Feeder 1.3.5 is now available and this includes support for the new iTunes podcast categories Apple introduced with iTunes 6.0.5 last week.

Feeder will upgrade any existing categories using the same mappings as FeedBurner, so all you need to do is publish your feed again. You may want to review the new categories to see if any of those fit your podcast better – you can do this in the iTunes section of the Info drawer.

Apple says it could take up to two weeks for changes to your categories to take effect in the iTunes Music Store, so bear that in mind when checking your changes. It also appears to be taking some time for the new categories to be populated, but I understand Apple is working on that.

FeedValidator has also been updated to support the new categories, so if FeedValidator says your feed is valid and you are having problems with the iTunes Music Store, your best course of action is to check Apple’s Producing Podcasts discussion forum, otherwise please get in touch.

Apple has reorganised their podcast categories with the release of iTunes 6.0.5 and podcasters listed in the iTunes Music Store will have received an email informing them of the new categories.

Expect a Feeder update soon to deal with these changes. Thanks. 😀

Podcasting in iTunes is one year old today. How the last year has flown! Feeder has been there since the beginning (and even before), it hasn’t always been a smooth ride but we got there in the end. It’s also interesting to see from the post I just linked to how much iTunes has changed in that short time.

Apple has a special page on iTunes to celebrate with a lot of the original podcasts on there. It’s great to see Feeder-using TWiT and the MacCast present and still going strong, along with a number of other really cool podcasts that show what the medium should be all about! 😀

Templates in Feeder serve two purposes. Firstly, they control which fields you see when editing items and secondly, they can contain default values for fields.

The idea is borrowed from page layout applications and the like, which help you to know what content is needed for a particular purpose and where to place it.

While there is only so much you can do to control the appearance of your feed in the various online and desktop feed readers, RSS feeds have so many different uses they almost resemble a blank piece of paper. Templates help you to know exactly what is needed.

Feeder comes with a number of templates suited to various tasks such as a news feed, a podcast and so on. These standard templates can be easily customized and you can create your own.

Using Templates

You normally choose a template when creating your feed, but you can change the template for a particular feed at any time by choosing Item > Template from the menu or by clicking the Template button in the editor windows.

Once there, you can choose an existing template from the pop-up menu, or click the Customize button.

Custom Templates

When editing a custom tempate, you can check fields to show them in the editor or enter default values in the fields themselves. The default values will be used even if the field isn’t displayed.

Note also the Show pop-up. This allows you to see fields from RSS extensions – at present only the iTunes extension, and mix and match these in your feed.

Global Templates

If you have a custom template you wish to use for other feeds, you can click the Save As… button, give the template a name and it will then appear in the pop-up menu of templates.

You can edit these global templates in Feeder’s Template preferences.

Apparently, Feeder 1.3.3 has 1,843 more lines of code than RapidWeaver – 60,273 in total. That doesn’t include any third-party frameworks or my own Reinvented.framework, which is generic between my applications (mostly handles software registration and some other stuff, maybe not all used). That framework contains 3,043 lines of code.

Who’d have thunk? OK, maybe nobody but me!

In reality, that sort of difference is negligible. Actually, in reality it’s a completely meaningless figure and subject to many variables, but it is good, clean, pointless fun to find out about this stuff.

For example, such a count could depend on how you do your brackets. I do them on one line unless it’s a method definition, a condition that spans two lines or I simply don’t feel like it:

    if ([name length]) {
        return name;
    }
    else {
        return [[[self localFilename] lastPathComponent] 
                   stringByDeletingPathExtension];
    }

But many people do them like this:

    if ([name length]) 
    {
        return name;
    }
    else 
    {
        return [[[self localFilename] lastPathComponent] 
                   stringByDeletingPathExtension];
    }

So that could add a few thousand lines to my count. 😉

Perhaps more telling is this: Feeder 1.0 was 24,679 lines. How it’s grown!