I listen to a handful of podcasts regularly throughout my days and weeks. It’s one of my primary ways to entertain myself or consume newsworthy content. Being a fairly robotic Android user, I found myself using the standard Google Play Music app for podcasts. Yeah I know there’s Spotify, Anchor, Overcast and what not as podcatchers for Android. For some reason, I never really considered them. Yes I know Google Play isn’t the “best” for podcast listening, but it just worked for a simpleton like myself. Then last year my buddy Todd hit me up. He asked me to try out Playapod - HIS podcatcher.

First off, let me give you a little background. My man Todd Moore and I met a handful of years ago as I began my freelance writing endeavors. We were part of a team started by John C Dvorak, Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Gina Smith. Maaaaan, this makes me think back to our time at CES which was probably the wildest night in ‘Vegas I’ve ever experienced. (Ever seen the movie The Hangover?) That was a hilarious and insane night out, Todd. Thanks for having me as your guest.

Anyway, during my time on that team as a freelancer, I was able to learn more about Todd and his life as a former IT security guy and his move into the world of app development. App development literally changed his life as he developed the world-popular White Noise app on iOS and garnered a gazillion downloads. (It’s a really great app). This lead to developing more apps and games for his TMSOFT brand. I’ve enjoyed several games he and his team has developed and had no problem giving his podcatcher a try. Why? Because Todd is a friend. And also, because I trust his brand and body of work.

The Updates

The Playapod app has updated to version two and it’s looking pretty good. In the first iterations of the app, I had some issues on Android. Yes, I know Android is a bit of a challenge to develop for, but never held back on feedback to the dev team regarding the app. Each bug fix was methodically taken care of over time. Then I work up to version two and it looks great. It provides the same functionality and then some as it now offers video support and many, many more features such as a updated “now playing” queue, custom groups and filters and even text-based feeds are now available as a text-to-speech podcasts.

I’ve tried the video support this morning and it looks pretty good. You can display video and show information simultaneously or you can just go with full screen video. Quality of the video depends on what you download directly. It doesn’t seem to offer a streaming capability of the video from what I can tell, but I’m ok with that. I’d rather have the file locally on my device for optimal playback and no issues from my cell carrier that isn’t on an unlimited data plan.

You can find out more about the updates Playapod via the TMSOFT blog post. I just wanted to give a congrats to my man Todd and his team for the milestone. The app is available on both iOS and Android. Check it out and let me know what you think.