A small set of features for the mobile user

[Lion]

Thanks for developing PodTrapper, I've purchased it after using it on trial for about a week. I tend to spend a lot of time on the road and it's nice to have podcasts handy at any time to listen to while in traffic, a hotel room, or whenever I've got a moment. Having podcasts on your phone is a nice touch to the mobile user, but I see a few use cases I think would make the experience even better:

My phone is always with me, even in a variety of environments. These range from fully connected with EVDO/3G (like when I'm in the city) to poorly connected with 1XRTT/2G (when I'm at my cabin) or no connectivity (like in a flight). As such I'd like to have more control over how my podcasts are downloaded and stored. For instance, it'd be nice to have a "pause/resume all downloads" button to halt downloads in poor areas. And a schedule for what time a podcast should be downloaded (like in the middle of the night). However, podcasts, at least for me, vary in "importance". There's a few I listen to every day, there's some I listen to once in a while, and there's a few I'd like to keep around just because I might find myself stuck in an airport for a few hours waiting for the plane to get fixed .. as such, I'd like to see different configurations for each podcast. My flash chip only stores so many as well, so a per-podcast retention policy would help a lot. PVR style settings like "Keep only ___ episodes." would be nice or even "Keep only if there's space." My PVR at home does a good job of this, it records every episode of a show but discards the oldest when it records a new one. This makes it possible to have the latest-and-greatest episodes of your not-so-often listened to shows ready for when they tell you to "turn off all electronic devices" for that long flight from IAD to LAX. Some podcasts as well I don't want every episode of. I'd like to browse the summaries of the individual shows and queue up one or more for immediate download. Otherwise I'd like those podcasts to have "Max to auto-download" set to 0 until I specifically request them. (The use case of this is there's a podcast from NPR I like that I listen only when they cover certain topics, some topics I never want to listen to).

Finally, what XML tag does PodTrapper respect for the "Summary" part of the individual display? {description} doesn't seem to show. (Curly braces instead of gt/lt to defeat anti-tagging in forums).

So, a quick summary:

- Pause/resume all downloads (main menu item)
- Schedule/retention configuration for individual podcasts (all of the following items)
- Max to auto-download "0" setting
- Retention policy choice: Keep all, Keep only /n/ episodes (delete oldest and get latest), Delete episodes when space is needed (delete oldest and get latest).
- Time to begin downloads (also "at any time")

Again, thanks, this is a nice piece of software and I hope you'll take time to consider my requests!

edit: fix some speeling

[Lion]

So I've read the bit about the per-Podcast toKeep setting and while it defines a retention policy that does something akin to what I lay out here, I definitely didn't see this right off ... my opinion is that interaction between the Max to download and toKeep isn't very clear since in the use of the software that connection isn't clearly made. (UI design concern of

Also I'm seeing the Max download doesn't exactly work in a global manner with podcasts that come as 3 elements for a single show (Some long podcasts are broken into 1 hour segments), which again I think speaks to a Per podcast download policy starting at 0.

Thanks ..

[marwatk]

Hi Lion,

Sorry for the delayed response, I took yesterday off.

The easiest way (right now) to disable downloads is the top setting item in the Settings screen ("Downloading enabled"). I plan on adding a quick toggle from the downloads viewer (though probably never to the main screen, it's already really crowded).

It's been in my head for a while to allow for customizable download settings per-podcast, but I haven't hammered out all that I want to allow customization in there. (Trying to keep everything as simple as possible).

For the ToKeep and max Download stuff, I agree that it's a hard distinction to grasp, but I haven't found a better set of terms to use (the criteria for the terms is that they have to fit on a single line in a settings screen). I think the disconnect (as you've pointed out) largely stems from them being at two different levels (application level and podcast level). Which I hope to fix when I nail down the per-podcast stuff I want to include. (One I already know for sure is moving the Max auto-download number to podcasts instead of a global setting).

The reasons for how it's set up are largely do to backend design choices that I'll have to refactor to work better. (The only reason it hasn't been done yet, I want to make everything work before I start breaking it again)

Hope this answers everything, let me know if it hasn't.

-Marcus

[Lion]

Hey Marcus ...

Just a suggestion about thinking about the retention methods, the PVR world has a lot of examples. The ones I use above are kinda based on the Windows Media Center style and I think a little Mythtv in there too. This is likely to be overkill, but some psuedocode for the per podcast decision tree based upon what I describe:

for each (new_episode and DOWNLOAD_OK) {
if(space_available < sizeof_new_episode) { // I think you can do this with a request to the webserver, not sure though
if(KEEP_ALL) exit
until (space_available > sizeof_new_episode) delete(oldest_episode)
}
download(new_episode)
while(KEEP_N and number_of_episdoes > keep_n_value) delete(oldest_episode)
}

Where DOWNLOAD_OK is "it's OK to download for this podcast" (somewhat akin to MaxDownloads=0), KEEP_ALL is the "Keep all I've Downloaded" setting, and KEEP_N is the "Keep only ___ epidoses".

The default method then becomes an implicit "Delete oldest episodes when space is needed" and the decision logic is pretty straightforward. I'm now thinking that the "MaxDownloads" thing is pointless, as downloading ALL new episodes is the way to go except when the podcast is initially loaded, which then a MaxDownloads makes sense in a global fashion, but moreso a "Max to Download for New Podcasts" setting that only applies when a new podcast is loaded.

This makes the per podcast settings "Keep All Downloaded" and "Keep Only # Episodes" where number can be set to some kind of representation of "As many as possible" as well as a specific number.

The only thing left is some kind of time window where downloads of that podcast is OK.

Lion

[marwatk]

Hi Lion,

What you describe is basically how it works right now. (And as of 1.5.5, both toKeep and maxDownload are per-podcast settings). The maxDownload is still important, though, since some podcast release a lot of episodes at once (though rare). Additionally, it may be the case that a user wants to manually control a podcast, in which case a maxDownload of 0 would be appropriate (and then they can download episodes as they want to).

Hope this helps,

-Marcus

[Lion]

The new per-podcast settings are working great for me!

One holdover question: What tag does Podtrapper obey in regards to the Summary, some of my podcasts have Summary displayed, some don't.

Thanks!

[marwatk]

Hi Lion,

The summary is currently only grabbed from
http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd:summary

There are a bunch of xml processing issues left for me to work out, the largest being Atom support, but definitely let me know if there's some low hanging fruit I can fix.

If you can give me a podcast url of one that isn't showing the summary I can add support for whatever tag it's using as well...

-Marcus