App Review: Downcast

I haven’t writ­ten many iOS app reviews lately but every now and then and app comes along that I just have to tell peo­ple about. That app is called Down­cast, a pod­cast down­loader. Now I know many read­ers are prob­a­bly think­ing “Why do I need a pod­cast down­loader? I have iTunes.” I thought the same thing when I first heard of it, but I was wrong. Down­cast has many fea­tures that really sets it apart from iTunes and makes it a fan­tas­tic iOS app.

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Synch­ing

Synch­ing is where Down­cast really shines. It lever­ages Apple’s iCloud ser­vice to allow you to sync pod­casts, set­tings and most impor­tantly episode infor­ma­tion such as play posi­tion between all of your iOS devices. The play posi­tion sync­ing is huge for me. It allows me to lis­ten to a pod­cast on my iPad pause and fin­ish lis­ten­ing on my iPhone. The key is their imple­men­ta­tion is com­pletely trans­par­ent and is basi­cally just mag­i­cal. It’s much akin to Amazon’s Kindle’s whis­per sync. The best way I can describe it is it just works! You never have to think about how the sausage is get­ting made. iOS devel­oper should take note, this is how every app should han­dle syncing.

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Auto­matic Downloads

Another great fea­ture is auto­matic down­loads. Down­cast allows you to select the fre­quency of these down­loads. So whether you want to get new down­loads every day or even every hour it will auto­mat­i­cally work for you. Again all of this is done trans­par­ently in the background.It’s great for when you’re on the go and not near your com­puter because one of the promises of iOS 5 is PC free, so why should you have to plug up to iTunes to get new podcasts?

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Ges­tures

One of the much-hyped fea­tures is ges­tures which allows you to con­trol the inter­face with­out tak­ing the phone out of your pocket. This is a fea­ture that I have not used much because I use the con­trols on the head­phones remote which also works with this app.

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Every­thing Else

Other fea­tures include a sleep timer, speed con­trols and pod­cast direc­tory. It also sup­ports password-protected feeds. Down­loads can be resumed and pod­casts can be streamed while down­load­ing allow­ing you to star lis­ten­ing immediately!

The devel­op­ers have really paid atten­tion to details right down to the pleas­ant sound effects when synching

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What I’d like to see

Over­all this is a fan­tas­tic app and I think it’s only going to get bet­ter over time. In my opin­ion the iPad inter­face could still use a lit­tle more tight­en­ing and pol­ish. It needs that lit­tle inde­scrib­able some­thing to really push it over the top and make it a fan­tas­tic UI much like reader. The iPhone inter­face how­ever is about as good as you can get!

Another fea­ture I would like to see but don’t believe will be here any­time soon is sup­port for audi­ble audio­books. The audi­ble iPhone app is okay but I think that the fea­tures that down­cast is using with pod­cast could really shine with audio­books. Unfor­tu­nately the DRM and audi­ble will prob­a­bly pre­vent this for the per­ceiv­able future.

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Down­cast is a uni­ver­sal app avail­able in the App Store for $1.99. If you are at all inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to pod­casts it is a must-have app for all of your iOS devices.

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