As registered user of NetNewsWire, I’d like to respond to comments made by the developers related to Apple’s new iTunes podcasting features. There are two things that iTunes offers up that are so good and useful, I’m currently using iTunes as my podcasting downloader of choice.
iTunes stores podcasts away from your regular music files thus allowing you to shuffle and browse your music without seeing or hearing all the podcasts. I had become very annoyed while traveling recently because while I love to use the shuffle feature when I’m driving, it’s very annoying to have to skip through podcasts, especially one’s that I’ve already listened to. Yeah, why don’t you just deleted them off you dummy? I’m a pack rat. I keep em for future reference, just like I keep my video game boxes. Don’t ask. I could have also added a new smart playlist that removed podcasts based on the category, meh, I want it to do it for me 
I love, LOVE having bookmarks of unfinished podcats. Being able to come back to a podcast and have it save my place is critical as I listen to many different things during my day and hate having to seek for the last spot I was on in a particular podcast. This feature right here was the deal breaker. All podcasts downloaded through iTunes have the ability to be bookmarked. I’m assuming this is because of a conversion process done on the client side which is automatic to me and the way it should be.
I hope that Ranchero will at minimum develop the AAC conversion process into NetNewsWire as I believe it would add the most value. Not sure if they could use the new “Podcasts” menu item to sort them away from music but if they can, again, would be very useful. I’ll be using iTunes for now as it has the two features I’ve been looking for since I started listening to podcasts long ago, hopefully the other tools will fall in and I can start using them again for podcasts.