I know I teased you last year with the PwopCatcher UI in this blog post, and since then everyone has been asking me for it.

I am hereby announcing an alpha version at www.pwopcatcher.com. Here are the features in a nutshell:

• Subscribe to RSS feeds that contain enclosures (of any kind).
• Each feed’s enclosures can be downloaded to a unique folder, or a common folder.
• Each feed can have a different interval (minutes between reloading the feed).
• You can specify (for each feed) a maximum life in days of enclosures. Only podcasts X days old or newer will be downloaded.
• Files are pruned locally: they are deleted after X days (for each feed) to avoid your hard disk getting full of old shows that you are no longer interested in.
• For the destination folder, you can specify either a drive letter or a volume label. In some cases you might want to download directly to a removable hard drive or audio device. Since the drive letter might be different each time you connect it, using the volume label to identify the drive solves this problem.
• Downloads will auto-resume. You can kill PwopCatcher in mid-download. Next time you run it, downloads will pick up where they left off
• BitTorrent support is provided by uTorrent, which is a 155K native Windows BitTorrent client app (see this post for more info). The uTorrent people have allowed me to automatically install it. If you subscribe to a feed that has a .torrent file in the enclosure, uTorrent will take over after downloading it. This requires a little bit of setup, which I have outlined below.
• Since ClickOnce is used, when a new version is available, the user is prompted to download it.

First of all, what is the future of PwopCatcher?

PwopCatcher is a podcast downloader, player, and manager application. The alpha version only has download and subscription features. Future versions will include a Player/Dashboard, and more importantly a podcast manager.

The Player/Dashboard will look like this. There is a main client area acting as a window into the podcasts that you have downloaded, showing a sort of slideshow of podcasts. The information area will look something like this:

These will fade in and out, giving you a nice preview of what has been downloaded, if you care to look.

The most important utility of the player/dashboard is podcast management. I don’t know about you, but when I want to copy some downloaded podcasts over to my iRiver H10 its going to take at least 15 minutes, mostly because I have to figure out what I’ve already listened to, what I want to listen to next, and what I want to delete. When you subscribe to 20 or 30 podcasts, that can be a big pain. It just makes me want to reach for the radio.

We’re introducing the idea of the “already listened to” attribute. Without going into too much detail the basic idea is you can say “give me 30 minutes of podcasts and copy them to my iPod” Those files are now marked “listened to” and so they will not be downloaded again, nor do you have to worry about removing them from your hard drive.

I must stress that this feature is not there in the alpha (see the list of features above).

The player will have several modes. You can listen to podcasts in random order or in order of publication date. Once listened to, they will no longer be in the live list. What actually happens here is that the files are moved to a “listened to” folder where they reside for 30 days (default – you can change this interval). After that they go bye bye. Although many people don’t listen to podcasts at their computer, this is still a good option to have for those times when you do want to listen.

Installation:

PwopCatcher is published with ClickOnce for the .NET Framework 2.0. If you do not have the framework installed, a setup is provided for you at http://www.pwopcatcher.com/install along with the Click-Once button for installing the app.

Note: ClickOnce does not work in FireFox as of this writing.

The first time you run the application you are presented with this dialog:

Click Yes, and it downloads right there:

Click “Yes” when asked if you want to make uTorrent the default .torrent application.

uTorrent gives you this dialog next:

At this time you should open up the port you want to use for uTorrent. Remember that you have to open it up at your router as well as the Windows Firewall (or any other software firewall you happen to be using).

I recommend testing the port with the “Test if port is forwarded properly” button. Very handy.

While you’re at it. Go ahead and create some folders for managing torrents. Then open the Options/Preferences dialog, and click the Folders tab. Enter the folders here. Make sure to uncheck “Always show dialog on manual add” or you’ll be pestered unnecessarily when downloading torrents.

Now, back to PwopCatcher.

Go to the Feeds tab, click on the url field and enter a feed url. In this example, I’m using two urls:

http://dotnetrocks.com/DotNetRocks_FullMP3.xml (.NET Rocks! MP3 Torrent)

and

When you move off the row, the rest of the fields will fill in with default values, which you can change. Let me explain what they are:

The Feeds Tab:

Fields:

Enabled: Podcasts are only downloaded when this is checked

URL: url to the RSS feed

Interval (Mins): This is the number of minutes between reloading the feed

Drive (ex: C:): This is the drive letter (and colon) OR the volume label of the drive to where podcasts from this feed are downloaded

Folder (ex: \podcasts): This is the folder name on the drive to where podcasts from this feed are downloaded. If the directory does not exist it will be created, even if it has multiple subdirectories.

Max Days Old: This is the maximum number of days old a podcast must be in order to be downloaded. It is also the number of days after which the podcast will be deleted from the folder.

After entering subsequent urls, after moving off the row, the settings from the previous feed will be copied to the new feed. This makes it easy to customize, but you don’t have to enter the same data over and over again for most feeds.

The panel on the bottom is for error messages that come from PwopCatcher. Unfortunately it is currently very rudimentary. This will be improved in future versions.

The Update Button

The Update Button saves the current settings (they are also saved when the app exits) and also initiates a cycle of checking all feeds and downloading if necessary. If files are already being downloaded, they will be canceled, and then will resume once the feed is re-downloaded and PwopCatcher sees that it was in the process of being downloaded.

The Status Tab

The Status Tab shows the status of all download activity. Multiple files are downloaded simultaneously. Take a look:

The .torrent file downloads immediately because it is so small. Hanselminutes is a 21MB mp3 file, so it takes longer.

Once the .torrent file has downloaded, uTorrent goes to work without prompting. Here’s what it should look like now:

Both of these files should end up in c:\podcasts when everything has completed, and indeed they have:

If you have any issues with the alpha, or any subsequent updates, send me email at carl AT (no spam) pwop dot com.

Until the next round of features, enjoy!