Tuesday 17 February 2009

podWeasel

The application which started it all.
When I bought my G1 I dicovered that there wasn't any software on it for doing RSS agregation or podcast downloading.  Being the kind of person that likes to tinker with code I figured that I might as well have a bash at making my own as, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, 'How hard can it be'.

Turns out quite hard really.  After the industry standard amount of swearing and headscratching I managed to blunder my way to what could optomistically be called version 1.
I released it onto the marketplace where it received a fair few downloads but was basically hampered by it's limited abilities.

Long story short podWeasel now stands at the version v2.1 mark and has become, if I do say so myself, a fairly nifty little application.  It's now capable of waking the phone, establishing a wifi connection and downloading podcasts before going back to sleep until it is needed again.  You can tell it when to check your various feeds, it will even list those which you've downloaded and mark those which are new.  There is even a very basic media player.

I learned a heck of a lot getting podWeasel where it is now and I certainly enjoyed the experience.  The most important thing, from a more business perspective is releasing an application before it is really ready does more harm than good in the long run.  This is especially true on the marketplace where the ratings and comments are persisted across versions.

1 comment:

  1. How do you use it? I am new to these "smart-phones" and so far I have installed the program from the Market. Now, I just need to use the software.

    It asks for "feed url" - is this the website where I found the podcast? For example, what is the Feed URL for Sound Opinions, which is at www.soundopinions.com?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete