A few weeks ago I had a dream to make getting my podcasts from Google Reader on to my mobile or mp3 player easier.
Now I didn’t write anything that runs on my mobile (and I haven’t got an iPhone!) but I did write a little Silverlight 4 application that makes things a lot faster to save a handful of podcasts in one go.
I still manage my podcasts in Google Reader itself.
But if there are a number of podcasts I want to download then I have to individually “Save Link As…” on each one.
But now all I do is Star the ones I want to listen to.
Run my Silverlight application and log in and start downloading.
Voila – all my podcasts get downloaded in one go.
Some of the features of the application include,
- MVVM implementation
- Calling into the Google Reader API (best resource I found was, here, thanks Martin)
- Using James’ JSON.Net library to process the result returned by the Google Reader API – great work on this James, appreciated it.
- Nice pattern for updating the UI thread during asynchronous processing (borrowed from here, thanks Jeremy)
- Some Silverlight 4 features that made this all possible,
If you want to check out the code you can get it here – you’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to open the solution.
You can also go here to try it out for yourself – you’ll need the Silverlight 4.0 Beta runtime.