Overcast Reviewed

This is by no means a comprehensive review of the entire application. This post is meant to tell you why I ditched my former podcast client and switched to Overcast full time. If you want to read such a review, I recommend you check out these reviews - Macworld, MacStories, Tech Distortion, iMore.

This morning Marco Arment released Overcast 1.0. You can learn more about the application from the Overcast website or just go to iTunes and download it. The application is free, but has just one in-app purhcase for $4.99. If you make this purchase, additional functionality will be unlocked:

  • Cellular downloads
  • Variable playback speed
  • Smart Speed
  • Voice Boost
  • Per-podcast effects settings
  • One-by-one playback option
  • Sleep timer
  • Unlimited number of playlists
  • Unlimited episodes shown in playlists

It is now the only podcast client I use. Here's why:

When I first found out Marco Arment was working on an iOS podcast client as his next project, I was immediately excited. Having been a long time Instapaper user I knew, in general, my design tastes jive with the decisions Marco makes in his apps.. Marco was nice enough to give me an invitation to the first beta release of Overcast on May 10 of this year. On May 13 I emailed Marco to tell him that I had just deleted Downcast from my phone. I have been using Overcast as my primary podcast client since. [ 1 ]

Applications that allow you to export OPML files can be read by Overcast to import all of your feeds.

Being able to see the entire beta process of Overcast has allowed me to see the app's many iterations and appreciate the finished product more than I normally would. One of the earliest features that I was able to appreciate was the ability to quickly migrate from Downcast to Overcast. Downcast, as many podcast clients do, supports the ability to export an OPML file of your feeds. When you export this file, you can choose to attach it to an email. I emailed it to myself, selected to open the attachment with Overcast. Overcast recognized the file and imported all of the podcasts.

First Launch

On first launch, until you import or add podcasts, you're presented with the photo above. After adding a few podcasts, making a few playlists or importing your existing feeds, the homescreen might resemble the below image.

One of the things that I rely on a lot with podcast clients are playlists. I listen to so many podcasts, that I don't always have time to listen to them all. My listening habits also vary greatly:

  • Some I only listen to occasionally, but all at once. For instance with NPR's Car Talk, I usually listen to on long car trips myself over the course of 4 or 5 hours, each episode back-to-back.
  • Some podcasts I listen to each and every podcast as they come out, almost immediately (ATP, The Talk Show, Back to Work, Roderick On The Line, Wait Wait...Don't Tell me).
  • Some podcasts I'm interested in but don't listen to each episode, deleting sometimes as many as half of the episodes. I screen these by reading epsidoe descriptions - The Incomparable is one such podcast. It is a phenomenally wonderful podcast but occasional episodes cover topics that I have absolutely no interest in and I just skip these. Planet Money's bad habit of re-playing old episodes whenever they take a week off is another example.
  • Some podcasts I like, but only when I'm in a certain mood for. These will sometimes pile up for months but I then catch up over the course of a week on all of the episodes that I've missed.

Playlists help me tackle all of these problems. One such feature, Priority Podcasts, attacks one of these problems directly. When configuring a playlist you may designate which podcasts fall under this categorization. These episodes will be pushed to the top whenever they are downloaded, making it unecessary to create a dedicated playlist for just these episodes.

Another feature I love of Overcast is how it handles its own podcast directory. Within the directory itself Marco has a curated list of very good podcasts, broken down by category. Just this along has allowed me to discover 2 or 3 new podcasts that I wasn't aware of yet, but I now love. Another feature is Twitter recommendations. After signing in with your Twitter app, you may flag podcast epsisodes as favorites with a star button on their respective episode pages. When you view this section of the directory, any people you follow on Twitter that have also done this will cause the episodes they favorited to be listed. This is similar to social functionality that Marco added to Instapaper years ago. I liked it then and still like it.

In his announcement post, Marco goes into detail about two of the earliest ideas he had for Overcast: Smart Speed and Voice Boost. When I first saw these in the beta, I ignored them. I've never been one to listen to podcasts in any way other than how they were recorded (minus editing of course). However, after seeing these being discussed by other beta members on Glassboard, I began to give them a try. While I don't use Smart Speed for every podcast, or even every episode of the ones I do, it is a nice feature when needed. Voice Boost, however, is fantastic and makes a huge difference when listening to podcasts in the car (or when I'm mowing the yard with headphones on).

Another reason I instantly fell in love with Overcast is the UI layout of the actual play screen. Marco put a lot of thought during the development of Overcast, all the way up through the beta changing this screen many times due to tester feedback. The end result is lovely giving the user just enough information and exposing the most important controls. Annoyances that I've had with other podcast clients, such as play/reverse/back buttons being too close together or the scrubber being hard to use, have been fixed for me. Additionally, whenever an episode is playing, a very nice animation effect is shown throughout the app in various places to show the sound of the current episode. Check out the gallery below to see examples of the play screen UI as well as this animation.

The wait was long, but it was worth it. Overcast 1.0 is a solid release, which Marco has put a lot of work into. I love using it, and appreciate its design (and nice app icon!). I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough so you should just stop right now and get it. I think you'll like it too.

[ 1 ] Also, apparently I am user #2.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Word Crimes

Music video by "Weird Al" Yankovic performing Word Crimes. (C) 2014 RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

This is such a good parody. Much better than the original. This song is on his new album Mandatory Fun, which you should go buy right now.

Yesterday's video he released, Tacky, was also fantastic:

Music video by "Weird Al" Yankovic performing Tacky. (C) 2014 RCA Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment

Apple’s App Review Should Test Accessibility

John Gruber at Daring Fireball and Jim Dalrymple at The Loop both commented on a horribly written article by Reuters' Christina Farr this week. Their main issue with her article was how it inaccurately and inexplicable claims that Apple somehow is feeling the most pressure from accessibility advocated to improve accessiblity on iOS, when in truth Apple is way out ahead of Android and all other competitors when it comes to accessiblity support.

John Gruber asks:

A few things in this article stuck out to me as oddly slanted. First, in what world does the above paragraph make sense? Why should Apple be “feeling more heat” than Google on the accessibility front? Where does the article state that iOS is far ahead of Android in terms of out-of-the-box accessibility for the vision impaired? (It doesn’t.)

Then Farr pulls a quote from Tim Cook out of context, selectivley leaving off the later half of the quote to make it sound as if Tim Cook is scorning accessilbity, when he was actually doing the opposite.

Here is the quote she used:

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook in a 2013 speech at Auburn University described people with disabilities “in a struggle to have their human dignity acknowledged.” He said, “They’re frequently left in the shadows of technological advancements that are a source of empowerment and attainment for others.”

Here is the entirety of the quote, unedited:

“People with disabilities often find themselves in a struggle to have their human dignity acknowledged, they frequently are left in the shadows of technological advancements that are a source of empowerment and attainment for others, but Apple’s engineers push back against this unacceptable reality, they go to extraordinary lengths to make our products accessible to people with various disabilities from blindness and deafness to various muscular disorders. I receive hundreds of e-mails from customers every day, and I read them all. Last week I received one from a single mom with a three year old autistic son who was completely non-verbal, and after receiving an iPad, for the first time in his life, he had found his voice. I receive scores of these incredible stories from around the world and I never tire of reading them.” “We design our products to surprise and delight everyone who uses them, and we never, ever analyze the return on investment. We do it because it is just and right, and that is what respect for human dignity requires, and its a part of Apple I’m especially proud of.”

As Jim Dalryple says:

Dear Reuters, you fucking morons: You can’t pick and choose which parts of a quote you want to use to fill the narrative of a story you already have written. You could have written a fine story about accessibility and everyone would have agreed with you, but what you did is show your lack of integrity, essentially harming a very important message about accessibility.

Next time, stick to the facts.

Also check out this follow-up post by Gruber in which he quotes the opinions of an actual disabled person when it comes to accessibility on iOS.

Now moving on to the topic of accessibility in general, Marco Arment took the opportunity of these blog posts to advocate for greater emphasis by Apple on 3rd party developers to support accessibility in their apps:

Accessibility failures should be embarrassments to all developers because they’re usually very easy to fix. For most problems, you just need to add label text to a custom control or image button. Rare “complex” issues are usually less than an hour’s work.

I try hard to get accessibility right… when I remember to. My triple-tap home-button shortcut is always mapped to VoiceOver so I can easily test. I include VoiceOver users in betas whenever possible and had an extremely valuable and insightful accessibility review in the WWDC labs this year. But I still occasionally ship unlabeled buttons, hidden-view clutter, or inaccessible custom views.

Poor or broken accessibility is exactly the sort of problem that Apple’s App Review team should check for: many developers forget to test it, it’s easy for Apple to quickly test when reviewing each app, and it’s easy to fix.

Marco goes on to explain more about the issue in general and some steps Apple might take to improve accessibility support in iOS when it comes to the App Store.

The Developer's Dystopian Future

Ed Finkler is a friend of mine by a mutual acquantaince and location (he went to college and lives in the hometown of my wife; a mutual friend used to work for my wife's dad during college who owned a book store in town). And thus I am happy to be able to link to this post that Ed made on Sunday:

I find myself more and more concerned about my future as a developer. …

My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles. I’m less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives. I value stability and clarity.

Marco Arment, another friend (who I don't think knows Ed personally...small world) took Ed's post to heart and largely agreed with it:

I feel the same way, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve lost almost all interest in being a web developer. The client-side app world is much more stable, favoring deep knowledge of infrequent changes over the constant barrage of new, not necessarily better but at least different technologies, libraries, frameworks, techniques, and methodologies that burden professional web development.

Go read both posts.

Rowling Writes Potter Update; Hints At Possible New Book

I first saw this on Twitter a few days ago as a retweet from Pottermore. Jason Kottke has the best summary of it I could find:

In a piece for the Pottermore web site, JK Rowling writes an update on how the gang from the Harry Potter books is doing. The piece is an account of the Quidditch World Cup Final written by Rita Skeeter, the gossip columnist from the books. You need a login to read it on Pottermore, but someone uploaded it to Reddit as well.

That last line is one of a few references to possible new stories in the piece...the last paragraph mentions a new biography of Harry and his pals due out at the end of this month:

And for those who want to know exactly how imperfect they are, my new biography: Dumbledore's Army: The Dark Side of the Demob will be available from Flourish and Blotts on July 31st.

Could Rowling be setting the stage for an eighth Potter book or is she just winding us up?

Very interesting. When I first read that myself I thought -- No...she couldn't have. But now that I think more about it...perhaps?

Smartphone Truths And Samsung's Inevitable Decline

Ben Thompson writes:

Ultimately, though, Samsung’s fundamental problem is that they have no software-based differentiation, which means in the long run all they can do is compete on price. Perhaps they should ask HP or Dell how that goes.

In fact, it turns out that smartphones really are just like PCs: it’s the hardware maker with its own operating system that is dominating profits, while everyone else eats themselves alive to the benefit of their software master.

Gruber has additional commentary that is worth reading on the topic of Samsung's software.