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Comment by skinnymuch | Hacker News Reader

That's cool that he was able to get a whole Mac app finished. Unfortunate that none of it seems to be open sourced, at least the non-private API parts. But maybe he plans to use the code to monetize something different in the future.

On the other hand, for best iOS/Mac podcast app, I haven't been completely happy with any for years. New ones with smart speed - great feature, but I like one feature above all else.

My favorite app was Instacast for iOS because it let me add time stamped bookmarks/notes. Audible has something similar. None of the apps mentioned in Product Hunt or his blog post seem to support this. Such a bummer. I paid for Instacast 5 before it was removed. It started crashing at launch on iOS 10 however.

Edit: I recognize not many people, likely a single digit percentage of podcast app users would care for bookmarking/notes (thanks Void_)

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Do a lot of people share this pain? It sounds like a very niche problem to me (as a macOS dev).

But if those bookmarks/notes is a problem to a lot of people, then it might just be worth looking into.

Nope, doubt it's a feature many people care about. I should specify that in my comment now actually. Thanks.

Imagine if you could share the notes. And the notes could be structured. And you could tweak your player to react to notes in various ways. We could have crowd-sourced ad-'blocking' on podcasts!

Hah. That is true.

Actually I have extensive time stamped notes for hundreds of podcast episodes including their ads starting and ending, but personally I'm against ad blocking. I've been in the process of removing those parts before publishing my bookmarks/notes.

I think I agree, much as I hate ads! There is something about podcast ads that I find much more acceptable than most other forms; the only slight downside is they tend to be quite repetitive, both within shows, and across them.

It would certainly be useful to have notes for a whole range of other benefits e.g. making it much easier to search an old episode for a specific topic.

That's actually why I started tracking the ad times. The same podcasts I listen to usually rotate through the same ads. So I would end up skipping them and noting it for fav episodes that I might come back to. Same issue ads on YouTube or Hulu when they become repetitive. I'm trying to not be against ad blocking, but when that happens, it's almost impossible to not be annoyed.

And yeah the other use cases help for sure!

If you think about it as "bookmarking" - no, don't care. Bookmarking usually implies a manual, fragile process.

Being half way through on iOS, then being able to continue listening exactly at the same point on MacOS - yes. That's something iTunes and the iPod supported since day zero, and nobody else has yet properly replicated. And it's really useful if you listen to podcasts longer than about five minutes long.

Use Android :) MortPlayer has that feature.

I admit I always prefer iOS over Android, but I already use a 2nd device as a music player. I can use another spare Galaxy now as my music player and as my podcast player with MortPlayer. Thanks!

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