We last covered Podcast Lounge here, looking at the changes for v2.1.x back in April 2014. Today's update takes us to 2.2.1.1 and here's a summary of what's been fixed or improved in the intervening six months, with actual new features in bold:
- Default filters for favourites were broken
- Playlist crash on reordering
- Page loading optimised for fast load and resume
- Added unselect all functionality
- Add new downloads panel showing all episodes with sort functions
- Added shortcut to storage management function
- Added ability to delete by podcast programme by using the press & hold menu in the downloads section (groups by programme)
- Downloaded episodes with no file size information are updated on-the-fly
- Favourites are auto-refreshed less regularly when option set
- Further improvements to stability and reduction in KeyNotFound errors
- Added support to recognise newer phone versions
- General bug fixes based on user error reports
- Fix for crash on resumption from tombstoning (state memory overflow)
- Ability to disable live tile counters
- More accurate live tile counters
- Added support to detect new WP 8.1 GDR builds
- Downloaded item clean-up changes weren’t being properly committed to memory
- Added support for file I/O routines to await for file access to return (SafeAccessFile)
- Added a check to report to the user that the phone cannot play a particular file format
- Fixed the nullreference exception with TiltEffect
- Removed the CommitTextDirectlyToLogfile mutexes as they were causing a AbandonedMutexException
- Added some code to trap the App.OnAnyError messagebox exception
- Fixed bug where the “restrict to audio” option in a playlist wasn’t being saved correctly
- Fixed Toolkit exception on Add URL section for 7.1 beta
- Potential fix for XamlParseException bug on 8.1 which caused random crash on app start-up for some users.
- Fixed exception where the playlist attempted to update an old Standard tile with IconicData
Not a bad haul, plus other assorted fixes and optimisations under the hood. A few shots of the new version's features in action:
The familiar default view of podcasts in Podcast Lounge - other views are available! (right) the default playlists - the top one is particularly useful for me, though each still takes several seconds to compile each time - I'm going to quiz the developer on this aspect....
The new options to turn off live tile counters, which can be annoying if you have lots that you never get round to listening to! (right) the new option in lists to 'unselect all'...
New download management, with everything sorted by podcast and with context sensitive delete function.
The world of podcatchers on Windows Phone is, of course, now insanely populated and competitive, recently added to by the third party Podcast2Go and the Microsoft-penned Podcasts application that's built into Windows Phone 8.1. In truth, any of half a dozen products are now probably good enough for the vast majority of users. But I try a lot of Windows Phone podcatchers and keep returning to Podcast Lounge in the end. Nothing's perfect though, and I'm meeting up with the developer in the next few weeks to ply him with questions - watch this space!
You can grab Podcast Lounge here in the Windows Phone Store.