

Another thing I started is indexing chapters. I am using the Instacast metadata reading technology to parse chapter information from the actual media files. This unfortunately takes a lot of time and a much bigger internet cable then what I have now. I am not sure if I can maintain this effort in a potential final product. That will greatly depend on the final maintenance costs which are not clear at this point. It would help a lot if every podcast publisher that also supports chapters would start adopting the Podlove Simple Chapter specification. And if you're not producing chapters at the moment, use the spec to indicate that you don't have any chapters by adding an empty <psc:chapters/> tag. This would speed up indexing a lot and would lower the performance needs and internet traffic.

What's great about the indexed chapters is, that you can actually click on the timestamp of a chapter and thus tell the target link to start playing this chapter immediately. This features builds on the Podlove Deep Linking spec which uses media fragments. If you already use Wordpress to publish your podcasts, consider using the Podlove Web Player wordpress plugin, which supports this method.

More updates soon.

If you have questions or feature requests, please let me know on Twitter.

You can check it out on poodle.vemedio.com. The prototype currently only searches the Top 300 English and the top 300 German podcasts of the Instacast podcast directory which means around 50.000 podcast episodes. I am using this prototype to find out what I and other people are actually looking for when searching for podcast content. I am hoping that this information will help make Instacast and other podcast based apps better.

So far you can only search for a combination of words like "podcast app" or "podcast or app". A lot more is surely possible in the future. The link will redirect you directly to the publisher website.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. Also let me know if you think that certain search results are not good enough for your particular query. After all ranking search results is a science in itself and takes a lot of optimizing, time and experience.

I am pleased to announce that we now have a better solution to integrate podcast feeds and websites with Instacast. With a simple HTML snippet, you can display a button that integrates seamlessly with other social buttons. The button can optionally display a subscriber count. This count only tracks subscribers that use the new Instacast 3.

The only thing you have to do is add this line into the head of your html page:

<script src='http://b.instaca.st/instacast-button.js' async></script>

Then add one of the following links somewhere on your site, where it fits the layout.

To add a simple button with subscription count, use:

<a href='http://feeds.feedburner.com/the_talk_show'
class='instacast-button'></a>

which will look like this:

To add a button without subscription count, use:

<a href='http://feeds.feedburner.com/the_talk_show' 
class='instacast-button instacast-button-no-counter'></a>

which will look like this:

The link of the href attribute should point to the canonical podcast feed.

If you like to create your own link, e.g. when you are using simple text links or different button styles, you can do that as well. You should then link directly to the button landing page:

<a href='http://b.instaca.st/button/subscribe?url=
http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fthe_talk_show'>
Subscribe with Instacast</a>

which just looks like that:

Subscribe with Instacast

Small disclaimer: We are using an iframe to display the button. However we do not track any visitor activity and don’t create user profiles whatsoever.

To recap, Instacast 2 had a myriad of settings to control automatic download and automatic deletion of content. This let to a number of issue. First, Instacast 2 had problems always enforcing all settings as a lot of them were in conflict with each other. This let to situations where you thought Instacast should automatically download the content of a particular episode, but didn't and vice versa. Same with automatic deletion, it could happen that you fell asleep and suddenly Instacast had deleted the content and you had to re-download it all over again.

Another problem has been communicating the difference of deleting an episode and just deleting the content of an episode (that takes up all the space). People were confused over which was which and sometimes accidentally pushed the wrong buttons.

All that let me to the conclusion that something had to change. I came up with the concept of moving the content management into settings and have access to manual management right from there. This has the advantage of not needing to go into every single episode to delete the content, plus people are not confused anymore what "Delete Episode" means. Then I removed all auto-deletion features and replaced them with only one rule: "Delete the content, when you have to"..., because you run out of space. Instacast then would start deleting content of old episodes first as long as they haven't been marked as favorite. This has multiple benefits. You can fall asleep anytime and Instacast wouldn't delete the content. You don't need to fiddle around with subscription specific delete rules and it provides some peace of mind. Ohhmmm.

Nevertheless the reality is much different. A lot of users don't like it and want to delete content rather sooner than later. I am recognizing this, but I don't just want to rollback time and be left with the same problems we had before.

That's why I will make some changes in Instacast 3.1. I will add two options that have to be enabled manually. You will be able to configure automatic deletion of content after an episode finished playing or as soon as the episode gets marked as played. Both of these options can be overwritten in subscription specific settings. I will also make some adjustments to the indicators Instacast is giving in the hope to remove the confusion. And finally I will grey out episodes in the "Offline Storage" settings that had already been played.

Unfortunately Instacast 3.1 won't be available before Christmas, because with the usual delay of 1 week App Store review time there is simply not enough time before Apple's company vacation on Dec 21.