Vista - Kinda Cool
Windows Mobile Device Center - Kinda Cool
Windows Media Player 11 - Okay (Much better than anything after Media Player 6)
Podcasting - Kinda Cool

Mix ‘em all together - and you get a whole load of problems.

Juice doesn’t work - as I mentioned before, so I’ve been using Doppler to get my podcasts. It would be OK if it wern’t so damn buggy and non-responsive. They seriously need to learn the meaning of “background worker threads”, or at the least - “asynchronous interface”.

Doppler chokes on the Battlestar Galactica directors commentary (it won’t sort by release date, and thus keeps trying to download the commentary from Episode 9, Season 1), and has other random b.s going on with it. Their interface is also truely crazy. To get feed details, you click on them. To remove something from the queue, you err… double click on it. Then it asks if you want to add the item to the history… wtf? No…. oh, wait… now the damn thing is being downloaded again. Argh!

Juice runs once under Vista, every subsequent time it just dies for some inexplicable reason. (It’s not admin rights, I checked that).

So… someone find me a decent, sane piece of podcast fetching software.

Features Required:
- Downloads enclosures from an RSS Feed (i.e downloads podcasts, vodcasts)
- Imports/Exports subscriptions from OPML.
- Can save them to a directory
- Has a sane UI

See, not so hard, is it?
Niceties:
- Automated downloading
- Queueing of podcasts to download
- Simple rules for automatic fetching
- Easy to add something to the queue, and remove it.
- Tag/Rename based on feed details, if empty.
- Export feed notes etc to a html file that sits alongside the podcast. *

Big Bonus points for it all running on a PDA running Windows Mobile 5. (* If running on a PDA, keeping the HTML and showing it while playing back the podcast would be ultra neat too)

Now, on to Windows Mobile Device Center - it’s kinda cool, but it doesn’t have any automatic media sync stuff that was present under XP with ActiveSync 4.2 and WMP 10.

Windows Media Player 11 is also missing the customisable playlists that display things based on rules… i.e only show items _x_ days old.

end of rant.