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Wednesday, December 09, 2009

DoggCatcher Podcatcher Review

I have been using DoggCatcher for 4 months, on my Android phone. It is pretty good. Nothing about it really irritates, for a start. They have an unusually sophisticated set of preferences for a mobile app, including such niceties as when to auto-synch, and how many seconds for the skip button. They also have good UI details, such as “long press required for skip button”. It does a very nice job downloading feeds Over-the-Air, but you don’t have to download at all–you can stream if you want.

Probably the most obvious improvement I can spot is having default user preferences for the Feed Options–rather than having to set manually for each feed you add. In the same vein, I think the set of system defaults could be better--it wasn't immediately obvious to me why feeds were not auto-downloading.

My other, really big idea for them would be to have a web page where you can add feeds. The main benefit would be just to ease of data-entry. But a nice secondary benefit would be to maintain a history of all podcasts you have ever downloaded.

Note that it is a paid app. At $6.99, it is by far the most expensive Android app I have purchased. However, considering its quality and utility, I would say it is well worth it.

Last point--consider a different name...I get the pun: DOG-catcher / POD-catcher...but it seems like a "false pun"--what does "Dogg" have to do with anything podcast-related?

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