What’s unique about ListenCat?

The main differentiator between ListenCat and existing podcast clients is the experience when using multiple devices. That experience is dependent on a service which can store information between devices, and intelligently manage the content available on all of the user’s devices.

What does ListenCat need to do?

There are several core things a ListenCat user will need to be able to do.

• Subscribe to feeds

• View episodes from

  • All feeds
  • A subset of feeds
  • A single feed
• Queue episodes for future listening

• Manage queue

  • Reorder episodes
  • Remove episodes
• Select & play episodes individually, or from the queue

• Resume episodes where last left off

  • Position should be syncronized between all devices

All of these capabilities will need to be available on all of a user’s devices. Eventually ListenCat will need to be available on a variety of devices and platforms. I currently want to support (roughly in order of importance).

• Modern Browsers

• Windows Universal App

  • Windows Phone
  • Windows 8/10
  • XBox One - obviously not until Windows 10 Universal apps will run here
• Android
• IOS

What’s MUST be done for the minimally viable product?

I obviously can’t implement all of these clients at once, and before any can be written the back-end services need to be functional.

The first version of ListenCat:

• Backend

  • Download, parse and cache feeds
  • Download and cache episode files
  • Store played to position

• Frontend

  • View subscribed feeds
  • View episodes in a feed
  • Play an episode from a feed

The next post

The next post will be looking at the technology and platform decisions I’ve made so far.

Written by Eric Haskins, maker of things.