What's new in v2024.5

Let's unpack what's new in the latest version of miaocast that will start rolling out over the next few days.

Widgets

Ever since the first beta release of miaocast, users have been asking for widget support. Now you can finally add widgets from miaocast to your home screen for quick access.

With this release, I've added support for 3 types of widgets:

• Podcast shortcut widget: directly open a particular podcast from your home screen
• Player widget: quick access to podcast playback controls
• Queue widget: see and control what's currently playing and episodes in your up next queue

On Android 12 and above, those widgets uses the color scheme of your home screen by default so that they match your home screen but you can also turn on content aware dynamic theme so that the widget adapts to the currently playing podcast. To turn on content aware dynamic theme for widgets, open settings screen then select "Widget" option.

Browse Mode

If you follow lots of podcasts like me then you might feel overwhelmed by all the new episodes that are hitting your inbox every day. Getting through all the new content one by one to decide which to add to your queue and which to skip can take a lot of time. With v2024.5 release, you can now use browse mode to quickly get through either your inbox or a podcast's backlog.

To enter browse mode, look for the ⚡ icon on Inbox screen or podcast details screen. Once in browse mode, you can touch anywhere on the screen to bring up the quick action dial and then swipe to select an action to perform. See this screencast (Youtube) for a quick demo of this new feature.

Beside the quick control dial, you can also use the bottom bar to perform even more actions on the episode.

With the introduction of browse mode, Inobx Filter and Category Filter are now displayed as floating action buttons on Inbox and Subscription screens respectively.

Episode Links

With this update, miaocast will also extract links from show notes and present them in a dedicated tab on episode details screen and the now playing screen.

Links from show notes are now much easier to access in this new tab and any preview images associated with the links are also presented along with the title and description for the link when available.

Unplayed Episode Count

For those of you want to keep tabs on all your subscriptions, miaocast now offer the option to turn on unplayed episode badge on subscriptions tab and folders.

To turn this on for subscriptions tab, click on the top bar sort icon to bring up the options sheet and turn on "Show unplaye episode count". You can also turn this setting on either when you create a folder or edit an existing folder.

Thanks to user Maximum-effort1388 from reddit for this feature request.

Season Selector

The app now shows a dropdown menu to select a particular season of the podcast to display so you can get to the right episode quickly:

Other bug fixes and improvements

• Performance imporvement when refreshing podcasts
• Fix skip forward / backward setting duration format
• Added option to increase or decrease playback speed by 10% in addition to the presets
• Episode row now expand consistently (just like in Inbox where if you mark an episode as played, the next episode will be expanded automatically)
• You can now turn on settings (Settings -> Episodes or on podcast screen) to automatically add downloaded episodes to queue
  • thanks to Jason for this feature suggestion

miaocast+ pricing

Lastly, I've updated the miaocast+ subscription pricing to use purchasing power parity pricing model so that the price is much more reasonable outside of US. Additionally, the anual plan is now about 50% off compared to monthly plan instead of 20% off.

If you want to try miaocast+, I still have plenty of promo code for 3 months free trials, so please shoot me an email if you'd like a few of those promo codes.

Feedback, bugs & feature requests

As always, if you have any feedback, feature requests or bug reports, you can reach me at feedback@miaocast.com. If you've enjoyed the app then please leave it a review in the Play store to help the app grow.

Cheers!

Xiaoming