john.pithed.org

My hopes for a built-in podcatcher for the iPod touch is nearly realized. As I was scanning the Cydia package list I discovered two cool new things.

The first is a Mobile Safari download plug-in that allows you to download many types of files. This makes the browser a lot more functional then it was. The plug-in has come leaps and bounds since the version in the link.

The second package is dTunes, a music player that plays files downloaded with its built-in browser. But as I discovered, it saves the songs to the same directory as Safari does, and plays any song in that directory regardless of where it came from. I like this because you don’t have to open up dTunes when you find an mp3 in Safari, you can just download it on the spot. It also means I can ssh files over and play them totally independent of the iTunesDB.

This is a huge advantage to me, as I can actually get CONTENT onto my ipod (finally!) However, through all my googling, I have not seen any podcatcher that ties into this new functionality. Granted, dTunes is only 6 days old, has already been updated twice, and gained video support (pretty impressive). I just know that it has to be on the horizon.

This has strengthened my confidence for the iphone app community outside of the App Store, who are doing really cool stuff. Apple won’t let their guard down for a while, which means that the foreseeable future will be fun for the hackers who get to introduce their programs to a very large userbase. As a consumer of these programs, I am enjoying getting more and more functionality out of a device that originally had much lower aspirations.