iTunes podcasting support leaves me wanting

Regarding comment #4 by ThePete, when you connect your iPod to your Mac, you have the option at that time to disable calendar sync.

Of course not - as you would be able to tell if clicked on my listed URL. It's not an 'obvious shortcoming', rather a minor itch and hey - guess what, it can be scratched! iTunes is far from perfect, but I'd rather see it rewritten in Cocoa so it can take advantage of OS X's newer technologies (especially the accessibility stuff, so blind people can use it). I would say that's a bit more important than something that could be fixed with an Applescript.

I agree that the failure to delete played podcasts is a big problem. To add insult to injury, the iTunes Help files aren't very helpful on the subject of managing podcasts in iTunes. Hopefully Apple will fix the documentation as well as the underlying problems.

Al, sure I could write an Applescript to do this, but why should I? This is an obvious shortcoming in the UI and I think iTunes would be a better program with this slight addition.

I hope you aren't one of those folks that things everything from Apple is flawless.

How about, instead of whining, you actually do something about it? It takes half an hour to learn enough Applescript to accomplish a solution. Why are you moaning about a free product when you can implement a fix yourself quite easily?

I'd had several issues with the Podcasting section as well. Other than the video podcasts not getting placed properly, I've been most annoyed that when a podcast download fails out, iTunes often won't notice and will just accept the incomplete files, then if you removed the incomplete file, there is no mechanism in iTunes to re-download a podcast. The coupled with some fun UI stuff just makes it such a drag compared to the rest of the program.

And yes, video playback really sucks compared to how QT plays back the indentical files.

The program needs an overhaul instead of a feature-add every few months.

It is impossible to contact one of you contributors so I'll post it in here.

Not terribly new but old funny apple support calls.

http://colo.slacker.com/apple-support-calls//

Smart Playlists are your friend.

Simply create a live updating smart playlist that will 'catch' all your podcasts then create a second smart playlist whose 'playlist is smart playlist 1' and 'play count is greater than 0'

Now you've got all your podcasts in one place and all the podcasts to be deleted in another.

Yes, there are a lot of problems with the way iTunes handles podcasts/vlogs.

There should be an easy way to see the latest podcasts which have been added.

There are some podcasts that are timely I want to listen to right away. There are others I can listen to anytime, so I don't want to iTunes to stop getting the podcast just because I haven't listened to it recently. That is really, really annoying. Particularly if I miss a podcast.

And I should have the option of keeping some podcasts on my ipod and deleting others.

Video playback in iTunes seems to be much more sluggish and unresponsive compared with QuickTime. Does anyone else notice this?