May 25 2005
iPodderX 3.0
Thunderstone Media has given us a sneak peek into iPodderX
3.0–the much anticipated upgrade to their already bleeding edge podcatching
client. August Trometer and Ray Slakinski have been working away on adding an
assortment of new features to a “from the ground up” build of iPodderX
and they are just about ready to release it. But before they do, let’s have
a look at what they have in store for us….
Vlog support
When you first heard and finally grasped the idea of podcasting, tell me you
didn’t see vlogging coming right behind it. That’s right, vlogging is video
blogging and iPodderX is here to help you access that content as well.
Thunderstone has put the icing on the video cake by enabling full screen playback
of vlog content right from iPodderX. Good news, indeed.
RSS Newsreading
But, iPodderX isn’t just for podcatching anymore. It can now be used as your
RSS reader for all feeds. This means you can keep up with the Wizards
of Technology and MacMerc.com
in the same RSS application. My only beef with this system is that, even though
you can set how often iPodderX checks for feed updates and because it is first
and foremost a podcatching client, it doesn’t allow you to check feeds often
enough for news junkies like me–only as often as once per hour at the most
frequent setting.
NewsCaster
iPodderX doesn’t stop at simply pulling down the text of your favorite news
sites, it can also convert them to speech synthesized MP3 files that you can
listen to on your media player. So now you can have Vicky, Fred or Bubbles read
you the latest Mac news!
iApp integration
Once you’ve got all this content, you’re going to want to organize the audio
and video in iTunes and the pictures in iPhoto. iPodderX has you covered there
too. It allows you to do all that and more…
…you can even create iTunes playlists right inside iPodderX. Smart, huh?
SmartSpace
I’ll tell what else is smart–SmartSpace. Sure, modern Macs can hold hundreds
of gigabytes of data. Hard drives are cheap. But how much of that space are
you willing to devote to podcasts? Those who have been catching podcasts for
a while now will tell you, those babies will eat a lot of drive space. iPodderX’s
SmartSpace will automatically delete your old downloaded podcasts to stay below
a drive space allowance determined by you. The oldest files will be the first
to go, but don’t worry, the files you keep in iTunes and iPhoto will be spared.
To sum up…
I have been playing with iPodderX 3.0 for quite a while now. August and Ray
have done such a great job of improving upon the ease of use and feature set
of version 2.0 that I really believe the release of this application is going
to result in explosive growth for podcasting listenership on the Mac and possibly
might inspire even more people to get into the podcasting themselves.
iPodderX is shareware with a registration cost of $24.95 (a free upgrade to registered users of iPodderX 2.0) and is sure to be
the Mac’s premier podcasting client.