Carl Franklin has always been a communication programming kinda guy. He helped me out with his serial and socket examples back in the day. Now, he's announced an exciting product for the world of podcasting - Pwopcatcher Alpha.
Features (in a nutshell):
- Subscribe to RSS feeds that contain enclosures (of any kind).
- Each feed’s enclosures can be downloaded to a unique folder, or a common folder.
- Each feed can have a different interval (minutes between reloading the feed).
- You can specify (for each feed) a maximum life in days of enclosures. Only podcasts X days old or newer will be downloaded.
- Files are pruned locally: they are deleted after X days (for each feed) to avoid your hard disk getting full of old shows that you are no longer interested in.
- For the destination folder, you can specify either a drive letter or a volume label. In some cases you might want to download directly to a removable hard drive or audio device. Since the drive letter might be different each time you connect it, using the volume label to identify the drive solves this problem.
- Downloads will auto-resume. You can kill PwopCatcher in mid-download. Next time you run it, downloads will pick up where they left off
- BitTorrent support is provided by uTorrent, which is a 155K native Windows BitTorrent client app (see this post for more info). The uTorrent people have allowed me to automatically install it. If you subscribe to a feed that has a .torrent file in the enclosure, uTorrent will take over after downloading it. This requires a little bit of setup, which I have outlined below.
- Since ClickOnce is used, when a new version is available, the user is prompted to download it.
Check out the full release information with future specs at Pwopcatcher Alpha