A heads-up if you use overcast
I opened up Overcast this morning and I couldn’t find my pinned feeds, which was confusing, and frustrating.
I found them eventually under a new “icon” called All, though only the pinned feeds with active podcasts show there.
When I looked in the app store, it looks like the app has just been updated.
Bit confusing. Not the end of the world. I’ve never understood how overcast works, but it does a solid job on the basics.
The Developer has been re-vamping the app for some time, adopting Swift UI and making changes to the sync servers. I think it is partly in response to some vocal criticism a year or two ago that the app was basically dying as it was heavy with legacy code. (I seem to remember that a couple of OS updates broke it because it was not well maintained at that time)
Recently, he has been working on the interface and has adopted and then partially reverted changes to the feed lists and what they are called. A long-term issue for some users has been confusion between “deleting” episodes and marking them “played”.
The developer (Marco Arment) is very aware of his users’ views, and those users all want very different things and have strong opinions about every detail. This sort of hiccup is him trying to find something that pleases most of them, but I think he sometimes misses the “silent majority” who are basically happy with how things are now. Those who send the most emails and messages represent a tiny proportion of users.
I value the app and its developer. it’s genuinely independent. Its sound is easily the best around. It’s robust and reliable and syncs well. It is not interested in capturing your data or locking you into a media company’s systems. It’s fairly priced. If it can look old-fashioned and relies on playlists, that’s fine by me as long as I can listen to the podcasts I want.
You can follow what’s going on on Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@overcastfm or listen to him on the “under the Radar” podcast.
On the plus side, this update introduced a quicker way to “move” from one playlist to another rather than the previously available “add” to a playlist. What this enables is an “All Episodes” playlist and a “Queue” playlist with a seamless way to move episodes from All to Queue, closely replicating Castro functionality, minus some more advanced queue management stuff that I never used.
This was previously possible using the “Add” functionality, but it required more taps and swipes - add to queue, remove from All as distinct steps.
Sorry, I’m rambling now, it’s probably only me that cares about this, but it’s been a huge QOL update for me and I now no longer miss Castro at all.
My main issue w/ Overcast is search. It is bad. If it does manage to find something I’m searching for, depending on which thing you try first (individual episodes or podcasts) when you go back to the search screen to try the next one, it’s gone. Search field is blank. Maddening!
I swear by Overcast but yeah, this kills me that it does it this way. And many times, I go over to the Apple Podcast app and search for stuff.
It’s not just you. I love the new move feature.