Downcast

Siri Shortcuts - v2.10.0

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 14:30:00 -0400

This update finally introduces Siri Shortcuts support for Downcast. You'll find a new button called "Siri Shortcuts" on the "More" tab. This view shows you a list of the available shortcuts you can setup within Downcast as well as any you've already configured here.

Built-in Media Shortcuts

You can also initiate playback using the standard media intent shortcuts without configuring anything in Downcast or in the "Siri Shortcuts" app. All you have to do is speak one of the following commands:

"Hey Siri, Play <podcast title> in Downcast"
or "Hey Siri, Play <playlist title> playlist in Downcast"
or "Hey Siri, Play my <playlist title> in Downcast"

For podcasts, this will start playback of the first episode in the podcast's local episodes list. For playlists, this will start playback of the first episode in the playlist. This logic will be updated soon to resume the most recently played, but not yet finished, episode. Or, if there are no partially played episodes, the most recent unplayed episode.

Siri doesn't always seem to recognize podcast and playlist titles, especially when they contain multiple words. If this becomes a problem you can just setup specific shortcuts for problematic podcasts or playlists within the "Siri Shortcuts" view on Downcast's "More" tab with a custom phrase.

Current Episode Information

There is another shortcut, not visible within the app, but configurable within the Siri Shortcuts app, called "Current Episode Information". This shortcut will return a data structure that contains information about the current episode in Downcast like title, play position, duration, the artwork, etc. This can be useful for building complex shortcuts that use information about the current episode.

Other Bits

The "Play" shortcut can be executed when Downcast is running or suspended. If it isn't running, it will be launched in the background. The other shortcuts require Downcast to be running.

Please contact support if you want to suggest any additional shortcuts.

Latest update - v2.9.62

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 06:00:00 -0500

v2.9.62

This updates fixes a bug introduced in v2.9.61 that prevented the player view in the watchOS app from loading on Series 1, 2, and 3 devices. This was caused by a bizarre problem with Apple's Bitcode technology that can affect devices with 32-bit architectures, like the Series 1-3 Apple Watches. The bug still exists, but this update manages to work around it.

Downcast now supports basic keyboard shortcuts on the player view when using an external keyboard. Hold the CMD key while on the player view to see the supported shortcuts.

See the change log for the full list of changes.

Coming soon

Siri Shortcuts are still on the way. This feature will be available in the beta in the next few days!

Latest update - v2.9.61

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 08:00:00 -0500

v2.9.61

This update contains a big improvement in Downcast's macOS app that reduces the chances of running into the dreaded 'inaccessible resource' issue. Per Apple's suggestion, Downcast stores security-scoped bookmarks for file system resources rather than absolute paths. Bookmarks are a more robust way to keep track of the content Downcast downloads like artwork, episode media files, etc. However, these bookmarks can become stale or invalid for a variety of reasons. When this happens, it's usually possible for the app to automatically refresh the bookmark and continue operating without issue. Unfortunately, Downcast wasn't handling a specific recoverable condition correctly prior to this build and that led to users experiencing this frustrating 'inaccessible resource' issue when they shouldn't have. This build addresses that issue and fixes several issues with the 'Resolve Inaccessible Resource Issues' dialog that was created to help you resolve these issues when Downcast can't do so automatically. The fixes and changes are mentioned in the change log.

Also fixed in this update is a syncing issue that could lead to the deletion of a podcast subscription after Downcast detected that it's feed URL was permanently changed. If you were affected by this, resubscribing to the podcast would appear to work but it would eventually be deleted again in the future. This affected the iOS and macOS apps and should be resolved now.now.

See the change log for the full list of changes.

Coming soon

~~The next release~~ One of the next few releases will, finally, include support for Siri Shortcuts. More on that soon!

Latest update - v2.9.52

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 14:00:00 -0400

Support for Dynamic Type in v2.9.51 was a big improvement but it did introduce some inconsistencies. This maintenance release resolves most of those. It also restores the medium weight that was applied to certain labels prior to adding Dynamic Type support. Overall, text should be more readable and consistent throughout the app now

This update also resolves a couple of storage related issues. A few of you ran into an issue that rendered Downcast's sandbox readonly. This was due to an undocumented behavior in iOS that required reinstalling the app to get past it. This has been worked around in this update and this should not happen again. Also, the storage numbers reported on Downcast's "More" tab sometimes became wildly different from what iOS was reporting. This is fixed now and the numbers Downcast and iOS report should be mostly the same now.

See the change log for the full list of changes.

Latest update - v2.9.51

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0400

Dynamic Type

The v2.9.51 update for iOS brings with it full Dynamic Type support ¹. Dynamic Type is a feature of iOS that allows you to control the system wide font size by going to Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Larger Text and choosing a size. The largest sizes are unlocked by enabling the Larger Accessibility Sizes.

Downcast supports all of the available sizes up to, and including, the smallest two accessibility sizes. The largest of the accessibility sizes have no additional effect on text in Downcast. This is a compromise that ensures a reasonable visual experience while still allowing for a large range of font sizes.

A new setting was added to Downcast that allows you to choose to match iOS' setting for font size or to select a specific Dynamic Type size category to use in Downcast. The setting is called "Font Size" and is found in Downcast's global settings in the Miscellaneous section.

Playback Speed

Added the 1.75x playback speed that has been mysteriously missing from Downcast for so long. Unfortunately, given the way Downcast currently synchronizes playback speeds, adding this options means that versions of Downcast prior to v2.9.51 will no longer synchronize playback speeds with v2.9.51+. As long as all your devices are running the latest version of Downcast, syncing of playback speeds should remain unaffected.

Images in Show Notes

Downcast has been overly strict about sanitizing show notes. Now, if show notes contain img tags, those images are hidden by default and replaced with a button you can tap to reveal any other images from the same domain.

Similarly, if an episode contained lyrics in its metadata, those lyrics would get appended to the show notes. Usually, these 'lyrics' are just an unstyled version of the show notes and redundant. Now, if lyrics metadata is present, they are hidden by default and a button will be present to allow you to toggle its visibility.

Minimum Required OS

The minimum requirements for Downcast are now iOS 12.4 and macOS 10.13. The minimum watchOS version is unchanged.

Downcast limits the effects of Dynamic Type where necessary. The player view, for example, only applies Dynamic Type to the episode description and show notes at this time. ↩

Latest update - v2.9.42

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 06:00:00 -0400

Available now for both apps. This update adds iOS 13 support, which includes support for Dark Mode, improves the in-list search experience and fixes a number of crashes and performance issues. This is a minor maintenance release for the macOS app. See the change log for more details.

More updates coming soon...

Latest update - v2.9.39

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 10:00:00 -0500

Available now for both apps. This is a maintenance release that fixes a handful of bugs, crashes, and resolves a big memory leak while using CarPlay. Anyone experiencing crashing while using CarPlay was likely suffering from this issue.

Both apps now remove the now playing episode from the player view if it is marked as played while paused.

The iOS app now shows the last time a feed was refreshed in the navigation bar above its episode list. Tapping this area will trigger a refresh of the podcast's feed, similar to tapping on the podcast list's navigation bar.

More updates coming soon, for real.

Latest update - v2.9.32

Sat, 05 May 2018 11:30:00 -0400

This release is mostly a performance + bug fix release. The iOS app should be noticeably more stable now. I was able to identify and fix a few really difficult to debug issues that would lead to random crashes, especially in the background. There are some general performance improvements as well as a couple changes to reduce memory consumption.

Several issues with the download queue were also fixed. That includes an issue where deleting downloads wouldn't update the episode counts for the corresponding podcast, a row duplication issue when rearranging downloads, and a queue order issue when queueing multiple episodes for download at once. All very annoying issues, all fixed.

I'm still working on the sync replacement, among other things, which is still going well and I hope to be done with that very soon. Hang in there, changes are on the way.

Also, a surprising number of you ask how to provide additional financial support. How nice! Downcast has had a tip jar for quite a while now to let you do just that! I haven't really promoted it because that's annoying, but I get enough inquiries that I feel it needs to be mentioned from time to time. You can find it in the app here: More tab ► Support Downcast.

watchOS 4 Update

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0400

Version 2.9.30 is now available in the iOS & macOS App Stores.

The macOS update is minor and contains a few bug fixes related to continuous play and iCloud Syncing.

The iOS update is notable since it contains a major technical upgrade for the watchOS app and several bug fixes. The watchOS app is now finally built against the watchOS 4 SDK, which means complication support. Since most of the code in the watchOS app was related to the disappointing inter-app communication methods available in the watchOS 1 SDK, it is essentially a complete rewrite. The result is a much snappier app with a much smaller codebase that requires far less processing on your iPhone. It still requires your iPhone to function, but stand-alone playback is something planned for later this year, assuming Apple makes some reasonable improvements to the audio playback APIs in watchOS 5 (or a watchOS 4.x update, but that's doubtful). The primary UI change you'll notice is the removal of section headers in the Podcasts & Playlists views as well as a couple of new icons to indicate whether something will be streamed and whether it is unconsumed (non-local).

Aside from the watchOS app, the iOS app also received a number of bug fixes and improvements. Fixes include the playlist episode reordering issue, random pausing on HomePod or other Airplay devices, and a sync related issue. It also gained a performance bump due to changing how the watchOS app communicates with it, improves the VoiceOver 'Jump to Time' feature.

One other minor change to the iOS app is that when resuming from an interruption, the player will now skip back by ~1s. I do plan to make this a configurable interval in a future update.

Up next is the new sync system. CloudKit wins. It's better than anything I could come up with, fast, secure, scales forever, doesn't significantly increase my overhead, and keeps your data out of my hands. Plus, I just can't bring myself to make you sign up for yet another account, that's like starting an at bat with one strike. No thanks.

This is in progress and moving along nicely.

Fair warning, iOS 9 support will most likely be dropped prior to the sync system replacement. To support it means using deprecated CloudKit APIs and risking the experience for the overwhelming majority of users in order to support a very small, and rapidly decreasing, number of old devices.

On the way

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 17:00:00 -0500

Not going to bother apologizing for the long delay in blog posts, apologies get old for everyone. Just gonna say what's imminent, whats coming, and what's coming a bit later.

Imminent

Updated watch app - The watch app has finally been updated to support watchOS 2, 3, and 4. Support for watchOS 1 has been dropped. This is mainly just a technical transition, don't expect huge changes. You'll still need your phone to use the app. Stand alone features will come later. That said, the new watch app has complication support, should be snappier and more reliable, and should provide the iOS app with a performance boost since it no longer needs to do nearly as much work to keep the watch app up to date. This should be in beta later this week.

Help article update - I've used Desk.com for support tickets and support articles for years, and if you don't have anything nice to say. A few months ago I switched to Front for support tickets, what a relief. Today I've switched the support articles over to Helpdocs.io, another relief. There's still a lot of work to do on the articles, but they've all had a once over, some old ones thrown on the burn pile, and now they look like they were created this century.

Maintenance - Continued maintenance on the v2.9.x version of Downcast. A lot of problems have been corrected recently in the v2.9.x version and will continue until v3 is released.

Coming soon

Server side feed aggregation - Refreshing feeds is a huge resource hog. It burns CPU, RAM, and battery life. Moving this process server-side will save your battery, make Downcast snappier in general, and prevent a lot of sporadic crashes that are a result of memory pressure. Downcast will still refresh password protected and private feeds on your device, so the functionality won't disappear entirely, it'll just have much less of a presence. This is far along in development. At this point I'm just ironing out some performance issues, trying not to spend too much on servers.

Push notifications - Server side aggregation makes this possible, and required. It's been a long missing feature of Downcast and I can't wait to get this done.

Sync system replacement - This is another resource hog right now due to the type of iCloud syncing we're currently using. The replacement will be far more reliable and far less resource consuming. Between moving feed refreshing to the server and replacing the sync system, you should notice a significant improvement in both performance and battery life.

Coming a bit later

V3 - If Duke Nukem Forever™ was a podcast app. As much as I want to just wrap this up, server side aggregation and replacing the sync system have to come first. Refreshing on the device and the current sync system are the two biggest sources of problems and customer support for Downcast. I don't want Downcast to inherit any of the problems v2.x has by not addressing these two things first.

Apple TV app & Web presence - Hope to round things out with these two. Again, server side aggregation and a new sync system make these much easier.