Monday 12 July 2010

Love to "Listen"

Every now and then I have the chance to sample Google's (or rather the Google Engineers') thinking style and, although not consistently all the time, I must admit I like it — that's why I have been "subdued" to use their services for a lot of my personal/business needs. The latest occasion for such "tasting" has been Listen, a fairly obscure Android application for searching and listening to podcasts.

As with other Google products, one can immediately recognize the "minimalistic yet functional" style — the views are elegantly clean pertaining a minimum amount of controls (only the really necessary ones), integration with Google Reader (a new Listen Subscriptions tag category will appear), quick view/access/control to the current podcast in status bar, ease of browsing the (searched) subscriptions and, the cherry on top, keeping tabs of your progress for each podcast (e.g. you resume from the last listening position for whatever previously opened podcast). Oh, did I mention it's quite lightweight ? :)...

So if I managed to get you interested by now go ahead and try it on your Android-powered phone (yep, it's Android only). For the IT oriented people I highly recommend the TWIT podcast series...

Tip: the subscriptions search is English-only; if you cannot find a certain podcast, you might as well directly add its XML/Atom feed URL via My Subscriptions / Add a subscription.