Ray Slakinski

It looks like we are all going to get Podcasts over the air via the iPhone/iPod Touch in the very near future and thats both good news and bad news. A while ago a 3rd party developer released an app to the app store that was denied that did a very similar thing.

The device is a platform much like Windows, OS X, XBox, PS3, Wii, Andriod. When you write applications for the platform you should not be restricted from adding your app to the device because it conflicts with applications the platform supplier also makes.

Lets say I’m a game developer, and I develop a game that is the next Halo killer and want to publish it on the XBox 360, MS says go ahead, we welcome your game with open arms. Same thing with all the other platforms, so why is the iPhone/Touch different? Why can’t I try to compete with Apple in software if its a decently written app that does nothing illegal?

Since I cant even be allowed to compete with Apple, or even be seen as something that is competitive or will be competitive to one of Apple’s offerings then why would I even bother when I can probably do just as well on Android or some other mobile platform?

I’m releasing the iPodderX Python codebase As-Is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

This is the codebase that was to go into Transistr, it has never seen the light of day before now and has not seen much testing.  I have made changes to the stock Bittorrent codebase and Feedparser, so you might want to look those over before updating them to newer versions.

I’m releasing this with zero support. If you’d like to use this code in a commercial application in part or in full please contact me at ray dot slakinski at gmail dot com

Update: I chose a CC license for the iPX Python code instead of a standard GPL, LGPL, MIT, Python or even a BSD license because right now I just want the code to be out there as a reference. If you want to use the code in a project feel free to email me and I’m sure we can work something out. As the license states, you can read and distribute the code free of charge, but I still maintain ownership of the code so please do not use it in full or in part without my written permission. Thanks

Update 2: Feel free to use the code locally and change it if you want to get it to work for you, I didn’t mean to say in my first update that you couldn’t at all play with it or upgrade your existing copy of iPodderX engine.

Before we start, lets first start with a picture:

This shows sales over a 4 year period. The 3rd blip right at the end was iPodderX going away and was suppose to turn into Transistr.

When iTunes 4.9 was announced, August and I were right there for the announcement. Later we went on TWiT to talk about it, we did our best to stay positive, hiding our fear in talk about fish cheeks

We already moved iPodderX from Podcatching client to into a standard RSS reader for feed reading and podcasting. But when we decided that, we put ourselves right into the mix with NetNewsWire and NewsFire which where very popular applications that did podcasting and RSS reading very well as well. It was easy for those applications to add good enough Podcasting support. From what I know, no one ended up using iPodderX to read news feeds.

As sales were dropping like a rock, day jobs were becoming demanding, and stress on august and I’s friendship also became very strained. We decided to stop working on it and move on to other things for a bit. August has been doing great work with his FoggyNoggin software creating very useful mac utilities, and I moved over to the web,  now working full time with Mahalo.com!

I’d like to also note now the RSS application space on the desktop has changed drastically. NewsFire and NetNewsWire are now free, RSS is now in the browser (the browser itself and web apps like google reader and bloglines) and all handle RSS enclosures (what makes podcasting possible)

One last thing to leave on, iPodder (not releated to iPodderX) who is now known as Juice hasn’t been updated in eons and no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers. We were not the only casuality.

If you have questions feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer them.

 Check out what August has to say regarding all of this.

Update: Talked with Andrew Grumet who now works for PodShow and this downloads chart looks very similar to ours.