Instacast – Another iOS Podcasting App Posted on: March 1st, 2011 by Daniel 1 Comment Welcome! If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The newest con­tes­tant in the iOS pod­cast player scene launched today – Veme­dio has released Insta­cast for the iPhone. Being the pod­cast addict that I am, I’m always on the look­out for a solu­tion that gets me away from having to sync to iTunes every day to get the latest pod­casts on my phone. I tend to listen on the way to and from work and during the day as well, so any­thing that can make that process easier is huge.

When I heard Insta­cast was released, I quickly made the pur­chase and started adding my feeds to it’s list in an effort to put it through it’s paces. You quickly notice the fit and finish that went into the UI – it’s a very attrac­tive pro­gram that doesn’t hit you over the head with chrome. It’s a very min­i­mal­is­tic approach, but in a good way.

Every­thing is right where you’d expect it to be from the pull-to-refresh, the add new feed button, and the UI for the actual play­ing pod­cast. Simple but beautiful. The first thing I found was that there is no way to add a feed URL, only the abil­ity to browse an exten­sive cat­a­log.

I found all but two feeds I sub­scribe to, so this wasn’t a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have the abil­ity to either a) enter in your own URLs for pod­casts or b) some sort of OPML import feature. Note: one trick to solv­ing the inabil­ity to sub­scribe to URLs is to send your­self the pod­cast with the fol­low­ing url format: pcast://feeds. feedburner.com/yourfeed.

Click that and it’ll open Insta­cast and you’ll be set. Next, I had the list of all of the feeds in front of me. The way that Insta­cast works is that it goes through all of your feeds and finds the new ones, show­ing a number of unplayed next to each feed title, just like you’d see in iTunes or another pod­cast tool. Once you drill down into the indi­vid­ual list­ing, you see the list of played and unplayed pod­casts avail­able to you.

By default, you are only able to stream the media through the app, but you can click on a button and cache the pod­cast to your iPhone. This way, you can listen on the road with­out wor­ry­ing about band­width and such. This is great, but I’d prefer a set­ting to auto­mat­i­cally down­load the most x recent pod­casts in pod­cast y. This way, I’d always have stuff avail­able when com­mut­ing with­out wor­ry­ing about the micro­manag­ing that goes into keep­ing fresh con­tent actu­ally down­loaded to my device.

Hope­fully a future update addresses this, as it will make the appli­ca­tion much more useful to folks who aren’t around WiFi a ton and would like to make sure they have a lot of con­tent ready to go at any time on their phone. The screen that actu­ally shows the pod­cast play­ing is very attrac­tive and simple – you see the pod­cast art, play/pause but­tons, a scub­ber, and a close button that takes you to the show notes or lets you browse to another pod­cast. The show notes are made to be a focal point of this app, which I feel is a really nice move given a lot of the shows I listen to link to a ton of con­tent in their notes.

The two things I did notice that were odd, how­ever, was the lack of a volume bar and the lack of a con­tin­uos play­back option. Obvi­ously, mod­i­fy­ing the volume via the phys­i­cal but­tons isn’t a big deal, just kind of off not to see some sort of volume con­trols. Addi­tion­ally, not being able to just press play and let Insta­cast play through my entire queue is kind of a pain for folks who are com­mut­ing and aren’t able to look down and fiddle with pick­ing the next show to play.

Maybe I’m miss­ing some­thing, but a few min­utes of look­ing didn’t turn any­thing up in the way of pref­er­ences for this. Another nit-​picky thing about the list – I’d love to see options for sort­ing of all pod­casts by name, date released, feed parent. Also, 2x/4x play­back to skip thru boring parts/commercials would be handy.

I’ve tried Pod­caster, which is actu­ally a really fan­tas­tic pro­gram, but it’s a bit crashy and not all that attrac­tive. How­ever, it does almost all of the things I listed above. For now, I’m going to stick with Pod­caster but I can def­i­nitely see myself switch­ing soon, as Insta­cast is really an attrac­tive, well thought out appli­ca­tion that is miss­ing a few things but over­all seems to be poised to be the king of iPod pod­caster apps very soon.

I think it’s def­i­nitely worth the $1.99, and will only get better with time. Pros: Beau­ti­ful inter­face, very minimalist Optional ‘unplayed’ count for icon Great dis­play of show notes Abil­ity to ‘star’ good pod­casts for future lookup Easy to down­load pod­casts to device for lis­ten­ing when offline/out and about Abil­ity to pull in pod­casts from iTunes At $1.99, very cheap A non-​blue icon! Cons: No abil­ity to auto-​download new pod­casts to device and delete old ones from iP