October 24th, 2005
Podcasting will change the world. How do I know? Hordes of bored iPod users are waiting for your content. 6.5 million iPods were sold in the last quarter. Let me put that number into perspective:
6.5 million iPods / 90 days / 24 hours / 60 minutes / 60 seconds = 0.84 iPods sold per second!
In the same amount of time, 4.4 babies are born in the world. Considering that a large portion of the world population is not wealthy enough to afford iPods, it’s no stretch to say that there is an iPod sold for every baby born in the developed nations.
Yet, a lot of people don’t even know what podcasting is. Spread the word about podcasting. Spread the word about Podcast Maker too. We live and die by word of mouth.
October 20th, 2005
Macsimum News has posted a review of Podcast Maker.
Podcast Maker does everything it promises and with true Mac simplicity. If you’re headed into the future of media distribution, this is a must have tool.
10 out of 10, Woo hoo!
Read the review at Macsimum News 
October 13th, 2005
Lots of announcements today from Apple. New iMacs, Video iPods, blah blah blah. It’s the only thing that anybody is talking about. I’m going to tell you about something else that is cool today.
We were brainstorming sometime before the release of iTunes 5, and I came to think about sliders. They are useful but pretty hard to use. If you want to change the value of the slider continuously, you have to grab the tiny knob and drag it around. For something like a volume slider, a real world knob is much easier to operate and more precise than anything in a computer. Well, a lot of people have mice with scroll-wheels nowadays so why not use it with the slider! Just move the mouse over a slider and scroll to adjust the value. Pretty nice idea I thought and proceeded to check a few apps to see if it was already done that way by default in OS X. Nope.
When iTunes 5 came out, I unconsciously flicked my scroll-wheel over its volume slider. It moved! I felt like a young padawan using the force for the first time. It was very strange, but in a good way. I didn’t think that anybody would be that detail oriented, or put another way: anal. Some programmer at Apple must have been thinking the same thing as me about around the same time because that feature sure wasn’t there in iTunes 4. Creepy. I might have a twin separated at birth working at Apple…
So yeah, you can use your mouse wheel to adjust volume in iTunes 5… uhm… 6. I think it’s a nice touch.
I haven’t put that in into Podcast Maker yet, but I will eventually.
October 10th, 2005
I want to point out an exceptionally well done podcast to beginning podcasters. It’s called Fly With Me by Joe D’Eon. It is about the ins and outs of the airline industry from the point of view of a pilot. It isn’t at all just about the technicalities and information about working in the airline industry. He manages to bring out the earthy qualitites of the people working the skies. The most recent episode is about recognition. It is an entire episode about how getting a pat in the back can mean so much. Joe’s podcast is refreshing to listen to since so many podcasts these days are in a talkshow format. It’s a wonderful showcase of what a podcast can be with a bit of creativity and hard work.
In addition to having interesting content, Fly With Me is also very well produced. The audio quality is superb, and the selection of music is wonderful. It’s just great all around.
Give it a listen
October 8th, 2005
After many nights of madness we have finally gotten 1.1 out the door. The main new feature of 1.1 is .Mac publishing. It is simply wonderful. You can actually publish a podcast with literally two clicks of the mouse. You don’t have to type in any settings at all. It just works. It also features publishing to SFTP servers. I know that I’m in the minority, but I actually care about how my password is transmitted across the Internet and using SFTP makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Lots of educational institutions also by policy do not allow FTP because they have been burned over and over by hackers sniffing packets for passwords; if you’re in that environment, life should be good for you with the new SFTP support.
A minor newly revamped feature is conversion from mp3 to m4a for enhanced podcasts. Instead of bothering the user with all kinds of conversion settings like bit rate, sample rate, and audio channel layout, Podcast Maker just does the right thing by itself: it looks at the mp3 file for these settings and uses them to make the m4a file. Obvious isn’t it? All software should do that automatically, you’re probably thinking. Ho ho ho, no…
We have also put in some eye candy disguised as new features. Podcast Maker now has a progress slider that you can use to skip around an episode. It should be a big help during chaptering too. To keep our goal of absolute minimalism and simplicity, it animates in and out depending on whether the episode is playing or not. You might not even notice the difference at first. To accompany the slider, we put in a spectrum analyzer that I think looks pretty sweet. Good looking software makes me feel good. So we want to make you feel good too by making good looking software.
Enjoy!
September 28th, 2005
Google completely destroys creativity. At least that is the effect it had on our product name. Unless you are a company with marketing dollars to reprogram people with, you want to be found via Google. How did we choose our product name? Simple, really. We just googled the phrase that might return potential competitors. The first one we tried wasn’t taken, so that was it. This scheme worked out so well, that now we’re getting requests to do a version of Podcast Maker for windows. I tell them to get a Mac. Can you believe that I switched to the Mac less than a year ago?
We have been working hard to bring the next version of Podcast Maker. .Mac support will make it really easy to podcast.
September 21st, 2005
We are taking a bit of a breather after releasing Podcast Maker 1.0.4.
I hope that this was the last of the bug fix releases that we have been putting out since 1.0.
We want to get back to implementing new features such as .Mac and SFTP.
What’s interesting here is that Apple just upgraded their .Mac service to hold 1 GB of files and they now give you 10 GB of transfer per month. This is plenty for people to get their feet wet with podcasting and it will make publishing podcasts even easier when Podcast Maker is combined with .Mac.
The revolution will not be televised! It will be podcasted!
On a side note, we’re planning to have our customer’s podcasts promoted on our web site. If you’re reading this and you bought our software, leave a comment here with your feed’s URL or iTunes Music Store link or e-mail it to us.
Happy Podcasting!
September 16th, 2005
It really has been an interesting last couple of days. I could
probably write 10 more pages about what happened this week. But
to stop from boring you I will make it short. For a brief moment in the
history of the MacIntosh software universe, there was a time that a
little app called Podcast Maker beat the giants like Netscape, Macromedia
Flash, and Firefox in the download rankings at the Apple site. As
proof, I am putting up the screenshot. Not to prove to you that this
really happened, but to me because I’m not sure if I will believe my
memory when the rankings change.
September 15th, 2005
Jag tackar.
Thank you.
Dank u.
ã‚ã‚ŠãŒã¨ã†.
Gracias.
Danke.
Mahalo.
Danke schön.
Merci beaucoup.
Thank you everybody for all the kind words and support. It has made all the hard work well worth it.
12 Comments, Posted in: Podcast Maker • Podcasting
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