A new, outstandingly designed podcasting player, search tool and aggregator has just launched. Called the Ziepod, it offers unmatched ease of use, features and ergonomics to make it anyone's best Windows candidate as the next podcasting player of choice.

The Ziepod is indeed a little jewel of UI and usability design, conceived and created with the end user in mind.

Its killer feature is that you can either directly listen to episodes of subscribed podcasts or download them for your later playback on your portable MP3 player. Yes, podcast shows can be immediately streamed to your computer as you click on them, and there is no waiting time before you can start listening to your favourite programming.

This is really the way it should be and in my view, this is an extremely powerful feature which greatly facilitates non-technical users adoption and appreciation of podcasts.

Nonetheless to novice podcasters and listeners these may not appear as revolutionary traits, I do think they really are. The ability to forego the time needed to download any podcast by making it immediately accessible through an instantly-playable streaming capability, DOES make Ziepod a much more accessible, easy and intuitive access route to anyone's podcasts.

The Ziepod superior interface is capable of four different viewing modes, providing the user with extremely flexibility and comfort in its use. I myself love the "deskbar" view, which not only is extremely unobtrusive but allows intuitive control and rating of any of the podcasts you are listening to.

With the new Ziepod you can also can search for past episodes and issues of any podcast, something not readily available by most other podcasting directories and playback tools.

This is made possible by Ziepod tight integration with Feedzie.com, a tag-based companion RSS and podcast search engine/directory which makes it easy and effective to find the RSS-based content you are looking for.

Among the other cool new features offered by Ziepod it is the ability to rate individual podcast shows, helping others find more easily quality content on the basis of your own recommendations, as well as the possibility of receiving email notifications of when new podcasts are available from your favourite authors.

Ratings leads to a useful assessment of what users consider great podcast content which can also be reached from the Ziepod Ratings Charts.

Ziepod provides podcasters with an elegantly and professionally designed icon to be placed on their sites which has the purpose of making it easy for everyone to subscribe to audio shows. The Ziepod colorful logo enables in fact a no-brainer one-click subscription to your podcasting channel.

Another fine touch is the minimalist approach to provide access to the main functionalities of Ziepod, including the ability to download, or imediately stream any result to a search thanks to episode action buttons which can be activated with one click (requires IE).

These easy to recognize buttons show up next to any podcast showing up in search results making it extremely intuitive to take action on selected items.

Documentation and help for novice users is also excellent and very easy to access.

I must say that Ziepod really marks its offering with a great set of features, great interface design and an overall experience that looks and feel great from the first minute your start working with it.

The Ziepod injects a good and needed dose of usability into the universe of podcast downloading tools and players. Of course it can't match the great usability and design of iTunes, but it does certainly go beyond it in the way of providing immediately streamable content, making searches of podcast content extremely fast and easy, while providing a truly dedicated environment for finding, listening and storing your preferred shows.

I definitely liked the Ziepod and recommend anyone interested in using a great podcast player, podcast searching and archiving tool to test it out as well.

Unfortunately, and I don't consider this a minor item, for now the Ziepod works only on Windows PCs with Internet Explorer.

The Ziepod is completely free and it can be immediately downloaded at:
http://www.ziepod.com/ZiepodSetup.exe (1.9 MB)