iPodder started out under the name iSpider before its name was changed to iPodder. It is usually called “iPodder Lemon” because of its program icon.

The original iPodder was an AppleScript hacked together by Adam Curry. I have never seen it. It is probably still available on the net, but from what I heard the code is not pretty. Nevertheless Adam’s code was an excellent proof of concept, which jumpstarted the podcasting genre and the development of more podcast aggregators.

The first open source iPodder was written in Java and is still under active development, now using the name jPodder. Furthermore there is iPodderX, a commercial podcast client written exclusively for the Apple platform.

Mostly everybody agrees, that naming the program (and consequently the hole genre) after Apple’s popular portable music player was a rather poor decision.

The iPodder team just released the first beta of their 2.0 version. It is available for Os X and Windows with a Linux/BSD version in the near future. It is written in Python and uses wxWindows. And it is open source.

I haven’t had jet the opportunity to thoroughly test it, because my iBook is still in the shop waiting to get fixed, but I did install it on my office laptop which runs Windows XP. The first impression is very good. A lot of requested features have been implemented: You are able to check only selected feeds, downloads can be postponed, paused and resumed. The ipodder.org directory is integrated in the GUI and the program provides basic tools to manage the storage of the actual files.

I still miss the possibility to read the show notes of the podcasts in the aggregator’s GUI. This feature would be very helpful, especially for managing the podcasts, i.e. deciding which files to keep and which files to delete.

I also haven’t found a possibility to automatically change the ID3 tags of the files (I like to set the music genre to “podcast”. This allows comfortable creation of smart playlists and exclusion of podcasts from music only selections). This might be a design decision though, because changing the ID3 tag (and thus altering the file) breaks bit torrent file sharing, a distribution method a lot of podcasters use.

So get it and submit bug reports. Now.