[HN Gopher] Making Castro's Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way
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Making Castro's Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way
Author : msmithstubbs
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-10-21 04:16 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (castro.fm)
(TXT) w3m dump (castro.fm)
| leokennis wrote:
| I'm so happy Castro has new owners. For me it has the best
| interaction model of all podcast apps (inbox + queue), it had a
| beautiful design and now it's also getting the backend + tech
| debt love it requires.
| mattweinberg wrote:
| I totally agree. I've always liked Castro's inbox/quick action
| method of dealing with new episodes a lot better than other
| apps. I'm glad it's back and am glad to subscribe again.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Me too. I switched to Overcast when Castro had its huge
| hiccups, but followed the new owners and the updates with great
| interest. The forward momentum seems great. I can see myself
| switching back home, when my new iPhone arrives.
|
| My ideal podcast client would be something like Castro with
| additional playlist queues. I never could build a good triage
| model in Overcast. But sometimes you'll want some organization.
| (And a real Mac app)
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I wonder if Marco Arment will ever reconsider designing the
| Overcast app himself. He seems to be the only who is
| convinced that he doesn't need one. As a fellow indie I get
| wanting to do everything yourself, but as a Apple fan I feel
| he should value design way more than he does now. The Castro
| app is so much better, it's like comparing iOS to Windows
| Mobile.
| zerkten wrote:
| Do you mean create a team behind the app? What element of
| design do you mean? There are things with the Overcast
| design that I like and dislike, but they fall into multiple
| categories.
|
| Marco seems like a very independent individual who wants to
| minimize dependencies on other people. He has mentioned in
| the past that he does get outside help on things, but this
| doesn't extend to other people taking ownership. At that
| point, he is managing people which doesn't seem something
| he wants to do.
| kemayo wrote:
| Similarly, I switched away from Castro when it was melting
| down, and I tried out PocketCasts and Overcast.
|
| PocketCasts is pretty great, but has one crucial flaw that
| makes it unbearable to me: at the time I was using it it was
| fairly slow to update feeds automatically, and you can't
| _force_ an update of a specific feed. This got really
| annoying with subscriber-only feeds, because I 'd know an
| episode had been released and had to wait a few hours for
| them to decide to actually let me see it.
|
| Overcast is good at what it does (the audio boost features
| are the best of any client I've tried), but it's opinionated
| about a certain workflow in ways that don't play incredibly
| well with people who want to subscribe to a lot of podcasts
| and only listen to occasional episodes that catch their eye.
| Previous statements by Marco suggest that he likes Overcast's
| workflow and doesn't really want to adjust it to support
| inbox/queue users. In some ways the recent rewrite helped
| (the UI no longer locks up regularly when you have a lot of
| subscriptions), but in other ways it hurts (there's no way to
| give it a global episode-limit setting, and the default limit
| now actively wrecks playlists).
|
| I'm inclined to say that if Overcast's workflow fits you,
| it's probably the best client to use. But if it doesn't, you
| have to make some choices...
| zerkten wrote:
| For people with large numbers of podcasts as well as many
| paid subscriptions there is a lot that can be done to
| better manage the situation, including deduplication. This
| falls into the power user bucket so it's less valuable to
| these apps than the basic and mid-level users.
| apozem wrote:
| Same. It always had the nicest UI and interaction model, but
| the bugs ruined it for me over time.
|
| There was a particularly annoying one where if I got to 31:20
| on Show A on my phone, then play Show B on my Watch, the
| playback in B would jump to 31:20. This was _brutal_ if you
| were somewhere around the 2-hour mark in Show B and have to
| find your place again.
|
| Really hope the new owners can make everything work again.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I tried that one and it seems fixed. I know the new owner
| tackled longstanding, annoying little bugs right after buying
| it.
|
| I almost left when the server outages happened, but the
| quality seems to have ticked up after hitting a low with
| Tiny.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Does anyone know how well it works on the Apple Watch? I have
| Overcast but am very frustrated with my experience on the Apple
| Watch because it doesn't sync properly even though the watch
| supports cellular connections. Nonetheless, it was the best of
| the podcast apps out there for that purpose. Has Castro made
| some progress on this front? It would be enough to convince me
| to switch if it works well on both the phone and the watch.
|
| Thanks!
| samcat116 wrote:
| I think a watch app rewrite is in the cards but for now its
| the old one.
| yzydserd wrote:
| I used Castro for 5 years and loved it. But when it had the
| ownership meltdown I switched back to iCatcher. It's quirky,
| but easy to set up an Inbox and Downloaded queue which is the
| Castro USP. I haven't missed Castro and can't say the news
| entices me back.
| admn2 wrote:
| Do you have Castro set to stream or download? Can't figure out
| which is most efficient for storage purposes (I've only ever done
| streaming, but the cache files always become super large)
| dabluck wrote:
| It sort of does both. The idea behind the app was you should
| just play it and not worry about the implementation detail. We
| need to get better at managing the storage space and showing
| the user what is in the cache.
| isiahl wrote:
| When I worked at a podcast host I was tasked to implement
| WebPubSub support to our podcast feeds. This introduced a "push"
| updates rather than requiring an indexer to constantly recheck
| the xml file. The idea seeems to not have caught on. At the time
| I think Google was the only indexer supporting the feature and
| I'm not sure if that has continued with the switch to YouTube for
| podcasts
| samcat116 wrote:
| Castro recently implemented this I believe.
| Hakkin wrote:
| YouTube still supports WebSub (PubSubHubbub)[0] via their own
| hub[1]. There's very little documentation on how to actually
| use it though, and it seems like it's been on life support for
| quite awhile, a lot of small oddities have crept in over time
| and recently there was extended outages where notifications
| stopped being pushed. The current documentation isn't even
| correct, since is specifies an incorrect topic URL (should be
| /xml/feeds/ rather than just /feeds/, the /feeds/ link is for
| the base atom feed, and while it actually does "work" if you
| supply it to the WebSub Hub, it won't send you correct
| notifications).
|
| [0]
| https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/push_notific...
|
| [1] https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/
| dabluck wrote:
| We support WebSub. It helps on the margins, but many feeds do
| not use it and also it isn't 100% reliable.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Overcast lost me after months of waiting for its disastrous
| redesign to be fixed. Castro is, in my opinion, the best
| replacement for feature equivalence.
|
| However, I actually chose standard Apple Podcasts. The
| transcriptions are a game changer.
| zippergz wrote:
| I have zero issues with the design of Overcast. But rebuilding
| from scratch introduced so many incredibly disruptive bugs many
| of which are still not fixed even though the developer claims
| that almost all of the major issues have been addressed.
| Something seems fundamentally wrong with the syncing or data
| store. That's what sent me looking for alternatives after many
| years as a dedicated user.
| akudha wrote:
| Currently paying for Overcast, but the recent changes (2-3
| months ago?) are just annoying. They removed the ability to
| arrange items in a playlist (it has to be by date now), OPML
| export is gone, can't get to a podcast from an episode in a
| playlist... and so on.
|
| All of this was working fine before the update.
|
| When something is working well, what is the point in needlessly
| "improving" it and making it worse? I just don't get it. Gonna
| switch to Castro, though it costs 2.5 times as Overcast
| jasonpbecker wrote:
| All of these are fixed in the latest version (possibly just
| the beta that is about to be released to the store).
|
| That includes OPML export (which remained available online
| but has returned to the app), arranging items (always
| possible throughout, but there were some new sync bugs that
| had to be worked out, IIRC), Go To Podcast (click the three
| buttons, last option in menu) from an episode, etc.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > They removed the ability to arrange items in a playlist (it
| has to be by date now)
|
| You can drag and drop to change the order. Or are you talking
| about something else?
|
| > OPML export is gone
|
| Back as of literally ~30 mins ago
| akudha wrote:
| If I drag/drop and change the order, it gets reset if I add
| another item to the playlist (this was as of yesterday,
| don't know if they fixed it in today's release)
|
| Haven't checked today. Glad they put OPML back
|
| Edit: Just checked the ordering, it seems worse now. About
| 2-3 months ago (forgot when these features were broken), if
| I added an episode to a playlist, it will add it at the end
| of the playlist, the episode date didn't matter. Which I
| what I liked, as I can reorder the playlist however I want.
| Now I don't even know what order it is adding - it is no
| longer by date, neither is it at the end of the playlist.
| leokennis wrote:
| It'll depend per person, but I subscribe to around 30 podcasts.
| For some podcasts (like The NY Times Daily) I'll skip 29 out of
| 30 episodes. For a select few I'll listen to 9 out of 10. For
| the others, something in between.
|
| Apple Podcasts is the absolute worst for this use case. Even if
| I listen to all released episodes, I'm still lost to where my
| unplayed episodes are and what my listening queue looks like.
| Let alone if I want to exclude episodes from said queue.
| lucasban wrote:
| Does it transcribe private feeds? I pay for the ad free streams
| for some of the podcasts I listen to the most, so if those
| aren't transcribed then the usefulness diminishes
| thoroughburro wrote:
| Just checked... looks like it doesn't.
| gr2020 wrote:
| Is there any sort of dynamic range compression available with
| Apple Podcasts? I've looked around, but can't seem to find
| anything. I find it especially necessary when listening in the
| car, so I've been using Overcast...
| dingnuts wrote:
| Is there some naming of Castro that I'm unaware of or is this
| application named after a murderous dictator just for fun? Might
| as well name it Stalin.
| erulabs wrote:
| Castro is a word that means "castle", there have been several
| famous Castros
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_(surname)), and there a
| famous district in San Francisco named "Castro".
|
| Don't let dictators capture _words themselves_, you only add to
| their power.
| re5i5tor wrote:
| I'm enjoying Castro _showing us_ they're actively developing
| again vs telling us. Even the Halloween app icon serves that
| purpose.
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(page generated 2024-10-21 23:01 UTC)