Usually I post all my code experiments and tools publicly (usually on Github, but that may change) but for some reason I never published this, but after a couple changes I might.
I don't always listen to a lot of podcasts, but for some stretches of time in the last couple years I listened to a few, and unlike most people (or so I heard) I usually did that on my Windows PC, while doing other things, and not on a mobile phone, so all the "common" podcast player apps were out.
The mp3s are downloaded or streamed (no huge preference) in foobar2000, but keeping track of where I was (episode-wise, not in the episode) proved difficult.
For a couple years I had used Juice
- but it was last updated in 2006 and at some point it could not connect to modern TLS hosts anymore. I quickly looked into just patching it, but that proved difficult. It's a python app, and then an ancient SSL version and... well, in the end I decided on rewriting it.
So I ended up with a GUI app in C++/Qt and a backend (I have a PHP version and a Golang version).
It looks like this:
It has its flaws (like being single-threaded and stalling while it downloads something) but it was purely an MVP that got a few more features.
It really only tracks a list of podcasts, then a list of episodes per podcast, gives me a download link, a link to the episode post, some timestamps, and I can set a status to New/In Progress/Done. That's it. Having it local only would have been fine, but of course I had to add an API.
I've not used it in a couple months, but it's there when I go back to listening to podcasts. And it also tells me where to continue if I want to.
When I use it again I will probably also fix the two things that I am not happy with: Finish the Golang rewrite so I have one less PHP app to update, and move to SQLite for easier backups (it's using Postgres right now).
But now I have access to a Mac I kinda also want to get it to build there.
Not that I see myself working on it in the immediate future, but it's a rare case of building something just for myself I'd been using daily for a while.