I love listening to podcasts. I’m always surprised when I find out that friends of mine have never listened to even one podcast. It’s possible that they don’t have the time to sit through one because they don’t have a commute that’s very long or whatever.
Although I don’t have a long commute (walking downstairs to the office is not long), I do end up in my car and also try to walk on a daily basis. It’s at this time that I love listening to podcasts even more so than listening to music which I also love.
Apple has a stock podcast app that gets ripped on by a lot of people. It’s probably fine for most but when you get a taste of something better that is also free with ads, it’s impossible not to use it.
The Overcast app is one of my favorite apps ever and today, it just got what I consider a significant upgrade even though it may not immediately blow you away.
There is one big reason why I love Overcast and that’s its ability to speed up a podcast but still keeping the person’s voice sound as natural as possible. It never sounds like you are listening to Mickey Mouse. Depending on the podcast, I can listen to it at approximately 1.75x the normal speed. Along with that, Overcast has a smart speed feature that shortens silences.
As I mentioned, Overcast got a significant upgrade. If this feature existed previously, I never noticed it, probably because the UX of last major release was never in my wheelhouse of thinking. When I’m about to go for a long drive, I would’ve liked to queue up a long list of podcasts. I never knew how to do this previously, if it was even possible. But now, you can not only have a playlist but also reorder the episodes within the playlist using drag and drop under iOS11.