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Apologies for the outage here.. blog went offline due to a provider subscription issue. All back now. Looking forward to sharing more about what’s going on around here at ObjectivePixel and, more importantly, with BringCast. That will come in a future post 🙂
thx
James
Hello Friends. Hope this post finds you well. For those of you living in the US, happy 4th of July Holiday weekend (and see end of post for a holiday special we’re running)!
On our end, now that the craziness of the day jobs have died down a bit we have been able to push out an update to our BringCast 4 UWP which fixes some bugs and adds, a couple of minor enhancements and one new experimental feature. The change log for the former is as follows:
Pickup where you left off on another device
This marks the first step towards our stated goal of being more multi-device friendly over time: we have built a new experimental feature (hence available to Pro users of the app) which allows you to view all devices in your Windows device graph and continue listening to the current podcast episode on one of those devices. Let’s say you’re listening to our good friends Carl and Richard (Rainbow 1 and Rainbow 2) over at .NET Rocks! on your shiny new Surface Pro using BringCast:
By clicking on the new cast icon, you get a menu showing you your device graph:
And from there you can click on another device, like your Elite x3 and playback will continue there picking up at the same spot.
Why James”, you say, “That’s great and all but I’d really love to have the same experience with my” (insert your favorite mobile device here). We hear you. Definitely looking into this scenario as well.
That’s all for now.. apart from.. because it is a celebrated holiday in the US, we are dropping the price of a BringCast 4 pro annual subscription from $6.99 to $1.99. That’s over a 70% discount! Get it while it’s hot.. offer ends on Friday 7/7/2017. Subscriptions are what get’s you access to the full feature set of BringCast including experimental features and also is what helps to keep the lights on our end so we thank you for helping to keep things going here.
Happy Holidays.
James
V4 is Out! Back in January we released the official version 4 release of BringCast after a marathon development process. This was certainly a huge milestone for us as the porting journey ended with the codebase running as a Universal Windows Application on desktop and mobile Windows devices. Thanks to all our loyal users and supporters who have stuck with us over the years.
On a related note, the “UWP beta” version of the app has been taken down from the store.. New policy does not allow apps with Beta as part of the name, hence all our current and future versions will go out from the official BringCast app that you can find at this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/bringcast/9nblggh093x1
Patch: Today we’re releasing the first patch for V4 including the following fixes / additions [in the final stage of certification / release at the time of writing]:
New Licensing Model: One of the changes we’ve made in V4 of the app is our approach to licensing. There were really two main goals for this change: 1) have a fully free version of the app with no adverts and a decent entry level feature set 2) move our paid offering to a subscription model. It is simply not economical to ship an app for a one-off payment of a dollar or two these days. Hence we’re hoping that users that value the more advanced features are willing to invest in us and in future versions. And for those that aren’t, we hope that the free offering will be good enough. This is certainly something of an experiment and we’ll see how it goes. Users who are willing to support us and invest in a Pro subscription will get all the latest features automatically before they become part of the main product. We’re also hoping that the level of income that Pro generates is sufficient to support a cloud sync service. Time will tell.
Next: We’re already working on new features that will be coming out in stages over the next few months. We are looking closely at some of the new capabilities in the Windows 10 Creator’s update and will be incorporating some of those in due course. We definitely don’t want to do any more “big bang” releases; instead we’ll introduce features more incrementally and therefore more rapidly. We’ll also test out features via the experimental channel which is available to Pro subscribers. As ever, let us know what you’d like us to work on and we’ll see what we can do 🙂
Thanks: Again, thanks to all who have stuck with us and continue to use the product. You inspire us to keep going! If you really want to help out, please do rate us in the store: it really does help us out.
thx y’all, you totally ROCK!
Love James and Mark
We got to the bottom of the pending issue.. you will need to temporarily disable backup of BringCast under settings->Backup->More options. We have developed a fix for this but it will only be deployed when we cut over to the production release app at RTM. Use the above workaround in the meantime. Other than that, this build is pretty much fixes only.
If you are testing the BringCast 4 UWP Beta build on Windows Phone Anniversary Update and are hitting an issue where the app goes into the Pending state where it will launch for a period of time, please
Once you’ve done the above send me email at with the tile of BringCast Pending along with a note of the bug number if you’re provided with one to this address
We’re actively trying to track this down. Thx for your help.
This is likely the last public build before we switch over to the RTM branch and push to the official app. Thanks to all for the help with testing. Cowabunga!
https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9nblggh5pm5q
Here is the changelog:
It’s been rather quiet around here of late, primarily due to work being the focus as well as other general distractions from life. For me the work in question has been shipping the Windows 10 Anniversary Update which went live at the end of June. Mark has been busy being a new Dad 🙂
The good news is that the Anniversary Update has a ton of new end user and developer features and we now get to take advantage of the latter in BringCast. To that end we’ve spent the last couple of months working on an update to the BringCast 4 public beta that specifically targets the Anniversary update. A big focus for this update is stability and polish.. we’re now focused on shipping and the good news there is that this build is now feature complete.
Looking back through our source control system, we’ve made 1175 checkins since July fixing bugs and adding features.
So what’s new?
Improved Playback Stability: This is the biggest item that has simplified the code and drastically improved stability of Playback. For the developers amongst you we’re now using the Single Process background model which you can read more about here .
Improved Import Export workflow: increasingly we find ourselves listening to and watching podcasts across a number of different devices. Since we don’t currently have a cloud backend (more on that in a future post) we wanted to offer an improved workflow with OneDrive. Using the new import / export workflow accessible in settings it’s now possible to save and restore all your subscriptions, playlists, the state of what’s listened to and not as well as what’s downloaded. It’s ease to restore back to the exact state that your in on a new device. Items you downloaded before will be automatically downloaded again.
Improved Onedrive Login: Coupled with the above, we’ve made it easier to log in to OneDrive by moving to using integrated authentication which means you can simply pick a Windows Live ID that you’ve already used to sign in on to OneDrive and use that to store and retrieve your podcast database for backing up or switching between devices.
More stuff is now free: Looking at the number of podcasting solutions in the store, we decided that more functionality that was previously behind an in app purchase should be set free. So now downloading, unlimited playlist items are all part of the free product. That’s much better 🙂
Visual Layer goodness: We’ve added aspects of the new Visual Layer both by default in the app as well as behind an experimental setting. If you turn that on you get more stuff. Along the way we’ve also made a ton of performance improvements for example in page navigation.
Adaptive UI: We’ve started to dip our toes into the water of adaptive UI. There’s a ton more to do to make the UX better take advantage but we’ve started this effort.
Show notes display are back: We took this away in the last update and now show notes are back in a new pop-up window.
Better telemetry: to help us identify and fix issues in deployment. ‘Nough said.
Notable Bug fixes: reliability with downloading and playback but we’ve literally fixed err 88 bugs in this update.
So that’s what we’ve been up to. Please feel free to download and play with the beta here.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/bringcast-4-uwp-public-beta/9nblggh5pm5q
In the next post we’ll talk about the release plan for BringCast 4 and what comes next.
Well, it’s been a long time coming!! James and I have been super busy over the last year. James has shipped Windows 10. Mark has become a father and shipped Apartments.com. And… we’ve found some time to chip away at the next version of BringCast!
BringCast 4 is a ground-up re-write of the popular podcasting app for Windows Phone. We’ve re-architected it for the modern Windows platform, and it is available for Windows Phone 8.1 today! The work we have done also makes it a seamless transition to move BringCast to Windows 10 – both phone and desktop/tablet – in the not too distant future!
So, what’s new in BringCast 4? Well, quite a lot actually!
Perhaps best of all, the basic functionality of BringCast 4 is FREE!
If you’re interested in some of the gory details of BringCast development, be sure to check out the BringCast Dev Podcast.
Check out some screenshots below, and be sure to stay tuned to @bringcast on Twitter for updates!
Did anyone find the Easter egg that we hid in the last podcast database update and BringCast 3.8.6!?
HINT: Try searching the database for “BringCast”… 🙂
That’s right – we’re launching our very own podcast called The BringCast Dev Podcast! This show, co-hosted by James and Mark will cover:
We won’t commit to a show schedule – let’s just say there will be new episodes as and when we find the time to record them 😉
Regardless, subscribe and enjoy! The first “real” episode is coming very soon!
James and I have been hard at work this weekend getting BringCast 4 ready for beta testing! After a super-productive “Geek Weekend”, I’m proud to say we made it.
BringCast 4 is a complete re-write as a Universal Windows App for Windows Phone 8.1.
It has a brand-new user interface, which is both simpler to use and more powerful. Here’s the new playback screen:
It’s cleaner than BringCast 3.8, yet shows more episode detail information. The new UI is fully adaptive to support large screen devices such as the Nokia Lumia 1520 and high DPI devices like the Nokia Lumia Icon.
The new Windows Universal App model also allows us to finally offer variable playback speed! You can choose from a bunch of options to speed through episodes at a more efficient pace. We’ve also added variable speed scrubbing to give you extra control.
Tapping the hamburger menu icon in the top right opens the new drawer. This is where BringCast 4’s new power user features really start to shine through. From here you can manage your playlists, but also view a complete playback history of every episode you’ve ever played.
BringCast 4 is built atop a fully relational database, making it possible to slice-and-dice episode lists however you want. You can show all episodes, unplayed or just those that you’ve downloaded. Also, new in this release is the ability to play an episode from anywhere in the app, without having to add it to a playlist first. This makes BringCast 4 an excellent choice for the type of users who likes to view a list of episodes in a show and play them easily, without worrying about playlist management.
With BringCast 4 you can ensure that you always have the X latest episodes available on your device and we’ve refined the display of them. Here you can see the list of episodes in a show, with one-tap access to play and stream and at-a-glance information about the episode.
This new version has been built from the outset to be fully localizable too, so we’ll be asking for some help from our loyal multi-lingual users to help us with translations into your languages!
Being a Universal Windows App has allowed us to greatly improve the download manager. You can now queue as many episodes to download as you like and the operating system will get them over Wi-Fi in the background. Is there a new episode that you just have to listen to now, but you’re not on Wi-Fi? No problem, BringCast 4 now supports promoting episodes to download over cellular in the background – there’s no need to keep the app open anymore!
There are lots of other features we’ll briefly touch on, including:
Geeky Deep-Dive
You guys have been clamoring for this release for some time and we’ve felt inspired by the overwhelmingly positive energy you’ve been sending us! So… what took time?
Really, the re-write is what took the time. BringCast 3.8 was already a well-established and feature-rich product. When Microsoft announced Universal Windows Apps earlier this year at //BUILD/, we know it was the right choice for the next version of BringCast to enable all the great features we wanted to bring, along with keeping us on the most modern platform version.
So, the decision was made to essentially start from scratch! With the updated platform, we chose to build support for large screen, high DPI devices and localization into the core of the product.
Perhaps one of the most time consuming things we chose to do was to sit BringCast 4 atop a fully relational database. This not only had a steep learning curve, but also tore apart our tried and trusted methodology of binary serialization of the data model that had powered the first versions of BringCast so well. However, the moment we implemented episode filtering, we knew we’d made the right architectural choice!
I Want It!
We’ll be sharing BringCast 4 Beta Zero with some select users as soon as this week. Once we’ve ironed out any show-stoppers with that small group, we’ll open up Beta One to those users who previously expressed an interest a few months back (thank you!).
Beta Two will be made publicly available to anyone who is interested ahead of the final release.
Please be patient, BringCast 4 is coming soon!
