PodSafe is an application that I have developed to be YAPA (Yet Another Podcast Aggregator^TM). I've tried four different podcast clients for Mac OS X, and haven't found the *one* that does everything I want. Some have some cool features, others sport additional neat tricks but leave out some key requirements. So, given that I'm a programmer, I figured the best thing to do was just to write my own. It's a great chance to learn Cocoa and Objective-C, anyways. Objective-C is a set of libraries and a pre-processor used on top of C. It provides object-oriented constructs and does the object-oriented thing better than C++ itself (IMHO). And it has both dynamic typing and dynamic binding! W00t! If you're not a coder, you probably have no idea nor do you care what that means. But please, read on.

So what is podcasting? It's a way of distributing media files (MP3 audio) using an XML file to describe a feed. The XML file stores information about the podcast and a list of all the available shows. When new shows are added to the XML file, you can use a podcast aggregator client to check the info and download the new files and put them right on your iPod. It's kind of like a TiVo for web radio shows. There are podcasts for independent music, talk shows, news, and a variety of other subjects. PodSafe is the client that manages your podcast subscriptions and checks them for new shows. It then downloads the files and puts them into iTunes.

Features

• Native Cocoa application built from scratch for Mac OS X.
• Simple, clean interface. No clutter! I think most other podcast clients fail miserably with japed up interfaces.
• Unlike a lot of other podcast aggregators, it's completely free. It's released under the GPL.
• Fully integrated with iTunes. It puts all podcasts in one playlist (called PodSafe), and deletes tracks that have already been played completely through. This makes podcast management transparent.
• Lets you update feeds automatically or choose to manually download individual shows.

Screenshots

main screen

about box

feed info panel

News

2005.06.30 - Now that iTunes 4.9 has podcasting support, I really do not see a need to continue development on this. So, version 0.4 is the final one. It was a fun little project. Enjoy it!

Download

2005.04.07 - Version 0.4 (stable) has been released. The .dmg and source .zip files are available at the SourceForge.net project - file release page. To install, download and open the .dmg disk image and drag the PodSafe application to your Applications/ folder.

Links

• Project page at SourceForge.net
• Cocoa Dev Central
• Apple Cocoa Reference
• Podcast Alley
• ipodder.org

Contact / Info

You may email me at stealthboy at mac.com. If you would like to report bugs, please use the SourceForge bug tracker for this project. If you would like to support this project by linking to it from your website, please, by all means, steal that little get podsafe image and link to this page.