Over the past week and a half, I've been fixing bugs in the implementation of newsgroups support in RSS Bandit. Yesterday I celebrated getting the last major networking issue being fixed by posting a somewhat empty message to the microsoft.public.xml newsgroup from RSS Bandit. The main thrust of what's left is for Torsten and I to decide how we want newsgroups to be exposed in the user interface.

It is time to start thinking about another item on the roadmap for our next release. This time I want to focus on what we'll do to better support RSS enclosures and podcasting. If you are unfamiliar with either of these concepts, you should read Dave Winer's blog post Payloads for RSS from 2001 which describes the concept of subscribing to digital media content such as songs and videos as opposed to just text as is common today.  

Although I am not interested in any of the amateur talk radio or audioblogging that is typically associated with podcasting I still think this is a very interesting development that should be supported by RSS Bandit. I would love to be able to subscribe to the G-Unit website and get new songs that have been released to the public or subscribe to the various XBox 360 rumor mills to get new videos of game demos.

Below is a list of features I'd like to see in RSS Bandit.

1. Ability to download RSS enclosures to a folder of my chosing. This folder can be configured per feed so I can have some stuff go to C:\G-Unit and other stuff go to C:\XBox360.
2. A list of files currently being downloaded or that have been downloaded.
3. A download meter to indicate how much of a file has been downloaded.
4. Ability to add files to my Windows Media Player or iTunes playlist of my choosing on successful download. The level of configurability of this feature will depend on how much work is entailed. :)

If you have any ideas that I have left out or comments about the above list, just go ahead and reply to this post.