This week saw the release of the BBC podcast pages optimised for the iPhone and iPod touch. Simon and myself have been working on this for a while for our 10% Time (basically we’re allowed to spend approximately 10% of our work time doing interesting stuff). The app itself is really simple, it just uses Joe Hewitt’s fantastic iUI to handle transitions between lists. We’ve also used code from reflection.js to generate canvas based reflections for all the images. I spent a lot of time trying to embed the audio in the podcast page, ideally I wanted it to play inline but that’s impossible for now. The next best thing was getting the audio to return to the orignal page. This was basically a trial and error process, but this embed code makes it happen:

<embed width="100%" height="22" src="moyles_20071101-2235.mp3" pluginspage="www.apple.com/quicktime/download" autostart="false" controller="false" enablejavascript="true"/>

We met some guys from Apple shortly before we put it live and apparently even they couldn’t find a better hack. Hopefully something there’ll be a bit better support for audio after the next update.

We’ve got a number of improvements we’re working on at the moment, these include moving to the newer iUI, breaking up the longer lists into more digestible chunks, improving the transitions and improving the reliablilty on EDGE. Our tests in the office wouldn’t load the audio links over the EDGE network, however there is evidence to suggest it does work elsewhere.

So far the iphone work been pretty well received internally and on the web. But we’re really keen to offer these platform specific optimisations for other devices, such as the PSP and Wii. The podcast system is one of the few BBC systems that make it easy to create alternative views, and therefore an ideal candidate for this type of approach. Plus the content is cool and has a lot less red tape than most of the stuff we do…