A few months back before the release of the first Ubuntu Touch phone, I started to think about apps that a new user might look for. Several apps came to my mind like Whatsapp, Google+, Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, Games, Podcast Manager etc and while I certainly cannot help out with every one of them (despite wanting to), I figured I would try to help app developers who are creating apps which fulfils a certain use case. One such app that caught my attention was Podbird which was being developed by Michael Sheldon.
Podbird was this simple podcast app that used the Itunes database to allow for searching and adding a podcast and a few other nifty features like downloading podcasts for offline listening. It was a great start to a use case that I could relate to. I mean who doesn't like to listen to podcasts on their phone? Here is a screenshot of Podbird v0.5 for those who haven't used it yet.
I joined the Podbird team to ramp up the development efforts and provide a podcast manager that would ease the transition for a new user. Features are being added to Podbird at a steady pace and I thought I'd share some sneak peaks of what to expect in v0.6.
First of is the most requested feature which is to auto-download new episodes on app start up (Bug 1435556 ). While implementing this feature, I revamped the settings page to be more organized and explanatory.
If you also look closely at the settings page, I also added the option to hide listened episodes.
I also added a welcome wizard to introduce the app to the user and help get started with Podbird.
We are fully committed to providing a great Podbird experience in all languages. And so once these features land in trunk, we will be making a call to get translations as we have added quite a number of new strings and then release this new version to the store.
Oh also before I forget, Podbird is essentially being made by developers and as obvious as that might be, we are not designers. We have tried our best to make Podbird easy and intuitive to use. On my request, the Podbird UI is now being scrutinized by Kevin Feyder whose apps I have always come to admire. With time, we should see his designs and opinions being reflected in Podbird.
Hopefully by the time we hit our first major milestone v1.0, Podbird should be feature par with podcast manager of other platforms.
Chirp... Chirp...