Ten years ago, Apple’s Phil Schiller surprised Apple enthusiasts and developers by walking out on stage at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live WWDC event and giving an open, human, honest interview to a somewhat jaded community. I wrote this in response: Both Apple and Phil Schiller himself took a huge risk in doing this. That they agreed at all is a noteworthy gift to this community of long-time enthusiasts, many of whom have felt under-appreciated as the company has grown. […] Phil’s appearance on the show was warm, genuine, informative, and entertaining. It was human. And humanizing the company and its decisions, especially to developers — remember, developer relations is all under Phil — might be worth the PR risk. This started a ten-year run of interviews by Apple executives on The Talk Show every year at WWDC that proved to be great, surprisingly safe PR for Apple. No executive ever said something they shouldn’t have (they’re pros), no sensational or negative news stories ever resulted from them, and Apple’s enthusiastic fans and developers felt seen, heard, and appreciated. *     *     * For unspecified reasons, Apple has declined to participate this year, ending what had become a beloved tradition in our community — and I can’t help but suspect that it won’t come back. (A lot has changed in the meantime.) Maybe Apple has good reasons. Maybe not. We’ll see what their WWDC PR strategy looks like in a couple of weeks. In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way. I hope that’s either not the case, or it doesn’t stay the case for long. This will be the first WWDC I’m not attending since 2009 (excluding the remote 2020 one, of course). Given my realizations about my relationship with Apple and how they view developers, I’ve decided that it’s best for me to take a break this year, gain some perspective, and decide what my future relationship should look like. Maybe Apple’s leaders are doing that, too.

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. Like podcasts better than blog posts? Listen to ATP #596 for more! What’s new Much faster, more responsive, more reliable, and more accessible. Modern design, optimized for easily-reached controls on today’s phone sizes. Improvements throughout, such as undoing large seeks, new playlist-priority options, easier navigation, and more. What’s not Most features. Overcast is still Overcast! The audio engine. It’s the best part of Overcast, and still leads the industry in sound quality, silence skipping, and volume normalization. (More soon!) The business. I’m still a one-person operation, with no funding or external ownership, serving only my customers. My principles. I always want to make the best podcast app, and I’ll never disrespect your time, attention, or privacy. What’s gone Streaming. Most big podcasts now use dynamic ad insertion, which causes bugs and problems for streaming playback.1 Downloading episodes completely before they begin playback is much more reliable. Tapping a non-downloading episode will now open the playback screen, download it, then start playback. It works similarly to the way streaming did before, but playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered. On today’s fast networks, this usually only takes a few extra seconds. And in the near future, I’ll be adding smarter options and more control over selective downloading of episodes to further improve the experience for people who don’t automatically download every episode. What’s next The last few missing features from the old app, such as Shortcuts support, storage management, and OPML. These are absent now, but will return soon. More options for downloading and deleting episodes. Upgrading the Apple Watch app to the new, faster sync engine. (The Watch app is currently unchanged from the previous one.) And, of course, more features, including some of your most-requested features over the last decade. Getting this rewrite out the door was a monumental task. Thank you for your patience as I work through this list! Why? Most of Overcast’s core code was 10 years old, which made it cumbersome or impossible to easily move with the times, adopt new iOS functionality, or add new features, especially as one person. That’s why there haven’t been many new features or changes in years. You saw it, and I saw it. I wasn’t able to serve my customers as well as I wanted. For Overcast to have a future, it needed a modern foundation for its second decade. I’ve spent the past 18 months rebuilding most of the app with Swift, SwiftUI, Blackbird, and modern Swift concurrency. Now, development is rapidly accelerating. I’m more responsive, iterating more quickly, and ultimately making the app much better. Thank you all so much for the first decade of Overcast. Here’s to the next one. Dynamic ad insertion (DAI) splices ads into each download, and no two downloads are guaranteed to have the same number or duration of ads. So, for example, if the first half of an episode downloads, then the download fails, and it downloads the second half with another request, the combined audio may jump forward or back at the halfway mark, losing or repeating content. ↩︎

Overcast’s latest update (2022.2) brings the largest redesign in its nearly-eight-year history, plus many of the most frequently requested features and lots of under-the-hood improvements. I’m pretty proud of this one. For this first and largest phase of the redesign, I focused on the home screen, playlist screen, typography, and spacing. (I plan to revamp the now-playing and individual-podcast screens in a later update.) The home screen is radically different: Home screen, before (left) and after (right). Playlists now have strong visual identities for nicer and easier navigation. Each playlist has a customizable color, and a custom icon can be selected from over 3,000 SF Symbols to match modern iOS design and the other icons within Overcast. And playlists can be manually reordered with drag-and-drop. Recently played and newly published episodes can now be displayed on the home screen for quick access, much like the widget and CarPlay experience. Podcasts can now be pinned to the top of the home-screen list. Pinned podcasts can also be manually reordered with drag-and-drop. I’ve also rethought the old stacked “Podcasts” and “Played Podcasts” sections to better match people’s needs and expectations. Now, the toggle atop the podcast list switches between three modes: podcasts with current episodes, all followed podcasts, and inactive podcasts (those that you don’t follow and therefore won’t get any more episodes from, or haven’t posted a new episode in a long time). The playlist screen’s structure remains mostly the same, while refining the design for the modern era: Playlist screen, before (left) and after (right). Here, it’s more apparent that I’ve replaced the system San Francisco font with an alternate variant, San Francisco Rounded, to increase legibility and better match the personality of the app. I’ve also added highly demanded features: By far, Overcast’s most-requested feature is a Mark as Played feature. That’s now available as a checkmark button on episode rows, as well as a left-side swipe action. The second-most-requested feature is a way to view all starred episodes. Special playlists for Starred, Downloaded, and In Progress can now be created. The light and dark themes now each have a customizable tint color from the modern iOS UI-color palette, including these favorites from beta testers: And throughout the app, I’ve made tons of tweaks and bug fixes, including: Notifications and background downloads are now much more reliable. Episode downloads can now be individually deleted or re-downloaded. Links can now be opened in Safari. (under Nitpicky Details) Performance is now significantly better with very large playlists and collections. Fixed bugs with episode-duration detection, CarPlay lists, Mac-app sharing, and much more. So much is better in this update that I can’t even remember it all. Thank you so much to everyone who helped me beta-test this massive update. As always, Overcast is free in the App Store. Go get it!

Losing Steve affected me more than it probably should have, given that I never met him or had any correspondence with him. But losing him was devastating — not just to my world, but the world. He was a sort of virtual father figure: I was always hoping that maybe Steve would notice something I did. We all wanted his attention and approval, and that drove us to do better work — even those of us who never worked at Apple. Nobody replaced him in this role. Nobody can. But as an outsider who had no personal relationship with him to mourn, it has been most depressing to consider how much of his work the world missed out on. He wasn’t taken from us after a long, complete life — he was taken in his prime. He had so much more to offer the world.