Sunday, December 21, 2008

Podcasting Problems

I just installed Juice, at a friend's recommendation, for managing Podcasts I listen to.
After playing with it for about 5 minutes, I can see it's not usable yet by normal human beings.

The Library feature has many lists of podcasts, more than half of which could not be viewed (some kind of "error"). Some of them had weird HTML entities and even [[CCDATA type things in them which shouldn't be there. And none of them were the basic tech podcasts that I personally consider most important: like, anything from Leo Laporte (Twit, Security Now, ...) or Revision3 (Diggnation, Totally Rad Show, ...)

I figured, maybe that's OK, there's a LOT of podcasts out there now, I can excuse it if it doesn't know what I personally like.

Using the Library was very discontinuous; you CANNOT click on a "+" sign to open the list, you have to know to click on the little folder-icon to open it. Then, to close it, you CANNOT click on the folder, you must click on the "-" sign! That's ridiculous; both should work in both situations. In fact, let me click anywhere within the big rectangle defining the entire line, from left to right, top to bottom, to expand/collapse that part of the tree list. Basic usability concepts, and I'm not even an Apple person.

Ignoring all that, I went to the "Downloads" tab. It looks like there's a search box at the top, so I typed a keyword and hit Enter. Nothing happened. There's no "go" button to click; I clicked the little magnifying-glass, nothing. I switched over to the "Subscriptions" tab and tried it there, same results, nothing. No error message, no throbber, nothing changed on the screen whatsoever. I waited. Still nothing.

That's just wrong.

OK, I figured, I can find a RSS feed or something with a web browser, and click the link to get Juice to see the podcast. After all, I answered "yes" when Juice asked to take over certain extensions, when I ran it for the first time; and I checked all the extensions it wanted to own, including podcast://, pcast://, .rss, and others.

I web-browsed over to TWiT's home page, and found a nice podcast to try. I chose the "pcast://" choice from a menu below the picture of a good podcast, but nothing happened. So I chose the RSS feed link instead; this time it brought up a little window, asking what app I wanted to run. I thought Juice was my new default? Shouldn't this stuff just work? I chose "Juice" from the application-to-run choices on my local machine, and guess what -- absolutely nothing happened.

My juice was already running, but the screen didn't change in any way. No new podcast showed up under any tab in Juice. It lost the message from the web browser that it was supposed to open a podcast RSS feed.

This is ridiculous. It shouldn't be this difficult for anybody to view podcasts. Podcasts are simple. The podcast has a name, and a list of episodes in 1 or more formats. That's it. A podcast client(player) has the ability to remember podcasts you like, and supports 1 or more formats. Who cares what the formats are! I just want to view my podcasts! It's not that hard.

You know, I hate Itunes, personally, but you have to admit they totally solved all of these problems. I can keyword-search for podcasts, and click a "subscribe" button next to the one I want. Then, it immediately downloads the latest episode. I can queue up downloading of more ep's if I want. I can see all eps that are downloaded and not-downloaded, and when I'm done with one, I can hit "delete" to delete the ep from my machine to save disk space. When I do that, the ep is no longer listed as downloaded OR not-downloaded; it's simply gone, which is the right thing to do. This way I have a sense of completion, and I can see how much more un-listened-to ep's I have to go.

I have a lot of issues with Itunes, but for podcast viewing, I have not found anything as simple or bug-free as Itunes yet. I'm sticking with Itunes until something better comes along.