all right hello everyone this is our weekly update for the metacast incorporated okay That feels like a big two-person company. all right let's go yeah well we have the entire c-suite on the uh on the call right now so let's uh yeah and actually an entire board as well so let's uh get going time is money before people get bored yes all right so this is our weekly stand-up update on what we've done in metacast and what we are working on
I'm Ilya and I'm Arnab and our promise is we'll keep this to less than 10 minutes. Let's go! So Arnab, what have you been working on last week? mobile app version 1.19 it's dev complete it's basically waiting some of the image and that sort of updates for the app store play store that you will talk about later i imagine other than that the app is basically complete at this point we are ready to send it to review i think tomorrow
And hopefully the new version comes out this week after Apple and Google's review. So this version includes new sharing URLs.
And along with a big update on the web app that you will talk about, Ilya. Now, when you share a podcast or an episode or a transcript, you will see much more human looking urls without all those mambo jumbo ids in there it just copies the URL and you can like very easily send it to like your friends on WhatsApp or text message or wherever and it'll have like a lot of metadata packed into the URL so that's pretty cool With the sharing URLs thing we fixed.
or basically we've decided to work around the whole android bug of some urls trying to open inside the app and thus failing like FAQs and OPML import blog post and all that because those are not meant to be open inside the app they're meant to be opened as browser so that whole thing will get fixed
and then if you listen to this last week you would know that we had a upgrade hell we upgraded everything and lots of things broke so all of that is fixed now so yeah this update should be ready later this week and part of that is you will see on our website but also in the mobile app the new logo and app icon launcher splash screens and all that so yeah for me i've also been stuck in the upgrade hell
i think it took me probably a couple of days to get myself out of it on the web app side but now we are all current on the latest version of all of the packages so it's it's all good you mentioned those new urls it actually might sound like a small thing in the mobile app but like overall it's actually it's a very interesting thing that we've done So now, when you copy any link from the mobile app
and you go to that link it always opens in the browser so the links will no longer open in the app directly so they will always open in the browser where you can actually get the access to the transcript you can copy the entire transcript if you want to
It just provides you a much better experience for interacting with the transcript. If you want to play in the app, then there is the Open in Metacast button now at the bottom of every page for every podcast in every episode. And when you tap on that... This is what happens if you have metacast installed and you open it from the mobile phone the metacast will open on that podcast to that episode
If you shared a segment, actually it will open right in that segment, so it's going to be a deep link. If you are on the phone, but the app is not installed, like if you send it to a friend, for example, right?
or maybe if you open the one of the links that are shared on linkedin it's also possible right uh on your mobile phone so then if you tap on that button it will guide you through the process of installing the app so basically it will have the link to the app store and the play store you can install the app and then you can tap the open button again and then it will open the app for you
And if you open it on the desktop, there will be a QR code that you can scan to either open the episode in Metacast. My favorite feature. Yeah, I love that feature. actually we've just we've just pushed it like two hours ago so i haven't had a chance to use it yet but i think it will be one of my favorite features too Or if you don't have the app installed, then it will show you the links to download. So basically, we are trying to make the experience of sharing podcasts and episodes.
as easy as possible regardless of which device you're on and also giving you access to the full transcript and just a quick aside I think last few weeks because we've been in this kind of weird the web app is using the new urls the app is not i have felt the pain of how painful it is to like share things so i'm really excited for this update yeah and the qr code thing because like i have had many occasions in the past where somebody has sent me a metacast url itself
and then i can't open it easily because i have to send it from my desktop to my phone and then wait for it to open blah blah blah anyway the qr code i just i love it yeah Also, if you're on the Apple ecosystem, if you share a link from the mobile app and you can airdrop it to your computer, it just immediately opens the browser with that link, which is really cool.
all right so we've also done the first phase of the rebrand so we've replaced the logo with the colors and we finally have the light theme on our website so now actually if you have the light theme on your device by default it will open this side in the light theme or you can toggle between light and dark
in the navigation at the top. And when you say first phase of the rebrand, this is the only phase we are doing right now. That's it for now. Yeah, I guess there is a little bit more that we want to do on the homepage to make it look a little bit nicer.
not smaller things no yeah yeah but basically yeah i think we can call a rebrand on them on the web app done except for maybe like some minor improvements here and there so also we've been talking about the caching this never-ending llm bots saga of like breaking our budget
So I think we've finished that finally. And we've also made some improvements in the image loading speeds. So hopefully now that when we share episodes on social media or on messengers, the images actually load faster and never time out. and we will also use that infrastructure to make the image load times in the app a lot faster.
cool cool all right we have four and a half minutes to go yeah so what's next startup what are you working on next uh the next seven ish days right so now that we are pushing v1.19 out tomorrow i am starting to work on 1.20 this will be a i think smaller update we're going to start showing summaries we have nice ai summaries that you can see on the web app right now that are not available in the mobile app
And personally, I think it helps me figure out if I want to listen to an episode or not within five words. So I'm excited about adding those.
uh we're gonna try to start using the new awesome image asset stuff that you've built to speed up image loading we see that especially on older android devices it's kind of crappy right now so that should be fixed And hopefully a small update where the app detects that there's a new version available and shows the user something so that users keep updating the app. and then i think once this work is done i'm super excited to start working on private podcast support
I think our biggest feature request so far. In sales, you always want to counter the objections. Because somebody listening to this will be like, how about my private feeds? And you're like, yeah, it's coming next.
As for me, we need to finalize the version 1.19, and this is where a lot of work that's actually invisible to the users that comes in. Because we've done a bunch of changes, in the last year since we last updated the images in the app so we have those like for new users when they start the app there are the onboarding screens there are some help screens that have screenshots and those are wildly outdated
now that you also change the logo I think it's a good time to actually update those images we also need to update all of the App Store details because we can only update them and as we submit a new version so all of that sort of overhead that's not building the app but actually marketing the app that we have to do and yeah i'll be probably spending all day tomorrow doing that and also writing the release notes the blog post all of that all the jazz
and then I'll start working on the creator-provided transcripts to show them in the mobile app. I'll be preparing the back-end infrastructure for that. I'll be on the flight next week, on a very long flight, and I hope to actually do some writing, to redo some of our marketing pages, some of our help pages on the website.
excited for that and this said next week we will skip this update because i'll be traveling to philadelphia for a 10-year reunion for my master's program And then I'll be flying to Vancouver to meet our nub and we'll be working together for about a week and a half or so.
so yeah so we will skip next week but next week we will have the long uh episode published so hopefully if you're you know you will not be missing us and because we'll be skipping next week the weekly update we might take a minute or two extra today over the 10 minute time okay We earned that. Cool. So let's finish this up with the recommendations. Why don't you go first? Sure. Yeah, so we'll finish this episode with a couple of recommendations for what we are listening to.
I've not been listening to many podcasts this week. But I do remember listening to Under the Radar episode 3.11 about what it takes to be an indie developer and all of the ups and downs that are coming with that. So it's a pretty cool episode from the creator of a computing podcast app which you know i hate to admit that i'm listening to every week because i really like what they're publishing
But I never listened in their app. I always listened in Metacast. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I was a long-term user of that app and I still like it and I like the personality and everything behind it. So, yeah. And so me, interesting because we were working on some rebranding and splash screen and stuff. i wiped out i had to like uninstall my app and with that all of my listening history right now the app doesn't store that in the cloud it's just on your device all that is gone
So I could not figure out... Sorry, the timer is going off. One sec. By the way, when you scream into the microphone, it actually clips. Okay, okay. What was I saying? Oh yeah, you were very excited. Yeah, I was very excited because all of my listening history is gone. I can't figure it out anymore. I think the only episode I remember from the last week that I heard was, again, from Everything Everywhere Daily.
and this episode was really interesting it's about when exactly did the roman empire like end and i think you should listen to it it's 15 minutes you'll be surprised because you may be thinking the year 400 something or maybe 1300s if you think the eastern roman empire but there are lots of like other possibilities so it's pretty cool cool everything everywhere all at once right every everything daily okay yeah that's the movie which is a cool movie too okay bye bye