Treo Podcatcher
Friday, July 08, 2005
One of the things that we’ve been searching for here for quite some time is a podcatcher that works well with the Treo 600. Up until recently, the best thing we’d seen was Quick News from Stand Alone, inc. It’s a great RSS reader and it does have the ability to download enclosures (it even calls them ‘podcasts’) but of course, over a PCS network, this is not great. Heck, it’s not even good…
A couple of weeks ago I was made aware of a podcatcher that takes a totally new approach: it’s a client that lives on your MP3 player, and it’s called Podcatcher on a Stick.
What I mean by that is, if your MP3 player connects to your computer as a drive, then this program, written in Python, actually lives on your player – complete with all of your subscriptions – and can be executed on any machine (Windows, MAC, Linux) without having to install anything on the machine itself.
Podcatcher on a Stick is an open-source project from Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany. It was developed by Christian Rotzoll with support from Hagen-Christian Tonnies and a special thanks to Michael Grunwald.
I am going to be giving a complete review on my next podcast, but as it turns out that probably won’t be until Saturday evening here in Houston so I thought I would start spreading the word a little early.
In a nutshell, this podcatcher works well. It is just now being released in a beta form for public testing, but I have already replaced my Podnova client with this beauty – don’t worry though, I still use Podnova to create and manage my subscriptions, I just feed the Podnova RSS file to my Podcatcher on a Stick. I will warn you that the MAC and Linux operability is still “highly experimental” as described by Christian, so if there is anyone out there that would care to test this out on either of those platforms we’d be very appreciative.
Moving forward, I am going to be helping Christian with support by moderating the forums at http://mypodder.mobilepodcast.org. This is intended to be the clearing house for all of the questions, bug reports, requests, etc. Hopefully I will be able to take enough of the support work off of his shoulders so he can continue to work on his projects.
So stay tuned for a more in-depth review of this program to come shortly. And in the meantime, browse on over to http://mypodder.org and download a copy of the beta and see what you think.
posted by Russell @ 7:45 PM,
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