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Saturday, April 10, 2010

DoggCatcher Doesn't Delete

I really like the Android podcasting app, DoggCatcher. It is by far the most complete, detailed Android app I have seen. However, I was recently surprised to learn that it had filled up my SD card with 2.5 Gbs of stuff. Almost nothing was getting deleted, even though I had the global setting of "Delete as space is needed". It turns out that only applies to items that have been marked as "Done".

The thing is, the way I use DoggCatcher is to accumulate lots of stuff, so that I have a lot to choose from, when I want a PodCast. I do not for a moment plan to listen to more than 20% of the stuff I capture. So as it fills up, I want the old stuff to roll off to make space available, even though I have not listened to the old stuff.

So I had to go in and manually delete every old podcast. Very tedious. I just find it so surprising that the DoggCatcher folks designed it this way. The DVR is somewhat analogous, and it works exactly the way I would expect--the old stuff rolls off as it fills up (assuming you don't invoke the "Keep" feature). I think this is a case of designing with slightly the wrong mind-set--quite analogous to Dave Winer's preference for RSS aggregators to deliver a "River of News", instead of treat feeds like a mail reader. To SnoggDoggler's credit, they do realize the need for an enhancement.

Weirdly, the old feeds don't actually show up in the UI of the app. You have to go directly to the file structure to see them.

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