The podcast is sponsored by Amazon Publishing’s romance imprint, Montlake Romance. The first two featured titles – Crazy Little Thing by Tracy Brogan and The Second Chance Café by Alison Kent — were both published by Montlake, although USA Today, which first reported the news about the podcast, says that “the books discussed will span a variety of publishers and imprints, including indie-pubbed books.” (Many of those indie-pubbed books will likely be published through Amazon’s own KDP.)

The podcast host is Laura Roppé, a singer-songwriter and the author of Rocking the Pink: Finding Myself on the Other Side of Cancer, published by Seal Press in 2012.

There are a number of podcasts out there focused on romance books, including those from Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Romance Radio Network. One possible advantage of “Kindle Love Stories” is that, if it focuses primarily on titles published by Amazon, all of those titles should be available free to Kindle owners through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

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On the Internet of Things podcast, Stacey Higginbotham spoke with Russ Fadel, CEO of ThingWorx. Fadel explains how predictive intelligence, big data plus connected sensors are changing farming and improving medical care.

And on the GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast, we have a round-table discussion on how Google is cleverly slipping through the cracks of Apple’s walled garden while also. Did you hear that YouTube has paid subscriptions now? If you subscribed to the podcast, you’d already know all the details!

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On the Internet of Things podcast, Stacey Higginbotham chats with Austin Energy on how the company manages electricity price fluctuations with technology. And on the GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast, the focus is on potential iOS design changes from Apple: Should we say good-bye to realistic physical representations in software?

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A year later, Player FM is back with a native Android app, it’s definitely worth taking a look as well: The app features a very eye-pleasing, Google-like design, complete with cards that we’ve come to know from apps like Google Now and the latest version of the Play store.

But Player FM isn’t just about looks: What sets the app apart from other podcasting applications is its emphasis on discovery. Player FM lets you not only subscribe to your favorite podcasts, but also to topics. These topics can be broad, like technology and international news, or very specific, like Pixar or Ruby on Rails. Each of these topics surfaces episodes from a number of relevant podcasts, which is great to discover new favorites and get different perspectives on a certain topic.

Your own podcast subscriptions are accessible through a separate tab, and also synced with the Player FM website, where others can use them as a starting point for their own podcast listening. Of course, there are also a bunch of features you’d expect from a podcasting app, including the ability to download episodes for offline listening, complete with options to restrict downloads to WiFi or even to times when the device is plugged in for charging.

There are some features still missing from the app, including playback status sync between different devices as well as the app and the website. You also can’t find podcasts by title through the app yet, but Player FM creator Michael Mahemoff told me that this feature is coming soon. In the meantime, users can go to the web app to fine tune their subscriptions, and then listen to them on the go.

Check out a few screenshots of the Player.fm Android app below:

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I hit up the Podcast Gallery website earlier today and took it for a spin. In short: I’ll be using this for both my audio and video podcast needs going forward on all of my devices. It doesn’t hurt that I have a fair amount of storage available to me in both Dropbox and Google Drive of course. Here’s Podcast Gallery’s creator, Amit Agarwal, explaining how Podcast Gallery works:

About the only feature I see missing — and I’ve already pitched it to Agarwal — is the ability to subscribe to a show and have it automatically upload new episodes to my cloud storage.

Yes, podcast subscription is a primary feature in any podcatcher, but I still see value in Podcast Gallery. The ability to watch or hear a podcast through a browser on nearly any device is a big plus. I’ve already streamed several audio and video episodes on an iPhone 5. And the Google Drive integration is perfect for Chromebook users; you can even set the media files to be available offline so they sync to your Chrome OS device.

One potential holdup for some: to save favorite podcasts to your collection requires you to sign in via Facebook or Twitter. Some folks won’t use a service that is connected to a social network. Surprisingly, you can’t sign in with a Google account, which would actually make sense, given the Google Drive integration. Regardless, Podcast Gallery is a handy and refreshing take on podcatchers that smartly bridges mobile, desktop and the cloud.

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To demonstrate those improvements, here’s a comparison between the update to Podcasts (Free, Universal) and my current favorite podcasting app, RSSRadio Premium ($2.99, Universal).

Episodes to keep on the device

Episodes to keep

To start, managing downloaded episodes and choosing which episodes you want to keep on your device is important when you have limited storage space. As an example, one way to configure news podcast settings is to set your app to download only the most recent episodes, and to keep only the most recent episode.  This helps keep your list of episodes up to date, without taking up too much space on the device.  These setting would be configured differently for an episodic podcast where you want to listen to each and every episode produced.  Apple’s Podcasts offers just as good of control over your downloaded episodes as any other podcast app out there.

Download and notification settings

Download settings

This is an area where podcasts apps struggle: scheduling the downloading of new episodes. It’s not clear if Apple is breaking its own rules of when an app can be running and implement a scheduling mechanism that seamlessly downloads new episodes as soon as they are available. Other apps tend to struggle with this: they have to invent timed schedules or implement a notification system in order to wake up the app and fetch new episodes to automatically download. Apple’s download scheduler is about the best there is right now.  When a new episode is available, it just shows up.

Notification settings

When it comes to notification settings, Apple allows you to control just how and when you are notified of a new episodes availability. Many of the top podcasting apps out there offer exactly the same level of control.

Show and episode Information

Show information

“Show information” is information about a collection of episodes. You really just want to see the status of the entire list of episodes that are available, and manage how each episode is to be downloaded. Apple’s interface for managing shows is on par with what you need to get the job done.

Episode information

The same is true when it comes to each individual episode’s information: what you are looking for are things like the show notes. Apple’s Podcasts app has them right where you would expect them to be.

Now Playing user interface

Now Playing

While Apple may have updated the look of the now playing user interface to exclude the reel-to-reel tape deck, what is has implemented in its place is right on par with the rest of the podcasting app pack. You can increase the playback speed, set a timer for when to stop playback, share the currently playing episode with friends, and control where the episode is played via AirPlay. Forward, reverse, play and pause are easy to access as well. Really a nice clean implementation.

Podcast playlist

Podcast playlist

Playlists let you have control over the content you want to listen to. You may download and manage 20 different podcasts, but that does not mean you want to listen to all of them all of the time. Apple calls this new feature “My Stations,” but it really is just a playlist. The one thing that Apple did that I really like here is it added the ability to manually set the order of your playlist.  That way you can listen to your podcasts the way you want. Most podcasting apps only allow for the list to be sorted by earliest or latest.

Overall, Apple has done a really great job with the Podcasts app this time around. Rather then try to reinvent the genre, it picked the best features already out there and caught up with the pack.  There really are no gaping holes in the implementation as there were previously. In fact, Apple’s app will likely become my new go-to podcasting app. With a solid implementation for downloading new episodes, a clean Now Playing interface, and the ability to control the sort order of my playlists, there really is not much left to ask for.

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New features in the Podcasts 1.2 update include: playlists synced from iTunes now appear in the app; the ability to create automatically updating stations featuring preferred podcasts; customized stations that are stored in iCloud and automatically synced across your iCloud-enabled devices; a choice to start playing either the newest or oldest episode; and the ability to add any podcast episodes to On the Go playlists.

Apple has also toned down some of the corny design to make it look more like the iTunes app and less like an old tapedeck — perhaps related to Jony Ive’s elevation to head of software and hardware design at Apple — and a playback bug has been fixed.

Apple’s Podcasts app has been lambasted by users since its introduction last fall (see the ratings and reviews in the App Store). The updated design and functionality should be welcome news to those frustrated with the iOS Podcasts experience; that is unless they’ve moved on to any number of third-party podcast apps that have moved in to fill the void.

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And I’d like to give a special thank you to all our listeners who helped launch the first GigaOM Podcast show this year! We’re going to be even bigger and better in 2013.

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PREVIOUS EPISODES:
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There are two basic parts to each podcast, the feed and the episode.  The feed is a just a list of all of the episodes that the producer of the podcast has published on the web. Podcasting apps manage both the subscribed list of feeds and the individual episodes.

Unfortunately, the design of iOS inhibits developers from automatically downloading new episodes in the background when their podcasting app is not running.  This makes checking for updated feeds and downloading episodes a bit of a challenge.  Here are some of the techniques that podcasting apps have had to use:

Schedule - Much like an alarm clock, at scheduled time intervals, a local notification will “wake up” the podcasting app and tell it to check its subscriptions for updates.

Push – By hosting their own remote notification servers, developers can automatically send push notifications to each iOS device, and “wake up” the podcasting app to allow it to update the feed information for that podcast.

Location – More recently, a few developers have added the ability to “wake up” the podcast app when you arrive or leave a particular location.

Once awake, the podcasting app only has a short period of time to try and check if each podcast’s feed has been updated.

Apple’s new podcasting app

This was not a huge problem in the past.  Apple used to require users to tether their devices to their Macs in order to sync the latest podcast episodes.

With iOS 6, Apple’s new Podcasts (free Universal) app caters to users that no longer tether to their Mac. Users can now check for feed updates regularly, and automatically download new episodes as soon as they become available.

The one big omission is the ability to organize and create playlists for your podcasts.  If this feature is still important to you, you may want to consider one of the third-party alternatives.

The Rest of the podcasting apps

There are three apps that have been considered the best podcasting apps for a while: iCatcher ($1.99 Universal), Downcast ($1.99 Universal), and Instacast ($1.99 iPhone, $4.99 iPad).  Each of these apps offers really good support for keeping your feeds up to date, backing up subscriptions to iCloud, creating custom playlists, and with the exception of Instacast, offering a variety of full-screen gesture-based playback control options.  You can however get lost in all of the configuration options that allow you to fine-tune the behavior of each feed individually.  While mature and very stable, adding features over time has made them a bit too complex for the casual podcaster to appreciate.

On the slightly simpler side of podcasting life, there are three relatively new apps that are worth considering.  These are RSSRadio ($1.99 Universal), PocketCasts ($1.99 iPhone), and PodCruncher ($1.99 iPhone).  Two of these apps are iPhone only, so if you are looking for something that accommodates the iPad, RSSRasdio is your only alternative.  RSSRadio is also the only one of the three that offers full-screen gesture-based playback control options and backing up subscriptions to iCloud.  Each of these apps does a very good job of managing your feeds, downloading episodes, and cleaning up after themselves by deleting the episodes that you have already listened to.

Recommendation: Apple, RSSRadio and iCatcher

The most important feature for me is speed.  How fast are my subscribed list of feeds updated, and how long does it take to download and store the new episodes on my device? Connection speed is not the only factor to consider as some apps do a much better job than others by allowing multiple simultaneous downloads.  The following are the three best podcasting apps:

Simple – When you forget how Apple used to manage podcasts, its current Podcast app is actually pretty decent.  It gets the job done and has a streamlined user experience that is really pleasant to use and unmatched by any podcasting app out there.  This makes Apple’s podcasting app the app of choice for the casual podcaster.

Full Featured - When it comes to choosing between Downcasts and iCatcher, I would have to say that the latest round of updates places iCatcher slightly ahead of Downcasts.  This again is primarily due to the fact that I happen to value speed above all other features.  Instacast has fallen woefully behind and no longer compares to either Downcasts or iCatcher.

Fast - I have found that RSSRadio is one of the fastest podcasting apps when it comes to managing feeds and downloading episodes.  At the moment, no other app has been able to match it when it comes to managing those basic tasks.  And when you are in a hurry to get out the door, the advanced features are useless if you don’t have any content to play.

One thing is for certain, all six of these apps are being updated regularly by their developers.  So if you have been using your current podcasting app for a while now, try out one of the others on this list.  You may just be surprised at how good some of the these podcasting apps have become since the iOS 6 release last month.

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In addition to all of its previous features as part of the Music app, the new Podcasts has its own top podcasts charts, a sleep timer to turn off a podcast if listening in bed, share sheets for Twitter, iMessage and Mail (perhaps Facebook sharing is coming to the app in iOS 6?), and a Top Stations section to allow better discovery of podcasts by topic, not just by publisher or title.

Podcasts was quietly released Tuesday sans press release, but for heavy mobile podcast listeners, this is important. Apple’s done a decent job in its mobile software of avoiding the problem that plagues desktop iTunes, where books, music, videos, apps and more are all packed into a single app. With iOS, Music, Videos, iBooks and Apps are each individually broken out from the iTunes App. But podcasts were still buried.

That changes now. And it’s a good sign for users that Apple is helping them to more easily find and surface stuff they like a lot easier — something Apple still needs to work on within its App Store. But it’s of course not-so-good news for existing apps on the App Store that were already catering to this need.

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