I am loving my new Samsung Focus, and have been adding in some applications, including the excellent Weatherbug, Netflix, Facebook, and Flixter apps.  However… today I found my favorite app of all.  The app is the appropriately named PODCASTS!, an app that searches the Zune Marketplace for podcasts, shows you a nice write-up and image, and then streams them directly. The user interface is awesome, the functionality is great, and the price is right (free)!

To be fair, the app icon is a bit corny :)  I would be nice if they added a live tile to cycle through images of my favorite podcasts.

Anyhoo… I give you: screenshots.

Download it here: PODCASTS!

Wishlist for version 1.1:

1. A “Favorite podcasts” section instead of just “recent”
2. A live tile that cycles through my favorite podcasts

Just saw the following announced… we have a team of folks that will write code samples for free in order to save you time as a developer.  How cool is that?

Today, the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework team announces an innovative “FREE” code sample request service for customers. This service is a proactive way for our developer community to obtain code samples for certain programming tasks directly from Microsoft. Our goal is to alleviate the frustration felt by developers.

Developers are encouraged to submit code sample requests dealing with  Microsoft development technologies to our site. At the same time, developers can now vote for newly submitted or existing code sample topics. Here’s the exciting part! Microsoft engineers will then pick the requests with the highest number of  votes and provide the code samples.  It’s all FREE!

The reason why this program was created was to provide personalized and connected services to  the developer community. This is a new way to listen to our customer needs and reduces the amount of effort needed for developers to complete their work.

Please see the full announcement: http://1code.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=NEW%2c%20FREE%20Code%20Sample%20Request%20Service%20from%20Microsoft%20All-In-One%20Code%20Framework.

For staying on top of my external blog feeds, I use a web-based RSS reader that works quite well.  Inside the corporate firewall, I subscribe to a number of internal/authenticated feeds from SharePoint, which are deposited into the “RSS Feeds” folder of Outlook.

Unfortunately, I use many folders in Outlook, and most are used to store messages that have been moved out of my inbox.  Out of site is out of mind, and I tend to forget to check my RSS Feeds folder for new posts on a regular basis.

If only there was a way to move new blog posts from the “RSS Feeds” folder into my inbox (that I check 476 times a day). 

Fortunately, there is!  It turns out that you can create rules on the RSS Feeds Folder just like you can on any other folder, and select your inbox as the destination posts from a particular submitter (or whatever criteria you specify).

Even better, you can change where Outlook puts RSS posts in the first place.

File –> Account Settings –> Account Settings  -->  RSS Feeds

Select the feed you want to change, and you’ll notice at the bottom, there is an option called “Change Folder”.  Click this button, and you can have Outlook deliver new RSS posts to any folder you want (including your inbox), rather than the default “RSS Feeds –> Blog Name” folder.  You can also click Change… above the list of feeds to specify whether Outlook automatically downloads enclosures for the RSS feed, as well as downloading the full article as an .html attachment.

Do that, and you’ll be the first kid on the block to read a new blog post by anyone you follow.