On Saturday, I wrote about Podcaster, the iPhone podcast-listening app which Apple refused to add to the iPhone App Store on the grounds that it duplicated functionality in iTunes. I said it sounded cool. And I now know I was right–because I’ve been enjoying using it tonight.
As reported by Sarah Perez over on ReadWriteWeb, Podcaster developer Alex Sokirynsky has used the iPhone’s “ad-hoc” distribution feature, designed to help enterprises install custom apps, to make Podcaster available outside the walled garden that is the App Store. I’m not clear how he’s doing this–I thought that ad-hoc distribution permitted installation of an app on no more than a hundred iPhones. But I followed Sokirynsky’s instructions and ended up with a working copy of Podcaster on my phone.
I like to call today’s Napster “Napster,” since it has little in common with the