Juice is a
cross-platform aggregator application used for downloading
podcast media files, such as
oggs and
mp3s. These media files can be automatically copied to a
digital audio player. Juice lets a user schedule downloading of specific podcasts, and will notify the user when a new show is available. It is
free software available under the
GNU General Public License. The project is hosted at
Sourceforge. Formerly known as
iPodder and later as
iPodder Lemon, the software's name was changed to Juice in November 2005 in the face of legal pressure from
Apple Computer, Inc.
The original development team was formed by Erik de Jonge, Robin Jans, Martijn Venrooy, Perica Zivkovic from the company based in the Netherlands, Andrew Grumet and Garth Kidd joined the team really soon after the first release. Its development team credited the program concept to
Adam Curry who wrote a little Applescript as a proof of concept and provided the first podcasts shows (then referred to as 'audio enclosures') but primarily to
Dave Winer who was the inspiration for Adam Curry. The first version also included a screenscraper for normal HTML files. Initially it was not clear that podcasting would be completely tied to RSS. Although that was eventually the method chosen, during the early development phase a diverse range of people were working on alternatives, including a version based on
Freenet.
Development
The program is written in Python and, through use of a cross-platform UI library, runs on
Mac OS X and Microsoft
Windows 2000 or
Windows XP. A
Linux variant has been heavily delayed.
The 2004 growth of podcasting inspired other podcatching programs, such as
jPodder, as well as the June 2005 addition of a podcast subscription feature in Apple's
iTunes music player. This development quickly put an end to the popularity of the Juice application. There were just too many advantages to subscribe to podcasts natively in iTunes than using a 3rd party application.
In 2006 the team effectively stopped further development of the program, the developers started working in other fields some Podcasting related. The team from Active8 created PodNova (http://www.podnova.com) an application which still integrates very nicely with Juice with the . Adam Curry and Andrew Grumet started working on a commercial show network (podshow) where all the shows are sponsored and the distinction between show and commercial is faded to the background. Others went on on other ventures.
Forks
There have been several
forks of Juice:
- , available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
See also
