The people have spoken! Thanks to everyone that participated in the poll, we have a very clear result: you want MobileCast to remain free.
So I’m going for take your advice and continue mobilecast as a free and open source project!
Following the same model of MobileCast 2.x, the source code is available under a GPL license so please feel free to check out the source, submit patches and enhancements.
You can contribute to the project over at the mobilecast googlecode site. If you would like to submit a patch please create an issue and attach a text file containing the output of ’svn diff’. If your not an iphone developer you can contribute by submittig bug reports or ideas for enhancements. I would just ask that you search through the existing issues before you create a new one.
Thanks again for participating in the poll, I’m looking forward to collaborating with many of you on making MobileCast 3.0 the worlds best podcast client.
MobileCast 3.0 Beta-1 just became available in cydia!
This means that you will need a jailbroken device (running the 2.x firmware). If you don’t know how to jailbreak, please check out pwnage.
You can send feedback (bug reports etc) on the beta to mc-beta@podgrove.com. The app is quite functional, you can download and playback both audio & video podcasts. It even supports password protected podcasts! To add a password protected podcast simply use the following url format when adding it:
http://<username>:<password>@<feed_url>
Replace <username> & <password> with your actual credentials, and <feed_url> with an actual url so a protected feed url might look something like the following:
http://joeblogs:joespassword@www.somesite.com/protected_podcast/feed.xml
3.0 also includes a search tab that allows you quickly search for podcasts & add them without having to type in url’s.
To delete items (or feeds) simply swipe your finger from right to left to reveal a delete button.
There are a number of outstanding development tasks & known issues (its a BETA afterall). Here is a list of known issues:
- white bar at top of add feeds & feed items page.
- downloads view is not ordered based on time.
- movie player used for all playback; so you don’t get the 30 second skip buttons like in mobilecast 2.2.x.
- even though we’re in jailbroken mode the app doesn’t run in the background.
- downloads view does not auto refresh (workaround: click the the refresh button in the downloads tab).
- the feed items view does not auto update the progress bar when a download is in progress (if you flick the table it will update though).
I hope you enjoy MobileCast, please keep an eye out in cydia for beta updates.
I am thinking about making MobileCast a shareware application i.e. try before you buy. So it will be free for 30 days, after which there will be a one time fee. The 30-day period will start from the date that you install the first non-beta release. I am interested in your thoughts on what a reasonable price for mobilecast would be, so please vote or post a comment.
I’ve been working on a complete re-write of mobilecast based on the official iphone sdk, with a goal of distributing the app via the app store. Progress was a little slower than we would have liked as its a complete re-write of the jailbroken version.
I am hoping to be in a position to release an initial version (not sure if it should even be called a beta) this weekend. If you would like to join the beta then please send an email to mc-beta@podgrove.com with your devices udid. The easiest way to send your devices id is via the adhoc app.
We’re limited to only 100 beta users so get that mail in asap!
The folks over at installer.apps have just published a list of their top 50 iphone apps. I’m very pleased to see that MobileCast ranked #7 overall! Thanks to all of you who gave us postive ratings over on installerapps
podgrove just got a search function that makes finding feeds for mobilecast a whole lot easier. Head on over to the search page and enter your query:
We’re using rails with ferret to power these searches. Ferret is basically an implementation of Apache Lucene in ruby, so you can leverage the lucene query syntax when your searching for podcasts on podgrove. Currently ferret is indexing & searching the title, description, url & body (raw rss feed dump); you can query just the description field for “BBC” by typing “description:BBC” into the search box. Its working pretty nicely for a first version. You can expect to see some further refinement over the coming days/weeks. Including integration with mobilecast - I’ve actually been thinking about using iui for a quick integration. All we’d need to do is initialize a webview of an iui version of the podgrove search page in mobilecast
Below is another screenshot showing off some search results:
If you click through on any of the results it should bring you to the RSS for that feed. Then if you’ve added the podgrove rss handler to firefox, you’ll just need to click to subscribe. To get the feed onto your itouch or iphone you’ll just need to hit the sync button on the settings page in mobilecast.
Please check it out. Head on over to podgrove, create an account if you don’t already have one and have a play with the new podgrove search feature. Please let us know what you think of this in the comments, we’d be vey interested in your feedback!
In just 24 little hours (to paraphrase a great song) - we’ve had 70 odd downloads of the latest 2.2.4 Beta!.
Thats a pretty significant bump from the 10-20 per day that we were seeing when folks had to manually grab the latest mobilecast drop & ssh it over to their phones.
As always we appreciate your feedback & contributions. I’d like to start a vote to select a new icon for mobilecast very soon.
Can anyone make a recommendation on how we should use to manage/run the vote?
It’d be nice if there was a simple rails or php app that I could throw up on podgrove. Of course letting a 3rd party site run the vote would be even better (as it would be less work to setup). Please post suggestions in the comments. Once we complete a vote & select a new Icon I’d like to do a 2.2.4 stable release.
I just posted MobileCast 2.2.4 Beta drop 113 (the numbers are based upon the svn revision) to the Installer.App via our source. There are 2 significant things about this drop:
1. Were testing out a new icon, the plan is to rotate all the mobilecast icons that have been contributed over the next couple of svn drops. This will give BETA testers a chance to experience each of the icons before they vote for the next official mobilecast icon.
Todays Icon was contributed by Gert, who has also started to contribute some code recently. Thats right folks, contributing code gets ya priority Thanks again Gert!
2. The second thing of interest in this drop is that we’ve added yet another config setting. Again this is under the “Add Feeds” page. I swear we’ll get our own settings page very very soon! Anyways it looks like this:
The new setting is “BasicAuth on Items”, it allows you to control whether or not we send HTTP Basic Auth headers to items in password protected feeds. Some protected feeds require this, however I’ve got a feed of my own where the rss is password protected but the items sit publicly on amazon s3. Unfortunately S3 barfs when you send it basic auth headers for public items. I would have expected it to ignore them, but whatever, we have this setting now & my feed works again so I’m happy
PS - when we get a feed specific settings page this will be one of them. It really shouldn’t be a global setting like it is today.
As of the latest svn drop of mobilecast you can now backup & restore your OPML to podgrove. Once you’ve backed up your opml, it’ll be available at http://www.podgrove.com/opml. You will need to either have podgrove login info in your http session, or you will be prompted for your your podgrove account infomation. If you want to access this programatically or from another service, simply send a GET request to podrove.com/opml with your user information supplied with http basic auth. Having the ability to backup your OPML is nice, it covers you should you loose or damage your mobilecast player. Its also useful if you want to import your feeds into another device…
In addition, its going to make it possible for podgrove to support a bunch of new features & services. For example, I just started implementing a feature that will allow you to pause a podcast of your touch/phone & continue listening (from where you paused it) on the podgrove website. There are many more cool features in the works, so stay tuned!
This is of little relevance to MobileCast users - you’ll probably only find this post of interest if your building an app and want to reuse some source code from mobilecast.
We have had to switch our license from Apache 2.0 to GPLv3. This is because we are now deriving from the GPLv3 code over at iphone-insomnia. If you’d like to consume the MobileCast source under a liberal license (like ASL 2.0) make sure your working off svn revision 102 or earlier as MobileCast source code from 103 onwards is licensed under GPLv3. We have just updated the copyright notices at the start of each the source files & are now including a license.txt & notices.txt in binary distributions.
Staying up to date with the latest & greatest development snapshots of MobileCast just got a whole lot easier. You no longer need to roll your sleeves up & get dirty with ssh as we now have our very own repository which you can add as a source to installer.app on your iphone/itouch.
So how do you add it?
Well, its really very easy, just do this:
1. On a jailbroken device fire up installer.app
2. Select “Sources” on the navigation bar on the bottom of the screen.
3. Click “Edit” on the top right of the screen.
4. The “Add” button now appears on the top left, so click it.
5. This will now present a dialog box where you should enter http://repo.podgrove.com/iphone.xml & then click OK. Install.app will then refresh its sources, you should now click the “Done” button on the top right to exit edit mode.
Now to install the MobileCast 2.2.4 development beta, click “Install” on the bottom navbar. You can now select MobileCast under the multimedia category. Please note that the 2.2.4 development version is the one that says “MobileCast BETA…” in its description. The other MobileCast entry is the last stable release - 2.2.3. We tend to update the development version of mobilecast a couple of times each week so you might find it easier to locate the MobileCast BETA via the “Recent Packages” category.
If you encounter any issues please post in the comments of this entry or on the mobilecast google group.
Thanks again Gert!
