Andreas Schaefer's Blog

June 2005 Archives

Cool: Even Duke is Podcasting

The jPodder team is proud to be the current Duke's pick hoping that Duke is using it, too. Podcasting is like the Internet 15 years ago where the users and providers made things happening rather than waiting for something to presented to them. Now anyone how has something or nothing to say can create an radio-like show and publish it immediately with the entire planet as potential audience.

But this revolution does not have to stop with audio or video files. I can imagine that for example JavaOne is published as RSS feed with the various media files attached to them. So with one-click subscription you could go to the Sun's website, click on the RSS link or button and voila jPodder is coming up, subscribing to that feed and letting you know what is available right now and you can schedule the downloads whenever you like. Right now I am working on "playing" a presentation through jPodder so that I can publish my various presentations as podcasts rather than publishing them on my website and then sending an email out to all subscribed user that there is a new presentation.

Still all of that are still simple files but imagine that a Java project maintains a RSS feed containing blog entries, articles, documentation in various formats but in addition they could also make their latest release available as podcasts. This way the application can be automatically downloaded, for example over night, and installed right afterwards. Or the project could release the application as Java Web Start which is fired up after the download so that the user can play with it right away. Finally the project could release incremental patches as podcasts making it very easy for the user to follow them without limiting the users ability to control it.

Enjoy the brave new World – Andy

Off-Topic: Excitement without JavaOne

Missing another JavaOne I sitting in my cubicle and reading my emails like every mooning when it hits me. Sun announced that they are going to acquire SeeBeyond, my employer, which was not really a surprise but the timing is. So I am going to see Scott McNealy tomorrow where he may (or may not) shed some more light into the acquisition. Nevertheless I am looking forward to be a part of the Sun family even thought there are changes coming but we, the software engineers, are used to deal with that on a daily basis, aren't we. If you like to follow the story please feel free to read my personal blog.

Enjoy JavaOne – Andy

Podcasting: The Hottest Thing on the Planet?

In case you listened to Steve Job's Keynote presentation at the WWDC you probably noticed that he spoke about potcasting and that it is a hot thing. Now when Apple is jumping on the podcast bandwagon and probably Microsoft is doing it quite soon then it must be a cool thing, don't you think.

Apple's plans are to include a podcasting aggregator into iTunes that is linked with their music store so that one can access the podcasts quite easily. Nevertheless if you need some extended features or having more control over what you get you may want to use a different aggregator to access and download podcasts. Most of them provide a way to put the podcasts into iTunes or other players anyhow. In happened that I am one of the developers on a Java based podcast aggregator called jPodder (please do not confuse it with iPodder which is Python based). We just recently released version 0.9 having very advanced features like ID3 tag rewriting on MP3 files which you may see as columns in iTunes or plugins to support many players instead of one like iTunes. I am considering writing a plugin that stores podcasts directly in an iPod rather than going through iTunes.

Now why would someone use a podcast aggregator if the stuff is already put into iTunes. A reason maybe the same as why someone is going through the hassle to use Firefox rather then Internet Explorer (on Windows). But there are others more subtle reasons to do so. iTunes is tightly integrated with their music store and therefore the features provided are there to either lure you into Apple's business model or facilitate that business. That said everything that is threatening their business is not going in there. In addition features that have nothing to do with their business are only being added to iTunes if they help them to increase their market share.

Imagine that you have a video player (or any type of portable mini computer) and you not only want to listen to podcasts but also see videocasts. These videos are going to be large and you are probably not going to wait for them to download until you can watch them. Nevertheless you could download them over night and watch them afterwards whenever you like. In addition a video player can play podcasts, blogs and maybe other stuff that comes along. This means a good news aggregator (one that can handle RSS feeds) would be able to deal with all sorts of content and you can configure that aggregator to download all the stuff you are interested into and the very next day you head out into the world with all the stuff on your player ready to enjoy.

Still in the near future Apple or Microsoft is providing features in their players to deal with additional content but Apple will keep iTunes simple meaning that you are limited in how to manage the media files and the download process. In jPodder we want to give the user the ability to configure it to their needs so that one can manage a big number of files with various sizes and content.

Have fun – Andy Schaefer

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