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.
update: 3/17/08 added images.
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.
Also in our latest svn drop is the first user visible integration with PodGrove. You can now add feeds to mobilecast via podgrove.com saving you having to type them in on the iphones keyboard. Personally I’ve got pretty used to the iphone keyboard for texting & even doing the occasional email but I’ve always found typing urls into mobilecast tedious (and thats without making typos!).
So to remove the tedium here is what you need to do:
1. Go to www.podgrove.com/main/register where you will see a page like the following:
2. Fill in your email address, password & click sig-up. You should then see something like this:
3. Check your email & click on the link in there to validate your account. That link should take you to a page that looks like this:
4. Click the button “Add PodGrove to Firefox”, This will inturn present a confirmation box where you should click “Yes”. You obviously need to be using Firefox here. This will install a PodGrove content handler for RSS feeds, its just a bit of firefox configuration no fancy plugins, extensions or anything like that.
5. Now when your on the web and you encounter a feed that you’d like to add to MobileCast, you can simply click on the RSS icon (or xml feed) where you should get a standard enough looking page like this:
This is all quite normal & usually this is where you’d make note of the feed url & start typing it into your iphone… However, you’ll notice that in addition to google, bloglines, my yahoo etc you now have an option for PodGrove.com. So select it & click subscribe.
6. Now grab your phone or itouch & fire up the recent version of mobilecast that you grabbed off the downloads page. Click on the “Add Feeds” button, scroll down enter your podgrove username (your email) & password. Then hit the Save button.
7. Click “Add Feeds” again, then click the podgrove “Sync Now” button. A swirly working symbol thingy should appear while mobilecast syncs with podgrove.
8 . Enjoy your newly added podcasts
Please note that once you’ve gone through these 8 steps adding more feeds is simply a matter of repeating steps 5 & 7.
I’m well aware that podgrove needs plenty of UI love (css and what not); it’ll get it in due course… I really wanted to share this as its a feature that I’ve wanted for the longest time!
For the paranoid… PodGrove will not share your email with any other website, service or third party. We will not spam or email you for silly reasons. Your passwords not stored in plain text on podgrove.com (we use a sha1 hash). Having said that the mobilecast client on your phone does store your password in plain text, this is because we are using http basic auth to login to podgrove.
I’m planning a bunch of other services for mobilecast at here PodGrove, next up will most likely be OPML backup… Stay tuned.
PS - you can feel free to donate, donations go towards the hosting costs for this site.
Thanks to iphone-insomnia mobilecast is now able to keep wifi active while your podcasts are downloading. Please check out the latest svn.
This means that we will probably have to chance our license from Apache to GPLv3, which is something that I’ve got no issue with given the benefit of this new feature
Apparently I was so awestruck by the new streaming feature in mobilecast that I failed to notice that in recent svn versions it would only stream when your connected via wifi. i.e. rather than playing the downloaded file it’d just ignore it & try streaming it instead 
Thanks to jkmullins & cgarson for reporting this issue. Its fixed in svn 99 onwards.
