Castro, the podcast player app by Supertop, is bold but minimalist by design. It also makes use of gestures for several of its more handy features. If you've been using Castro but haven't poked around enough to find them yet, here's what you need to know.
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Scrubbing lets you quickly move your way through a show so, at the touch of a finger, you can swipe from the beginning to just exactly the time code you want to listen from.
In Castro, you scrub forward by touching and holding the grabber on the bottom left and dragging to the right. You scrub backwards by touching and holding the grabber on the bottom right and dragging left. Combined, these two gestures will take you anywhere, in any show.
Settings lets you control everything from playback speed to jump intervals to sleep time to streaming and download options to sorting and notifications to... you get the idea.
To access settings in Castro, you can touch and hold the play/pause button at the bottom middle. You can also just grab the screen and pinch from anywhere in the app. When you're finished customizing your options, hit Done to return to the player.
If you do have the sleep timer set and it runs out while you're still conscious and listening, just tap the play/pause button to automagically extend it for another 5 minutes.
If you forget to set the sleep timer and fall asleep, Castro won't delete the episode when you're done. It'll mark the episode as played, so you can go easily go back and re-listen to any parts you might have missed, but Castro will waits until you play the next episode before deleting the previous one. Just in case.
Also, any time you're listening to one episode, you can swipe down on the screen to access the list of all episodes. You can also swipe from left to right to go back to the listing of all your shows or all previous search results.
The Supertop Blog has already announced that they're hard at work on Castro 2. In the meantime, these gestures should help you get the most out of the current version of Castro. Give them a try and let me know!
