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Alex Iskold

Winds 2.0 - Open source podcast & RSS desktop app

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Winds 2.0 is a beautiful Open Source podcast & RSS reader created by Stream. Free desktop apps are available for macOS, Linux and Windows.

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tschellenbach
Maker
RSS has been in a downward spiral for a while now. Readers are shutting down, sites are dropping support, user experience is poor, the standard is fragmented. It's time to revive RSS. Winds is a beautiful and open source Podcast & RSS app. The tech stack of React/Redux/Node enables makes it accessible for many designers and developers to contribute. Lets see if we can leverage open source to kick this trend back into the right direction. You can contribute in many ways. Share you thoughts about new features for Winds 2.1, suggest RSS feeds or podcasts to feature, contribute to the codebase or contact your favorite sites to improve their RSS feeds!
AI Being
@tschellenbach i cant seem to be able to create an account give me this error "There was an error when attempting to create your account. Please try again later. " any way to fix this ?
Tommaso Barbugli
Maker
@r3djok3r1 thank you for the feedback! Unfortunately we did not show a clear error message for all validation errors at signup; we have a patch ready for this which will go live ASAP. In the meantime I suggest trying to create an account using an alphanumeric username.
AI Being
@tommasobarbugli tried alphanumeric username still cant create an account
Craig Fifield
@tschellenbach This looks awesome, congrats! I'm really looking forward to seeing where the community takes this. Perfect timing to launch as well with all the negativity around the Google News redesign! As for feature requests - I'd love to be able to categorize my feeds.
tschellenbach
Maker
@tommasobarbugli @r3djok3r1 which platform are you using? The team just pushed a fix for Linux and Windows downloads. Upgrading to the latest version might help.
Roman Rybalchenko
Hi! Any plans on Android app?
Joshua Tilton
Maker
@cooluck Mobile is something we absolutely want to do. There are some features we are keen to implement with this version first, as they will really enhance the overall user experience. Thank you for trying it out!
tschellenbach
Maker
@cooluck yeah most definitely. which RSS or podcast features do you use most on mobile? One thing we'd really like is storing podcast listening progress so you can pick up your mobile and resume where you left of.
Matheus Matos
@cooluck @uijudo React Native could be a great option, following the stack used on desktop version. I can help with it.
Roman Rybalchenko
@tschellenbach I use Pocket Casts for podcast and completely satisfied. They have sync with web and all needed features. My pain is RSS reader for Android with Feedly integration.
Chris Messina
Launching soon!
So meta when your face ends up on a website for a product which is built using a feed format which you helped pioneer like 10 years ago.
Stewart Henderson
This looks awesome, definitely going to try it out.
tschellenbach
Maker
Ben Halpern
Nice to see our friends at Stream doing cool open source things!
tschellenbach
Maker
@bendhalpern Thanks Ben, we will definitely also create some React related tutorials on Dev.to
Charles Magnuson
As someone who already subscribes to 200+ podcasts, I don't find Winds very useful. What I want out of a podcast app is an easy way to listen to different playlists of podcasts which I subscribe to. I have my essentials playlist, my 1x playback speed playlist, my music playlist, my news playlist, and my undecided playlist. Each one of these playlists provide me with a different set of podcasts which follow a theme, such as news or music. With Winds, it doesn't appear that I can group the podcasts I follow into different playlists. Instead, all of the podcasts I follow are pushed into one big group. This isn't a good situation when one follows more than a few dozen podcasts. Additionally, it doesn't appear that Winds offers OPML importing which means I would need to individually search for and follow more than 200 podcasts to get started. It appears that Winds is all about discovering new podcasts. While podcast discovery can be valuable, there is a certain time and place for discovery. Most of the time I just want to listen to the podcasts I already know and love. Discovery is something I only want to engage with from time to time, maybe once or twice a month. The Winds homepage would be much more useful if it was devoted to mostly displaying content I already subscribe to, such as different playlists of podcasts, instead of new content I haven't listened to before. Nevertheless, Winds is quite beautiful when it comes to UI. The desktop application well designed. I'll keep an eye on this project because I would love to use Winds in the future instead of the horribly buggy PocketCasts app.
Joshua Tilton
Maker
@magnuson We have this spec'd out already! The design is done and we will be working on this (along with other features) next. Thank you for your detailed response.
tschellenbach
Maker
@magnuson hi Charles, is there anything else you're looking for in terms of features? Let us know and we'll see what we can do for version 2.1. With the help of the community i think we can get to a really polished and bug free user experience. We do allow OPML imports btw, but you can only import RSS at the moment. So that doesn't really help.
Craig Fifield

Easy to use, highlights podcasts nicely

Pros:

Nice and clean

Cons:

None

tschellenbach
Maker
Also if you want to submit RSS feeds or Podcasts we should feature, you can do that here: https://github.com/GetStream/Win...
W Ian Douglas
Nice work, everyone!
tschellenbach
Maker
@iandouglas736 thank you!
Masoud Mirzaei

I found it very easy to use. I was always for a convenient way to read rss in mac. Winds made it possible! Oh, and I'm a podcast producer and a podcast addict. So That's a good reason to love this app. :)

Pros:

Clean design and easy to use

Cons:

None

Jarod Stewart
This looks great! One problem, I couldn't reset my password from around when v1 launched.
Ken Hoff
Maker
@stewartjarod Hey Jarod - we completely rewrote Winds 2.0 from the ground up, so your user account wasn't transitioned over from the original version of Winds. Just go ahead and create a new one :)
Jarod Stewart
@ken_hoff done! Great work
@ChuckReynolds
I'd love to be able to test drive it w/o being forced to choose 3 topics and signing up before seeing how it works or if I can import my own list from Feedly.
tschellenbach
Maker
@chuckreynolds that's a good point, we're going to add a skip button to make it easier to get setup with just your own feeds.
Dillon Nichols
@chuckreynolds @tschellenbach Yeah I'd love a desktop app to read Feedly. Might be possible here but I deleted the app when it made me select interests and create an account.
ismael Garcia
Hi, thank you for create it, is possible create rules for filter the feed I will receive?
tschellenbach
Maker
@ismael_hispanog what sort of filters did you have in mind?
ismael Garcia
@tschellenbach For example, if I have a twitter account with RSS and I want filter the retweets ot the titles with thw world "EEUU" ..etc
Kirsty Williams
Love the look and feel of this. However, there are issues which are preventing me from actually using it. 1) UX issue with the signup flow. I couldn't figure out what the problem was with signup. I was editing all the fields until the button had become active and it seems the password requirement is > 8 chars as opposed to the standard >= 8. This is fine but some feedback on the password constraints would be helpful. 2) I can't listen to any of the podcasts. I was trying to play a a16z podcast and nothing loaded. So I clicked to play another one, paused it, and then clicked to play the a16z one. It looked as though the a16z one was supposed to be playing from the UI but nope, it was the previous one I clicked on. I love the concept and would have loved to play with this if it worked.
Chrish Dunne

Enjoying it so far but have spent less than a day with it. So far so good, but I hope they keep improving it in the future as there a few little nuances that could be made better.

Pros:

Interface invites you to discover new feeds.

Cons:

Lack of on-boarding makes it a bit confusing when you first open the app. There should also be clearer field validation on the sign up.

tschellenbach
Maker
This is great feedback, we're going to work on the onboarding and polish that.
Ryan Williams
This looks awesome!
James
It looks lovely and I appreciate the need for a start somewhere - but my feed reading and podcast listening habits tend to be between my Macbook (albeit via the browser), Android phone and Android tablet. Having my history synchronised across them all is fundamental to how I read and listen, so a stand-alone desktop client is unlikely to be something I'll attempt to work with. Good luck with the platform's development!
Darin Ji
failed to register
Ishan Jain
@tschellenbach I wanted to give it a try but it won't let me import my feedly OPML file.
tschellenbach
Maker
@ishanjain_t the latest releases of Winds have become much more stable, great to see such a community effort
Marty Schneider
It says available for iPhone and iPad but when i go to the app store it doesnt let me download it.
tschellenbach
Maker
@martyschneidr it's desktop only at the moment. mobile apps are on the roadmap though