Peter's Blog

ipodder is a program for downloading podcasts at times when your computer is otherwise idle. I tried it for a while but was not impressed with it: it had a simplistic user interface and burned 20M of ram all the time. There is a new version out but I haven't tried it. I listen to podcasts on a pc using Quicktime, I don't copy them to a portable player, ipod or whatever.

I've been giving iPodder a try. It's an application for automatically downloading podcasts for later listening with iTunes: the podcasts appear in iTunes playlists.

I've been considering using my laptop for dowdloading podcasts instead of having a server running 24/7 and launching my downloading script once a day. The dell Inspiron 500m laptop can be turned on at certain times through it's Bios and after that it can sit in standby mode until the windows scheduler tells it to download podcasts. The laptop is effectively silent so it's not a pain like the server. I don't even know if it has a fan in it.

I gave iPodder a try as a more refined way of podcasting than the script. A potted review:

• it installs as a taskbar app
• it's user interface is little more than a set of property pages
• when it is idle, waiting to download podcasts once a day, it has about 20M of memory allocated to it. Ok, so most of this is probably swapped to disk all the time but even so, HOW MUCH?

• as it is a taskbar app, someone has to be logged into windows to run it. It is not a service and the windows scheduler can log in automatically to launch a task.
• it works but it is unremarkable.

I'll probably stick with my script if I can get it to run on windows, which should not be a problem. During the 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day it is doing nothing it will consume negligible resources. Downsides are that I do have to edit the script to add new feeds and it won't integrate with iTunes.

In England at least a lemon is something that is something of a liability. It is also iPodder's icon.