Outside of reading numerous different tech blogs on a daily basis, I keep up with my technology news through podcasts. There are a lot of great tech podcasters out there that not only keep you up to date on the latest and greatest, but also offer a huge amount of insight into the tech world. Most of the time, I use my iPhone to store and play them in my car or while I am out and about.
But, I don’t always want to use my iPhone to play podcasts, especially when I am at my desk working on my computer. Yes, I could use iTunes and just play them through it, but today I am going to talk about another alternative. I came across Podcast Gallery about a week ago and it is a web based app where I can find and play a variety of podcasts. It actually is a pretty nifty alternative for those of you that are looking for something that is on the web. Let’s take a more in depth look at it.
Getting Started
To really take advantage of all the features, you are going to want to create an account with Podcast Gallery. You can do this by signing in with either your Twitter or Facebook credentials. By doing this, you can start to bookmark podcasts that you like or want to listen to later and you can sign in from any web browser to find them at another time.
Exploring and Listening
As you start to look around for podcasts that you want to listen to there are a handful of ways you can do this. On the front page there are a variety of popular podcasts that you can choose from or you can also use their Explore menu and you will see different categories that you can select to find other ones. The other option would be to use their search function where you can type in a name of a podcast to see if it is in Podcast Gallery.
Searching podcasts for ones that you are interested in
Once you find one that you are interested in listening to, there are a variety of options for you to choose from as far as listening and saving the audio. You can start to listen to a specific episode right from within Podcast Gallery, or you also have the option to save it to your Google Drive, Dropbox, or download it to your computer. There are also links so that you can get it in iTunes, the podcast’s webpage, or you can subscribe to their RSS feed. There is also a button where you can add the station to your collection, so that you can come back later and it will be saved for you.
Options to listen or save episodes
Interesting Concept
When I first discovered Podcast Gallery, I had to refrain from comparing it to using my iPhone for the same purpose. I had to stay in the mind frame of reviewing this as strictly as a web application and how well it worked for that purpose. When I was able to do that and judge it from that perspective, I found that this was a very good site. I really liked how they gave you the features to download podcasts to cloud apps like Google Drive and Dropbox as well as being able to download them onto your computer. I also liked how I could save stations on Podcast Gallery so that I could get to them later, which is what I love about the web, in that I can access things any where as long as their is an internet connection.
The site overall was very easy to use and I felt like I was able to get all of the podcasts that I wanted to. Now, from my perusing of Podcast Gallery, they don’t have all of the podcasts that are on iTunes, but they do have a pretty good selection. I don’t think you can go wrong with finding ones that you will be interested in or have already been listening to.
Final Thoughts
The only thing that has me nervous for this app is, will people use something like this instead of other, more mobile options out there? There are ways that you could get episodes on your smartphone from Podcast Gallery, using their cloud features, but will people bother doing that? At the same time, I can definitely see this app meeting a need for a group of people. One thing I would love to see to make it a little more attractive would be to see some kind of social features built in. I also don’t think it would hurt to have a smartphone app that can sync with the web app.
Those are my two cents for what it is worth. What do you guys think: would this be an app you would use or do you already have your own way that you get and listen to podcasts? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.