User interface design evolves year after year, and 2019 with the transition from iOS12 to iOS13 will be no different and bring a good amount of freshness to our devices.

One of the foundations of Castamatic design was to have an app that would feel “at home” in the context of the device and its OS, with the least possible amount of custom elements that can confuse the user and steer his attention away from the actual functionality.

This is the main reason behind this summer’s release: a complete refresh of the UI that will look great on both the current and the next versions of iOS, with a couple of new features that have been frequently requested from the users.

The n’1 requested feature was to have favorite episodes. Our favorite shows produce tons of episodes; we love to listen to them all as soon as they are published and then move on to the next one. But sometimes we want to store some precious gems that touch some arguments that have some particular meaning for us, so we can get back to them sometime in the future.

This has always been cumbersome with most of podcast players on the market and consisted in making a manual playlist and moving each episode that we want to keep to that playlist. Or even worse keep some text note with the favorite episodes numbers or exporting the audio files to a folder on our devices.

With Castamatic 5 you can touch the star icon at the bottom of the player, marking the current episode as a favorite. You can access the same feature in every list of episodes by swiping the episode’s cell to the right or via 3D touch / long press. Favorite episodes will be stored in a special playlist that you can access at any time.

Another frequently requested feature was localization in languages other than English. This required a big amount of work with new code and obviously the translation of each and every text string in the app.

I’m proud to announce that with this release Castamatic is 100% ready to be translated in foreign languages, and Italian is the first translation to be available to the public. New languages will come in the next releases, so if Castamatic is your favorite player and you’d love to see it available to all users in your country who are not so well versed in English, please drop me a note on Twitter (@castamatic).

Have a great summer with Castamatic 5 and your favorite podcasts!