![]() ![]() The interface, and the feature-set are nearly indistinguishable. It's simple - the two are one and the same. You might be wondering, at this point, why my focus so far has been on the beta web player and not the Windows app that was released recently. There's no way to download episodes to consume later while off the grid, unfortunately. One noticeably absent feature is offline listening. I enjoyed using it a bit more, despite its lack of unique playback features currently present in its mobile counterparts, such as a sleep timer and automatic clipping of extended silence in a podcast. It scales well with high-DPI displays, and barring the necessary padding, lacks the absurd, unused white space that one might find on certain other scaled-up software. This isn't to say it's a blown up version of an app made for small screens - the web player is not a Progressive Web App, and has been designed primarily for use on large screens, and won't play nice with your handset. Work then began on a revamp of the web player in the form of an open beta, giving the interface a greater degree of familiarity to anyone used to the interface in the mobile apps. Its UI was a little different, straightforward nonetheless. The web app worked as expected - it kept the same list of podcasts I'd subscribed to on my phone, kept tabs on the ones I'd already listened to and had the same sections for 'starred' and 'in progress' podcasts among others. Having to switch between devices just to change volumes or skip ahead a bit in a track kicked me out of my workflow quite easily, so I caved and purchased access to the web player shortly after. Being fresh out of school, I still had the solid, full-featured smartphone app to work with, rendering the web app unnecessary for me at the time.Īs a college student, the need for a podcatcher on my laptop for when my phone wasn't readily available became pressing. ![]() In 2014, Shifty Jelly debuted a web player for Pocket Casts that synced with the mobile apps, while also functioning independent of them. I discovered the appeal of podcasts, enjoying the often soft-spoken voices feeding me stories and tidbits of knowledge that somehow sat comfortably in the back of my head despite being, more often than not, a background activity. After its buttons gave out, I got my hands on a Nextbit Robin, and after that one gave up the ghost, I sit now, seven years after the iPhone failed to boot one last time, with my Xiaomi Mi A1.Īcross these preposterous pubescent platitudes and the multiple smartphones that succumbed to my horrifying "experiments", one of my very first paid apps on the iPhone - Shifty Jelly's Pocket Casts - has stuck with me through and through, so I understandably have some attachment to it. I was better than my friends, embroiled in their daily struggles with their finicky Android Gingerbread-powered handsets, while I could lord my high-end Apple device over them as they did so.ĭeveloping the itch to mess with phone software over time, I moved on to the Nexus 5 (the irony isn't lost on me), which, till today, remains my favorite smartphone. What followed shortly was my very first all-nighter, spent in utter juvenile excitement over the gadget, in an attempt to figure its ins and outs, and most importantly, to stuff it senseless with every application a boy that age would want to keep in the massive sixteen-gigabyte storage, a la Temple Run and the original Angry Birds, with its fifteen free-to-play levels before the IAPs kicked in. It was a scuffed, scarred, plastic little thing, and for the 15 year-old nerd that held it, it was nothing short of mesmerizing. My first smartphone was a twice-handed-down iPhone 3GS. ![]()
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