[From Darcy Boese, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada] Hi Sammy! I'm a pretty technical-type user, but I for one tend to
avoid both Windows and Macintosh systems. Basically I sit at my
(Linux) workstation all day long, and when I get home I prefer to
stay away from the computers. My feelings towards this are probably
even stronger, since my boss insists I'm available on-call 24/7/365
in case of problems.
When my boss got my a new iPhone 3G, I started using it only grudgingly. In order to even activate the thing, I had to sync it to a spare Vista workstation three rooms away from my desk. And so I only have a chance to sync my phone with iTunes occasionally.
Once consequence, the "podcasting" feature of iTunes is all but useless for me. There's simply no point for me to even try to listen to any regular podcasts on my iPhone, because I just get very far behind, it's not possible for me to keep up with them.
So when Apple decided to blacklist the "Podcaster" http://www.nextdayoff.com/ program from the AppStore, I was very much annoyed. That was my opportunity, snatched away from me before I could even give it a try! The basic premise of that program, you can download the podcasts directly to your iPhone without going through iTunes. Their reasoning for denying the application was that it "duplicated the functionality of iTunes".
I'm sorry Apple, but YOUR idea of "duplication" is not MY idea of "duplication". Without a program such as this, the functionality does not even EXIST for me. It's attitudes such as this that makes me dis-recommend a DRM-crippled smartphone such as the iPhone. I would go so far as to recommend users jailbreak their phones, simply to be able to access the promised functionality that they'd been sold in the first place. And personally, I've started recommending Palm smartphones to anybody asking me what the iPhone is like.
Fortunately, the developer of the banned Podcasting program has a website http://www.podcaster.fm where you can listen to podcasts, and for a short time they will let a limited number of users install the program, WITHOUT having to jailbreak their phones. I'm crossing my fingers that all of this will be worth my trouble.