Instacast 1.4.4 Available

While the minor version number change might not look significant, Version 1.4.4 is a bigger update, that moves some advances from the HD version over to the iPhone app and fixes some major issues.

First, let me tell you about the feature changes. I removed the annoying welcome alert view and replaced it with a much more friendly welcome screen like the one on the iPad. This way a new user is not confronted with an empty user interface and a lot of disabled buttons.
I also changed the sharing services implementation and added 'Read later' support for Readability. While the settings for services look a bit empty now, that will change in the future when there are much more sharing options shipping with Instacast.
Then I added a bunch of optimizations, like a preview page before subscribing when importing from a URL. This makes it much more consistent with the other import methods of the directory and gives you the convinience of making sure you subscribe to the right feed.
There are a couple of edge case podcast feeds which add podcast items that do not have any playable media attached to it, e.g. for announcing stuff, etc. Instacast won't import these episodes anymore, because it is a podcast client and not a news reader. If you want a news reader, I recomment Reeder.
I also added support for podcast artwork specific to an episode and also display it now on the lock screen, along with chapter specific images as well.
Plus Instacast is now allowing 2 downloads at the same time, like the iPad version.

Another big issue that should be solved is 'Continous Playback'. It didn't really work before and I couldn't find out why. Thanks to @mattfarrugia who found an article over on Stackoverflow.com, I found the solution. I even got rid of the local notification at the end of the show. I am really glad about that. If you're still having issues in some edge cases, please contact me.

Also fixed some crashes, some of which users reported and a lot that have not been reported. I found them through the new 'Crash & Diagnostics' function, I added. Basically everytime the app crashes, it sends a crash report to Hockeyapp which aggregate and analyze them for me. If you don't want me to have a look at your problems, you can disable this in the settings.

I think that's it basically. Let me know what you think and message me on Twitter.

December 14th, 2011 • Permalink

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