Kastlar

Highlights of changes in 24.02.0:

• Kasts has been ported to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6.
• The color scheme can now be selected manually.
• Fixed several bugs related to images and playback controls.
• Network checks for metered connections can now be fully disabled.
• Updating podcasts should now be significantly faster on slow hardware.

New features and bugfixes in this release:

• The header bar player controls have been redesigned, partly based on the design of Elisa. The header bar is resizeable and can be fully collapsed to just a minimal toolbar.
• The left sidebar menu in desktop mode has been redesigned. It's now using similar buttons to the ones used in the bottom navigation bar in mobile mode.
• The audio backend has been re-written from scratch. It can now handle multiple backends: libVLC, gstreamer and Qt Multimedia. Kasts will use libVLC as default backend when available, which should solve common issues: volume control is now available through the main toolbar and seeking should no longer make the audio hang.
• The settings menu was ported to the new form components.
• Support for chapter images was added.
• Timestamps mentioned in episode descriptions are now clickable, which will make the audio jump to that point in the episode.
• Images in headers are now clickable. This will open a fullscreen view of the image in question.
• The subscribe button is now disabled when a podcast has just been added.
• Several issues with right-to-left language layouts were solved.

• The interface is simplified by only showing one page at a time instead of adding columns, and by combining the podcast page with the podcast episode list page.
• The podcast and episode info pages are improved by adding a button toolbar (moving actions out of the app header) and by reworking the information layout.
• A sleep timer has been implemented.
• The app will now remember the position and size of its window.
• Kasts now has the ability to push all local episode states to the sync server.
• A setting has been added to tell Kasts how many recent episodes should be marked as unplayed when adding a new podcast.
• Several small UI bugs and glitches were solved.

• The podcast update routine has been completely overhauled, solving several bugs. It's now using multithreading, and it will also update existing episode information.
• General improvements were made to make sure that the app fits well on small screens in both portrait and landscape mode.
• Episode images will now be retrieved from id3v2tag if available.
• New episodes will be added to the queue in ascending chronological order (rather than descending) per podcast.
• A switch has been introduced to optionally adjust the time left on episodes based on the current playback rate.
• The episode details pages now have a context action to go straight to the list of episodes for that podcast.
• It's now possible to sync with custom GPodder servers (i.e. other than the official gpodder.net instance).
• Podcasts can now again be updated even when the sync server is unavailable. This was a bug in previous versions.

• General code quality improvements and bugfixes

• Various User interface improvements
• Keep fetching episode actions until we get the current timestamp
• Re-enable icons for gpodder and nextcloud

New features in this release:

• Support for chapters, both RSS feed and MP3 tags encoded chapters are supported
• Several improvements in user interface
• Optimization and improvements for backend
• Reworked settings page
• Support for syncing subscriptions and episode play position using gpodder.net or nextcloud-gpodder app
• Several bugfixes.

New features in this release:

• Discover page to search for podcasts on podcastindex.org
• Podcast downloads can now be resumed.
• Updated playback speed settings dialog.
• Settings to allow/disallow network access on metered connections.
• More descriptive error notifications from which the complete list of errors can be opened.
• Several smaller improvements: menu item highlighting, tooltips, hotkeys
• Several bugfixes.

First release of Kasts, a Kirigami-based convergent podcast player. Released as part of Plasma Mobile Gear 21.06. It features:

• a play queue
• notification panel and lockscreen media controls
• inhibits systemd suspend while listening to podcasts
• convergent UI; looks good on mobile and desktop