Hello everyone! This is the second installment of our weekly update series.
for the Metacast podcast app. I'm Ilya Bezdilov, one of the co-founders of
Metacast, and with me is Arnab Deka, the other co-founder of Metacast. Right, so we'll try to make it in 10 minutes this time.
So let's start with what have we done since the last update, so in the last, I think, eight days.
I know, we kind of a little bit over-promised and under-delivered, which is what happens in software all the time. So we will try to promise less.
starting from today. What have you done since last update, Arna?
So I think we wanted to release the app this week. We might still release 1.19 this week, but we've been stuck in a bit of upgrade hell.
We upgraded everything like basically dependencies and a few things broke as expected.
And I think we've fixed all of them. I won't go into all the details.
Aside from that, we have new sharing URLs in the beta version already and we should be releasing this version this week. Nice.
Yeah, never say... Will. Never say the word will.
So on the web app side, I've been working on caching quite a bit, because as a reminder, we were hammered by LLM bots crowding our website.
And we needed to protect our budgets and not spend too much. So we were implementing Cloudflare in front of the website.
So that work is mostly done, just some tiny bits remaining. I've also been stuck in an upgrade hell on the web app side. We use a framework called Tailwind CSS and another framework called Daisy UI for our website.
Pretty significant upgrade that broke everything. Basically, for the first few hours after I changed the versions, I was just stuck with figuring out how to make the damn thing to even build the website.
Yeah, and then while I was there, I also replaced the logo and changed the colors a little bit. Yeah, the website will look differently in a couple of days after we make the change.
And yeah, I've also been doing some changes to prepare for the new sharing URLs that we'll talk about in a moment. Yeah, another thing that I guess happened is I've not been feeling super well last few days.
And it's not like sickness or anything. It's just, you know, just like feeling tired and kind of a bit of apathy. And it's kind of hard to be creative and productive when you feel that way. So yeah, that's also sort of, I guess, part of life.
and part of a release schedule for Metacast. But you'll be here in another three weeks or so and everything will be awesome.
Yes. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to visiting you, man. That'll be fun. We'll talk in our more in-depth episodes because we have eight minutes left or actually six minutes left in this episode. Let's go.
All right, so what are you working on in the next seven days?
so yeah so we'll release first goal i think 1.19 release hopefully in the next couple of days again new sharing urls we fixed all those broken links in android
like OPML and FAQs. Lots of people told us via email and Reddit that those links are not working. Those are fixed.
And then once that is done, I'll start working on summaries. And Ilya, I think you will start working on creator-provided transcripts.
In the backend, I'll work on the mobile app for that. We'll try to squeeze in a pairing session and get the new Metacast logo, which will be up on the website very soon, along with the rebrand.
Just the logo in the mobile app. That's all we'll do. We'll put that in.
Yeah, you know, it's a bit of an aside, but we have time for this episode. I was listening to, I think it was Lena Werner on the Lenny's podcast.
And it was called something like top 10 growth mistakes startups make or something like that. And she said there that startups doing rebrands are basically doing it wrong.
Which I generally agree, which is why we're not putting like... I think you decided to take on the rebrand because we were upgrading all these libraries and everything was broken anyway.
And otherwise, it'll double our work at some point. So might as well take a couple of days and do it. Yeah. Libra itself probably took like half a day. Exactly. But it's a broken library. Is that really the problem? Yeah.
Cool. Yeah, so also on the web app side, it will be actually most invisible, this stuff that I'll be working on caching. It's, again, to save costs and to optimize the loading speed a little bit.
But by the time you hear from us next, we hope to have
the new sharing experience on the web app. So basically the flow will be like that.
When you share a link from the mobile app, you send it to someone, right? If they have Metacast, they'll be able to tap the button and open Metacast directly from the web page. If they open it on the desktop...
or if they open it on a mobile phone that doesn't have Metacast, we will have some experience to help users download the app and open the podcast and listen to it in Metacast.
That deep link. Yeah, deep link. We'll also add QR code.
So that if you open it on desktop, you can easily get it on your phone. Yeah, QR codes are the next big thing. The next big thing five years ago. Five years ago, yeah.
Well, five years ago, we didn't even start Metacast, so let's be fair to ourselves. No, no, I mean, like, generally, QR codes were the big thing, like, five years ago. We're just waking up. We're seeing the usefulness of it, I think, for this specific use case, so we'll add it, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. That's it for the app updates and the last section of this podcast is the recommendations of what we are listening to and we do this in 30 seconds with a timer that goes off loud right so i'm gonna
start the timer last time i failed okay so i have two two recommendations super quick um everything every day uh that podcast calendar reform really cool ideas about different ways we could have our
calendar setup that avoids all this leap year and all the weirdnesses and all that. Very interesting ideas.
And then Andy Roddick has a podcast called Served. He did the top 10 greatest tennis matches of all time. Highly recommend. We'll have links in the show notes.
Whoa, I did it.
Exactly in 30 seconds. So I think you cheat because you actually, because you can see the timer. Yes, please show me the timer. Hold on, hold on. Let me just. Yeah, this is an audio only podcast, but we can see each other.
So this time I'll be able to track it. Shall I start it?
So I hate to admit this, but I regularly listen to the podcast called Under the Radar.
which is done by two people, Marco Armand, the creator of Metacast. Not Metacast, Overcast. Overcast. Yeah, and his friend creator of Pedometer++.
And in the last episode, they talk about the importance of battery life for mobile applications. And yeah, I really enjoyed that part. They talk about the specifics, the technical details. It's a really cool episode for the technically inclined. That sounds like a fun one. Yeah.
And hey, you did it within 30 seconds. Yay. Yeah, because this time I could... see the timer all right all right and we managed to record this in less than 10 minutes which is an amazing achievement it's almost like the achievement of the year hopefully it's not just for the year okay
Let's go. See you next week. Bye.