Pre-Announce PocketCasts Plugin

As the author of the Bandcamp plugin you mentioned I do have some advice:

- ask them whether they have a public API. I bet all their apps and the
web implementation, too, do use some kind of web API. Is it publicly
available?

- if there isn't, then you're up to some dirty work. Be prepared for
maintenance hell: whenever they change the web UI you might need to fix
your plugin.

- if you're ready to get your hands dirty: get firefox with firebug
installed. This imho still is the best tool investigate how a web site
works. Monitor the console. There you would see all kinds of requests
going to their servers, and the responses they give. Look at what the
browser is sending. Is it XML? JSON? What else? Look at what the server
returns. Same questions. Try to understand the parameters. That's what
they call reverse engineering. It's ugly. It's a lot of guess-work. But
sometimes it works surprisingly well.

When I did this for Bandcamp, it was a very interesting (and
impressive!) experience. It really told me what "data driven web UI"
means. There's very little static HTML. Most of the content is served up
by some web services being queried when the page is loaded.

I wish you luck with your project!

--

Michael