Josh Kinberg (he of the crazed bicycle mounted dot-matrix printer) sent me an email telling me that the new version of FireANT that runs on Windows XP is available. I had actually never donwloaded the Mac version, which I did today. It seems pretty slick. I’m not actually turning on the automatic downloads just yet because I have enough problems with running out of space on this machine.
At one point, a little bit of code from my get_enclosures script existed in ANT but I’m not sure if that’s the case anymore. I didn’t see my name credited in the list, so I’m guessing that they have improved things enough that my lousy Perl has flaked off as cruft. I’m not sure of the difference between ANT and FireANT (if any.)
Hey Slusher,
Just wondering if u left an anonymous comment on my blog. It was a post that mentioned your show and said something like “Hey, What’s up with that, you mug?” -Dave
Late
Dave,
I recall you mentioning FireANT previously on a podcast but have only just now checked it out under Windows, so thanks for the nudge. Great program, although I find the colour scheme of the UI a bit distracting.
So far my biggest complaint with it is that, for podcasts at least, the filenames it saves the mp3 as are end up as a 40 character hex string, eg. 53819E067ECA4D7C9E996732B6EA958E623FD112.mp3. For someone like me who listens to podcasts on different PCs (or a discman) depending on what I’m doing, this is going to create a lot of head-scratching. Ideally I’d like the original filenames to be retained, and each feed to have its own local folder, eg. [..]\podcasts\5 Minutes with Wichita1_TimObrienFINAL.mp3
Something else I just noticed is that if you try to move a downloaded podcast into another folder, you’re not able to while FireANT is running in the background and is previewing it, because the file is locked.
I’m using 1.0.1.3. I’ll pass this info on to the developers…
Regards
Andrew
Cody, that was me responding to you saying that you were rambling on the blog post because of listening to me. I put my name in the field, I thought it posted it.
Andrew, It’s not a perfect program by any stretch. Unlike a traditional iPodder style client, it assumes that you’ll be using it to view the files and thus doesn’t play that well with other things. Give them your feedback. I’m not sure if their idea is ultimately to become more like an iPodder or more like an end-destination blackbox program that downloads, plays and is the only thing touching the various files.