layout: post title: iTunes 4.9 has podcasting, RSS, and a phone created: 1119974028 categories:

• Music
• Mac

What's going on? Microsoft releases an extension under a Creative Commons license, and Apple gives us a PDF download? Hmm, I'm not impressed. Why couldn't we have had a "podcast" namespace, instead of the Apple-specific "itunes"? I'd ask Apple what I asked Dean and Amar when they were on stage: where's the community process? But I guess we got the answer already -- there isn't one.

Update: Marc does good pointers to Dare and Danny...and thinks we should all support Yahoo's mediaRSS.

Below are some round up links to iTunes podcasting support.

• Michael Gartenberg: iTunes 4.9 is here with Podcasting support but wait... there's more: "In short Apple's done for podcasting the same thing they did with RSS in Tiger. They made it usable by the mass markets and at the same time, they have the what is going to be the most widely used podcasting client on both Macintosh and Windows and that will make their directory the one to be listed in."
• Scripting News: Apple has defined a namespace for...: "Apple has defined (PDF) a namespace for podcast info. Just took a brief look. Net-net, it would have been a really good idea for them to get a community review, like Microsoft did, before shipping. We could have done a lot better."
• walkah.net: itunes phone?: "while there are a couple other posts I've been meaning to do lately... this little snippet caught my eye and has me all excited this morning. from macrumors.com"

Apple should have released this at Gnomedex. Maybe that would have just blown everyone's mind. Too...much...new...stuff.

Update 2: I'm going to keep collecting some feedback down here.

• Edd Dumbill: A first look at iTunes RSS extensions :"From the point of view of XML and the web, iTunes RSS extensions are somewhat disappointing. From a professional point of view, I'd say this looks rather embarrassing: Apple clearly don't have enough people who really understand XML."