by Jason Snell
Overcast turns 10
My podcast player of choice for the last ten years just celebrated, yep, its 10th anniversary. Here’s Overcast’s sole proprietor, Marco Arment:
Today, on the tenth anniversary of Overcast 1.0, I’m happy to launch a complete rewrite and redesign of most of the iOS app, built to carry Overcast into the next decade — and hopefully beyond.
Speaking as someone who got antsy writing about Apple betas for a couple of weeks before being able to release my work this Monday, it’s absolutely amazing to think of the restraint Marco went through over the last 18 months, working on entirely rewriting his app without anyone seeing the fruits of his labor.
I highly recommend this week’s episode of ATP, in which Marco details the highs and lows of the process of rewriting his app.
The trick in writing about this update for broader audiences is that, well, it’s still really just Overcast. Users don’t care if a developer spent tens or hundreds or thousands of hours working on the code; all they care about are new features. This new release of Overcast is surprisingly familiar: the design’s a bit different, but not too much, and almost every feature is there. I’ve been using the new Overcast for a few weeks and it was easy to get used to the interface changes. It’s still my Overcast.
What’s exciting is that, by rewriting the app in Swift and using SwiftUI, Marco has given himself the opportunity to stop maintaining an elderly code base, and instead has a fast, modern app that he can iterate on quickly. Marco suggests that “some of your most-requested features over the last decade” are going to be rolling out soon, enabled by the rewrite. See, that’s me being a user. It’s all about those new features.