I’m not a massive podcast fan, but I know plenty of people who are and one of the chief complaints I hear is that Linux lacks a decent app for managing them.
But hopefully this won’t be the case for much longer.
Getting Vocal about Vocal
Vocal is an upcoming podcast manager that aims to do what similar, and well intentioned, apps fail to: do one thing and do it well.
While it’s not the first to try and serve the needs of podcast users, its developer, Nathan Dyer, hopes to avoid the ‘clunky, bloated [and] unnecessarily complicated’ flaws of current options.
The result is this slice of awesome:
“I’ve never coded anything this complex before. There are a lot of pieces that have to fit together just right,” he writes on his website.
With the goal in mind being one of simplicity and not Swiss Army Knife, Dyer’s modest feature set aims to cover the essentials, like streaming and downloading; supporting video and audio podcasts; and being able to automatically check for new episodes and download them as and when they’re released.
“I also plan on implementing podcast discovery and one-click subscriptions for future releases. Device support may also be something I work on in the far future, but there are no official plans right now,” he adds.
Vocal is not yet available to download, but an initial beta release is being targeted towards the end of June.
For now you can find out more on Nathan’s blog.
Are you a podcast addict? Does Vocal look like something you’d use?