It's Not You, It's...Well, Mostly It IS You

Most of us have had that relationship that on paper should be great, but there's just something not quite right to us.  When trying to explain it, all we can really settle on is "It's just not working out."  Such has been my experience with doubleTwist.

I had high hopes for doubleTwist.  I had expected it to work for me in a similar manner to how I used iTunes with my iPod Touch.  However, after a week of using the program, it became obvious to me that it just wasn't going to make me happy.  There were too many things that I could point to and mention how it kind of bothered me.  None of these things were huge in and of themselves or what we would call "show stoppers," but they were nagging at me.  The performance was slower than I would have liked.  The podcasts were organized in a way that bothered me.  I had to manually delete the completed podcasts.  Then came the final straw: I provided feedback.  More appropriately, I received a response to feedback I had left in their forums.  The response was basically: "All of these are by design and can't be changed by the user."  I understand that engineers can get a specific work flow stuck in their minds (pot, kettle. kettle, pot), but to not even provide an option to order the podcasts in a way that the user might want? That, to me, is unacceptable.

So starting this week, I cut ties with doubleTwist.  It was an easy move to make at the time because that morning, for whatever reason, my podcasts decided to not sync through. So I listened to my podcasts by directly downloading them to the computer. Then I started looking in to other options.  The first thing that I really looked in to and tried was Google Listen.  It's an app on the phone, but it's also manageable through the Google Reader site.  This accomplishes one of the reasons for using a computer-based syncing option for the podcasts: Making the podcasts discoverable and subscribe-able through something other than the phone itself.  Mobile devices, in my opinion, are great for consuming certain content.  They tend to be less than great for discovering content to be consumed.  Integration with Google Reader lets me subscribe to podcasts through a web interface with a keyboard and a mouse.  Much better.  Listen, by default has one of the same small issues that doubleTwist had: it orders things by default from newest to oldest.  However, at least they provide you with an option to queue the files up in a specific order.  Not ideal, but it works.  I'm hoping that one of the new options I found in Reader will take care of the default case for me.  You're able to organize items there from oldest to newest.  I'll let you know how that turns out.

The app itself isn't perfect yet.  They need to provide play controls at the lock screen so I can pause and re-start the audio without having to unlock the phone and in some cases re-enter the application.  By the way, this is one way in which Android is (at least currently) superior to Apple's mobile OS.  I'm able to run an application in the background and not be locked in to the application as long as I want it to hear it.  Other than that and some small navigation issues (it's not yet immediately obvious to me which screen I need to be at for the different functions I want it to do), it's been working pretty well for me.  I'm able to set options in the app to not download items unless the phone is on wireless (using the home networking as opposed to hitting Verizon) and plugged in (not draining down the battery).  Throughout the day, it will occasionally hit the server to discover if there are any new items forthcoming, but it will wait to download them until the two conditions are met.  A nice solution instead of syncing, in my opinion.

So, that's it, then, doubleTwist.  I suppose I'll only see you again when I have some new purchased/ripped music that I want to be putting on the phone. I'm sure it will be an awkward and uncomfortable five or so minutes. Just like a real relationship.