"I was awarded some kind of award!" - MARCO ARMENT, How To Value Your Startup, StartUp #StartUp #Gimlet #MarcoArment

On Tuesday, on the app’s 10th anniversary, Marco launched a major update to Overcast, the podcast app I’ve been using since its launch.

Smart Speed has saved you an extra 931 hours beyond speed adjustments alone.

There are a lot of changes big and small. I don’t think I lost any features I super relied on but some controls and views did move around and I’m still adjusting.

I think one of the most obvious changes is that reordering episodes in a playlist seems to work without any more occasional rendering bugs (like episodes becoming invisible list items).

Buttery smooth

Of course it wouldn’t be a blog post about an app if I didn’t complain a little. There are a few changes I hope to see (now that Marco has delivered a new foundation for progress) that will better fit my podcast consumption habits.

My usual workflow:

Subscribe to way too many podcasts, many of them with the usual suspects

Use smart playlists to group shows by general topic or mood (I have ones like Friends, Tech, Media, Trek, and Short.)

Add recent incoming episodes to Queue playlist

Reorder shows in Queue based on multiple factors (which is why the list view fixes matter to me)

• Alternate shows/topics/hosts when possible
• Prioritize podcasts from people I “know”
• Defer episodes until I’ve consumed the relevant media
• Newsworthy topics
• Available time to listen
• Mood

That all means that I want it to be easy to triage new episodes and reorder my queue, see what’s in my queue, and occasionally switch to topical lists to pick episodes for other reasons. (If there were an engine for it these rules could probably even be automated.)

I hope for more options here.

Basically I don’t want to see all my podcasts on the home screen (there are too many); I do want to see the top of my queue. So I would need an additional option here to “pin” a playlist. Perhaps something like this:

The view option is most important to me but I’d also like some contextual actions on the recent episodes up top. Press and hold to Add to Queue for one; but also to delete a podcast. I forgot I had subscribed to The Run Up years ago and this new recent view shows Overcast has been happily updating the feed for me forever.

Congratulations on the (re)launch, Marco! Here’s to ten more years.

https://blog.ultranurd.net/2024/07/18/new-overcast/

#app #ios #MarcoArment #overcast #podcasts

#overcastapp #OvercastFM #applepodcastapp #marcoarment I’ve been a premium subscriber to Overcast for maybe 5-6 years. Love it.
But recently finding I need to keep a copy of the stock Apple Podcast app installed because the ability to discover new podcasts from within Overcast is absolutely atrocious.