I’ve been continuing to explore the potentials of web app creation, following my decision to branch off from webOS development. While the news of HP planning to Open Source webOS means there is yet life in webOS, it is going to be a long road ahead for webOS, and more importantly an uncertain one as far as new webOS smartphones are concerned. I remain platform agnostic when it comes to smartphones and web apps allow me to run the apps I create in any webkit compatible browser, typically found in modern smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices. My early work can be found in medwebapp.com and oncopda.com.
I have been playing around recently with fetching RSS feeds and using code to extract information from the feeds. One early project was to get the BBC audio podcasts as they are something I listen to regularly – thus Beeb Cast was created. The next challenge was to create a web app to enable one to play major medical podcasts. I thought like Beebcast, it would be better to display and play only the latest podcast from each RSS feed rather than show the entire archive including outdated podcasts.
The screen design is a standard iPhone form with lists and tapping on each one will display a page showing the title, description and publication date of the latest podcast. The screen shot below shows the NEJM audio summary playing.
iOS devices will get to see a little Audio control where you can pause the audio and continue. The Play button will also start playing the Audio control. Unfortunately the Audio control is not yet compatible with some non-iOS devices e.g. Android, and in such cases, the Play button will play the MP3 stream directly. I have found on my iPhone that the audio will play in the background even if you have the browser minimized so you can “multi-task” by running other apps while listening to the podcast.
To run MedCast all you need to do is to go to http://palmdoc.net/nsbapp/medcast/ in your smartphone’s browser
Let me know what you think and there’s even a “Like on Facebook” button in the app if you appreciate it 
from the Palmdoc Chronicles
MedCast – a multi-platform podcast web app
