Ah, iTunes 4.9. Of course, everyone read the announcements on my news pages, in my news RSS feed and on this blog stating that Feeder would be supporting the iTunes RSS extensions, and tons of people haven’t flooded my inbox ever since to ask if it will be implemented, when it will be implemented, if there will be a charge, etc. Yeah, right. 😉 Seeing the futility of my actions, I’ve now plastered notices around Feeder’s product pages, but I don’t hold out much hope.

Actually, it’s great to hear how many people are interested in this and now I’ve got to grapple with the rather plain specification released by Apple yesterday and translate it into a smoothy and silky user interface that doesn’t look like you have to type the same thing at least three times in three different ways.

A few opinions popped up on the web about these iTunes extensions yesterday. Dave Winer thinks it’s “funky” in that it duplicates lots of information, Edd Dumbill thinks it’s somewhat disappointing and even NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons thinks it could be better and will be revised.

I agree, but for now, we’re stuck with it. I want to be constructive about this. Some of the tags are great and no problem at all: explicit, duration and block. I can live with the predefined categories and understand that the images need to be a different size to fit into the CD artwork style boxes in the iTunes Music Store.

The first problem is that tag names which match those in RSS make it confusing to users and annoying to differentiate in the user interface. I’ve already had a few emails about this. With that in mind, “image” would be better named “artwork” and the “category” tag would be better as “genre”.

And then there’s the whole duplication thing. In particular, we now have two more versions of description at both a channel (i.e. feed or podcast) and item (i.e. episode) level: subtitle and summary. Subtitle is a short description, must be plain text and no more than 255 characters. Summary is a longer version, also plain text and up to 4000 characters in length. The subtitle appears in the lists and the summary appears alongside the artwork and in the Info window. You can’t omit the existing RSS description field, because existing podcatchers and newsreaders use that.

I think it would have been better if they added subtitle by itself and derived the summary by stripping the HTML from the RSS description or better still by taking the HTML description as is. I suspect all this duplication is because a) the contents of your feed is going to be stored in a database and / or b) the iTMS can’t handle HTML in its existing fields. Apple normally seems really good at taking existing technology and wrapping it up in user-friendly ways so you don’t need to worry about what’s going on underneath, but in this case the inner workings of the iTMS seem to be laid bare.

I hope the spec changes and will gladly rework to the new spec. In the meantime, I’ve really got no choice but to plough on. At least with Feeder’s templates, you can choose which fields to show and omit anything you don’t need. I’m also looking at ways to reduce the amount of duplicate data entry required. More information about how iTunes handles podcasts that don’t have these tags would also be useful. I think it’s early days and this will all come good in the end!

iTunes 4.9 is out, I’ve been checking out the podcasting features and it looks great. I thought I’d post some screenshots – click the images to see full-size versions.

It all starts at the iTunes Music Store. There’s a new Podcasts genre which works much like the rest of iTMS except everything is currently free.

The new Podcast entry in the source list holds all your subscribed podcasts. The small window on top is what you see when you click on the Info button to the right of the podcast or show:

The bottom right has buttons to unsubscribe and a settings button which takes you to iTunes new Podcasts preferences. Shown here:

Finally when playing a podcast, an AAC audio file can be set up to have chapters using a new application, currently in beta, called ChapterTool – at present this is a command line tool, but (totally unsubstantiated prediction alert!) probably a sign of things to come in something like, oooh, GarageBand. Anyway, when a podcast has chapters you can navigate them using a little chapter button next to the audio display:

Finally, I mentioned in a previous post that Feeder would support the new “pod” namespace extension that Apple would release with iTunes 4.9. It turns out this is called the “itunes” namespace and has a ton of stuff in it. The information for this is available in the iTMS.

Feeder will be supporting these extra tags in Feeder 1.2, which should be out, well, as soon as it’s ready. I’ve yet to do a detailed design and estimate and I’m hoping to put some other stuff in that release too, so expect it in a month or two.

Feeder gets another mention in the 24 June issue of MacUser in an excellent feature, “Promoting Your Website”:

A blog may be the easiest way to create an RSS feed for your site, but any site can have an RSS feed containing your chosen content […] There are a number of applications that allow you to create and update RSS feeds, but one of the best is Feeder from Reinvented Software. Feeder allows you to quickly update your RSS feed and upload it to your server via FTP. It enables you to create templates for feeds, embed images and preview your feed before uploading.

It was mentioned on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code today that iTunes 4.9 (the one with podcasting support built in) is to introduce support for a new “pod” XML namespace to extend RSS 2.0 and add tags that will work with iTunes, including a synopsis, the option to be excluded from the iTunes Music Store, an explicit tag and more.

It sounds like iTunes 4.9 will be out within the next 2 weeks or so. The specification for this namespace hasn’t been published yet so I don’t entirely know what’s involved, but Feeder users can be sure these tags will be supported in future versions of Feeder as soon as possible.

Like a lot of things, with syndication formats it all seems to come out in the wash. Some of you may know that there are quite a few different kinds of XML feeds out there. One family consists of the RSS 0.91, 0.92 and 2.0 formats. RSS 1.0 is almost a different format (based on RDF) and there’s also RSS 1.1 in the works to follow on from that. Plus, for something completely different there is Atom.

Confused? You should be. The most recent comparison I could find is here and that also describes the politics involved, while an older (the age only really affects Atom and RSS 1.1) but more comprehensive comparison is made here.

In a nutshell, RSS 2.0 is simpler than RSS 1.x while Atom is also a publishing API allowing, for example, desktop apps to integrate with a blog – although there’s also the MetaWeblog API which is based on RSS and does much the same thing. Blogger uses Atom almost exclusively, I believe, while most blogging tools provide RSS feeds in some format or both of RSS and Atom. Practically everything else appears to use one of the RSS flavours. All of these formats can be extended with XML modules to the point that an RSS 2.0 feed can look almost identical to an RSS 1.0 feed, but Atom is a completely different animal.

I really don’t care much about the format politics. It seems most of the arguments centre around the semantics and the togetherness of the specifications rather than what they provide users of the feeds, which is what wins it in the end. Last year it seemed that Atom would supersede RSS as The Format To Use but with the emergence of podcasting, thanks to the Enclosure element in RSS 2.0, RSS seems to be on top again. Atom types will point out that the Atom link element can be used in the same way, and that you can have multiple enclosure-type links for each entry. That’s all very well, but I don’t know a “podder” app that supports Atom yet and the more flexible things are at the back end the more difficult it becomes to present and manage in the front end.

That’s where I think RSS 2.0 has the advantage as the use of feeds extends beyond the blogging world. RSS 2.0 is pretty simple and all the technomarvels in the world cannot beat that. I don’t see Atom or RDF going away – far from it – but I do see the three formats carving out their respective niches.