iTunes 4.9 coming soon - with podcast support
Apple is notorious for its secrecy, which as a journalist is rather frustrating. As such, much of what the company releases comes to the market as somewhat of a surprise.
Well for once the company has let the cat out of the bag early. While at the Wall street Journal “D” conference in California, Steve Jobs decided to go public on some of the new features that will be bolted into the next release of iTunes.
iTunes 4.9 will retain all the usual features of the iTunes app, but will also have the facility to read and download from RSS feeds, meaning that iTunes will now be able to directly download podcasts, without the need for external applications such as iPodder.
Depending on the implementation, I think this could be a very good thing in principle - iTunes has mass-market recognition and penetration, and thus should open up the world of podcasting to a much wider audience that would otherwise never know of its existence.
