check for new episodes time

John,

This may seem like a pain, but right after your mac starts up and iTunes launches. Do a manual update, either through preferences or your update button on the iTunes window.

Right after that, set your "Check for new episodes" to Every day. And it should set it 24 hours from the last time that you updated, which is right after your mac started up.

Another way is to manually set your Mac's time to be the time that you want to update. Then manually update your podcasts.

Very easy solution

create an applescript and run it on startup

the applescript should be

tell application "iTunes"
updateallpodcasts
end tell

I am not on Tiger yet, but updateallpodcasts might be a automator function.

Podcasting hasn't been included in Automator yet, it predates iTunes 4.9.
But you have the command "Run AppleScript", where you can type the command you want.

From the original poster's request for a way to make sure podcasts update on start up, I was thinking that creating an applescript that would run on startup would do the trick.

What I left out of the instruction above was to save the applescript as an application. Then drag that application to your start-up items under system prefs.

A Podcast set to update once a day will update its automatic update time to 24 hours from the last update. So, if you issue a manual update at 10AM on a Monday, the next automatic update would be on Tuesday at 10 AM.

Well, if you always want an update at start up, use an applescript to accomplish this. Then you can click on the update button to your hearts content, but still always have an update at start up