Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way | Hacker News Reader

Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way

castro.fm

94 pointsmsmithstubbs36 comments

I’m enjoying Castro showing us they’re actively developing again vs telling us. Even the Halloween app icon serves that purpose.

When I worked at a podcast host I was tasked to implement WebPubSub support to our podcast feeds. This introduced a “push” updates rather than requiring an indexer to constantly recheck the xml file. The idea seeems to not have caught on. At the time I think Google was the only indexer supporting the feature and I’m not sure if that has continued with the switch to YouTube for podcasts

Castro recently implemented this I believe.

YouTube still supports WebSub (PubSubHubbub)[0] via their own hub[1]. There's very little documentation on how to actually use it though, and it seems like it's been on life support for quite awhile, a lot of small oddities have crept in over time and recently there was extended outages where notifications stopped being pushed. The current documentation isn't even correct, since is specifies an incorrect topic URL (should be /xml/feeds/ rather than just /feeds/, the /feeds/ link is for the base atom feed, and while it actually does "work" if you supply it to the WebSub Hub, it won't send you correct notifications).

[0] https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/push_notific...

[1] https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/

We support WebSub. It helps on the margins, but many feeds do not use it and also it isn't 100% reliable.

I’m so happy Castro has new owners. For me it has the best interaction model of all podcast apps (inbox + queue), it had a beautiful design and now it’s also getting the backend + tech debt love it requires.

I totally agree. I’ve always liked Castro’s inbox/quick action method of dealing with new episodes a lot better than other apps. I’m glad it’s back and am glad to subscribe again.

Me too. I switched to Overcast when Castro had its huge hiccups, but followed the new owners and the updates with great interest. The forward momentum seems great. I can see myself switching back home, when my new iPhone arrives.

My ideal podcast client would be something like Castro with additional playlist queues. I never could build a good triage model in Overcast. But sometimes you'll want some organization. (And a real Mac app)

I wonder if Marco Arment will ever reconsider designing the Overcast app himself. He seems to be the only who is convinced that he doesn't need one. As a fellow indie I get wanting to do everything yourself, but as a Apple fan I feel he should value design way more than he does now. The Castro app is so much better, it's like comparing iOS to Windows Mobile.

Do you mean create a team behind the app? What element of design do you mean? There are things with the Overcast design that I like and dislike, but they fall into multiple categories.

Marco seems like a very independent individual who wants to minimize dependencies on other people. He has mentioned in the past that he does get outside help on things, but this doesn't extend to other people taking ownership. At that point, he is managing people which doesn't seem something he wants to do.

> The Castro app is so much better, it's like comparing iOS to Windows Mobile.

lol respectfully, this is a wildly bad take. yes you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you aren’t entitled to your own window mobile comparisons.

Similarly, I switched away from Castro when it was melting down, and I tried out PocketCasts and Overcast.

PocketCasts is pretty great, but has one crucial flaw that makes it unbearable to me: at the time I was using it it was fairly slow to update feeds automatically, and you can't force an update of a specific feed. This got really annoying with subscriber-only feeds, because I'd know an episode had been released and had to wait a few hours for them to decide to actually let me see it.

Overcast is good at what it does (the audio boost features are the best of any client I've tried), but it's opinionated about a certain workflow in ways that don't play incredibly well with people who want to subscribe to a lot of podcasts and only listen to occasional episodes that catch their eye. Previous statements by Marco suggest that he likes Overcast's workflow and doesn't really want to adjust it to support inbox/queue users. In some ways the recent rewrite helped (the UI no longer locks up regularly when you have a lot of subscriptions), but in other ways it hurts (there's no way to give it a global episode-limit setting, and the default limit now actively wrecks playlists).

I'm inclined to say that if Overcast's workflow fits you, it's probably the best client to use. But if it doesn't, you have to make some choices...

For people with large numbers of podcasts as well as many paid subscriptions there is a lot that can be done to better manage the situation, including deduplication. This falls into the power user bucket so it's less valuable to these apps than the basic and mid-level users.

Same. It always had the nicest UI and interaction model, but the bugs ruined it for me over time.

There was a particularly annoying one where if I got to 31:20 on Show A on my phone, then play Show B on my Watch, the playback in B would jump to 31:20. This was brutal if you were somewhere around the 2-hour mark in Show B and have to find your place again.

Really hope the new owners can make everything work again.

I tried that one and it seems fixed. I know the new owner tackled longstanding, annoying little bugs right after buying it.

I almost left when the server outages happened, but the quality seems to have ticked up after hitting a low with Tiny.

Does anyone know how well it works on the Apple Watch? I have Overcast but am very frustrated with my experience on the Apple Watch because it doesn't sync properly even though the watch supports cellular connections. Nonetheless, it was the best of the podcast apps out there for that purpose. Has Castro made some progress on this front? It would be enough to convince me to switch if it works well on both the phone and the watch.

Thanks!

I think a watch app rewrite is in the cards but for now its the old one.

I used Castro for 5 years and loved it. But when it had the ownership meltdown I switched back to iCatcher. It’s quirky, but easy to set up an Inbox and Downloaded queue which is the Castro USP. I haven’t missed Castro and can’t say the news entices me back.

Haven’t tried iCatcher myself. It has that utilitarian look that usually either means it’s a power user app that can be configured to behave exactly like you want, or it is a hobby project of a single person without UI/UX talent. Going by your comment it’s the former ;-)

I’m lucky Castro fits my workflow (or rather, my podcast workflow came to be by using Castro since forever), and as it looks pretty as well I have no reason to switch apps.

Overcast lost me after months of waiting for its disastrous redesign to be fixed. Castro is, in my opinion, the best replacement for feature equivalence.

However, I actually chose standard Apple Podcasts. The transcriptions are a game changer.

I have zero issues with the design of Overcast. But rebuilding from scratch introduced so many incredibly disruptive bugs many of which are still not fixed even though the developer claims that almost all of the major issues have been addressed. Something seems fundamentally wrong with the syncing or data store. That's what sent me looking for alternatives after many years as a dedicated user.

Currently paying for Overcast, but the recent changes (2-3 months ago?) are just annoying. They removed the ability to arrange items in a playlist (it has to be by date now), OPML export is gone, can't get to a podcast from an episode in a playlist... and so on.

All of this was working fine before the update.

When something is working well, what is the point in needlessly "improving" it and making it worse? I just don't get it. Gonna switch to Castro, though it costs 2.5 times as Overcast

All of these are fixed in the latest version (possibly just the beta that is about to be released to the store).

That includes OPML export (which remained available online but has returned to the app), arranging items (always possible throughout, but there were some new sync bugs that had to be worked out, IIRC), Go To Podcast (click the three buttons, last option in menu) from an episode, etc.

> They removed the ability to arrange items in a playlist (it has to be by date now)

You can drag and drop to change the order. Or are you talking about something else?

> OPML export is gone

Back as of literally ~30 mins ago

If I drag/drop and change the order, it gets reset if I add another item to the playlist (this was as of yesterday, don't know if they fixed it in today's release)

Haven't checked today. Glad they put OPML back

Edit: Just checked the ordering, it seems worse now. About 2-3 months ago (forgot when these features were broken), if I added an episode to a playlist, it will add it at the end of the playlist, the episode date didn't matter. Which I what I liked, as I can reorder the playlist however I want. Now I don't even know what order it is adding - it is no longer by date, neither is it at the end of the playlist.

It’ll depend per person, but I subscribe to around 30 podcasts. For some podcasts (like The NY Times Daily) I’ll skip 29 out of 30 episodes. For a select few I’ll listen to 9 out of 10. For the others, something in between.

Apple Podcasts is the absolute worst for this use case. Even if I listen to all released episodes, I’m still lost to where my unplayed episodes are and what my listening queue looks like. Let alone if I want to exclude episodes from said queue.

Does it transcribe private feeds? I pay for the ad free streams for some of the podcasts I listen to the most, so if those aren’t transcribed then the usefulness diminishes

Just checked… looks like it doesn’t.

Thanks for checking

We are going to add transcriptions soon for podcasts that include it in their feeds. No plans to add autog-enerated transcripts anytime soon, I'd rather show the feed that creators intend listeners to see.

Thanks, hopefully that gets more common as apps add support.

Is there any sort of dynamic range compression available with Apple Podcasts? I've looked around, but can't seem to find anything. I find it especially necessary when listening in the car, so I've been using Overcast...

Do you have Castro set to stream or download? Can't figure out which is most efficient for storage purposes (I've only ever done streaming, but the cache files always become super large)

It sort of does both. The idea behind the app was you should just play it and not worry about the implementation detail. We need to get better at managing the storage space and showing the user what is in the cache.

Is there some naming of Castro that I'm unaware of or is this application named after a murderous dictator just for fun? Might as well name it Stalin.

Castro is a word that means "castle", there have been several famous Castros (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_(surname)), and there a famous district in San Francisco named "Castro".

Don't let dictators capture _words themselves_, you only add to their power.

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