My new favourite iPhone app: Instacast

I love podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And almost exclusively, I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts.

But heres’s the thing: subscribing to and downloading new podcasts to my iPhone is fiddly. Syncing with iTunes on my Mac is fiddly. Downloading new episodes a-la-carte via the iTunes app on iOS is fiddly.

Which is why I was absolutely delighted to learn about Instacast. It’s a standalone podcast downloader and player for iOS, and it’s exactly what the iPhone’s built-in should have been. I wish I’d known about it sooner. Here’s a video:

Introduction to Instacast from Vemedio on Vimeo.

If you listen to or download podcasts regularly, and aren’t satisfied with iTunes, Instacast is well worth the $1.99 asking price.

Scheduled syncing with iSync

I like my cell phone (a Motorola L7) just fine. It’s small-ish, the speaker volume is sufficient, and through iSync, it can keep in touch with my address book and calendar using Bluetooth.

Problem is, I never remember to actually sync the darned thing, so the information on my phone is always hopelessly out of date. So I’ve come up with a solution — scheduled syncing:

1. I copied Fraser Speirs’s Synchronize with iSync, then Quit script into Script Editor, then saved it as an application.
2. Then I set up a cron job to periodically run the script. I used CronniX to do this, because I’m no Unix geek.

The result? When my computer is on, and my phone is within range, it’s periodically synchronized with iCal and Address Book. If my phone is out of range, it fails and quits iSync.