mission statement / purpose / goals

[violet4]

main goals

• usability
• accessibility
• privacy: your data is yours

a strong focus on privacy means we will NEVER EVER track any user data of any kind except what users explicitly volunteer information, for example a user survey on a web form somewhere that is NOT in the app. the app will absolutely under no circumstances ever send a single packet across the internet to phone home or anywhere else. it will download the podcast episodes you request and nothing else.

this means that there is some responsibility on users to report bugs and feedback. i would rather have a tarnished reputation for a having a bug (which we'll fix as soon as we humanly can and will work to avoid in the first place) than for tracking user information.

primary feature wishlist

if any of these are in conflict with the main goals, we'll need to reevaluate on a case-by-case basis.

• the moment you load the page you can play from where you left off as instantly as possible (this is mostly working but needs a little more work, mentioned in the most recent ticket)
• as easy as possible to set playback speed and skip forward/back speed. this is already mostly working but the skip forward/back can be improved with user feedback.
• episode viewer/navigator. however this is implemented needs to be (do research) accessible and easy for users. it seems like indefinite scrolling would be inaccessible and difficult for users to navigate. users are going to want to find an episode by number, or paginate by 10 or 100 episodes at a time.
• ability to add new shows by a RSS xml url. optionally user should be able to upload the RSS xml file, if technically feasible, in case the RSS xml url is hosted on a CDN that user wants to avoid and grabs the file using private browsing or something.