Mocast 1.0

New $2.99 iPhone podcast player by Frank Krueger. By bizarre coincidence, it launched the same day as Overcast, so it might have gotten lost in the Overcast shuffle. It’s a different take. Krueger writes:

I wrote Mocast because I was unhappy with the iOS podcast app selection. While there are almost as many iPhone podcast players as there are weather apps, I find that they all have two fatal flaws.

First, they take downloads way too seriously. Most UIs differentiate downloaded vs. not downloaded episodes and bifurcate their interface along those lines. This is silly to us podcastistas who aren’t the greatest at planning ahead.

Second, they take new episodes too seriously. Whole apps seem built with only new episodes in mind as they hide away the back catalog. I don’t know why this is. My favorite podcast, The Incomparable has an amazingly rich back catalog of episodes that I love to listen to. It’s nice when a new episode arrives but there’s no need over-emphasize them at the cost of the full catalog.

Interesting technical note, too:

As with all my apps, I wrote Mocast in C# using Xamarin.iOS. She came out to be about 8,000 LOC with about 60% of that code lying in the UI layer.

★ Monday, 21 July 2014