The prolific podcaster is undergoing a major design overhaul

Overcast, a popular podcast player for Apple devicesIt’s getting an update that brings a major design overhaul to your home screen, as well as a new theme system that lets you choose the colors used throughout the app. For Cloudy users like me, the update is a fresh coat of paint for a well-made application, and experienced users are likely to find a lot of new tweaks and settings they can use to make the application work better for their use case.

In the Blog postApp developer Marco Arment said the 2022.2 update, available for download Friday, is the app’s “biggest update” ever, and promises some exciting future updates.

Changes are visible from the moment you open the app – there’s a new episode that lets you quickly resume the episodes you’re listening to and see which podcast episodes have new episodes (you can even tap on blocks for more options), and the interface is full of updated icons. The playlists, which appear at the top of the screen, have been reworked: they now appear as customizable colored dots with icons instead of the gray rectangles as before, and you can now create playlists that display what’s queued, starred, or completed episodes downloaded or in progress.

If you want any of the pre-built playlists, you can easily add them to the home screen via the add playlist menu – and if you don’t, you can just ignore them altogether. (Adding a playlist also includes the option to hide and show the last bar if you’re not a fan.)

Below the Playlists and Recents section is your podcast list. In the previous design, the home page had sections for playlists, podcasts, and podcasts being played. The last two modes have been replaced by a menu that allows you to switch between three modes: not busy, active and inactive. Unplayed podcasts shows with unplayed episodes, active shows for all podcasts that are followed, and inactive for “podcasts you don’t follow that haven’t added episodes or appear to be inactive”. (These podcasts are also given a little moon icon all over the UI.) You can also pin shows, which puts them at the top of the list.

In addition to the new functions, the application is also only a look the most beautiful. I wouldn’t say Cloudy got bad, but in my opinion the update makes it look more modern. Arment mentions that it has updated typography and spacing between the app, but perhaps the most exciting is the addition of a new theme system. You can keep the light orange in Cloudy mode and the darker blue if you like, but I imagine a lot of people will want to look at the available color palette and pick something different – and yes, you can have different colors for as long as the app is running. In light or dark mode.

Photo: Marco Armant

There are also some minor tweaks, like a redesign of the menu that appears when you tap on a podcast episode in a playlist. There will now be a button allowing you to mark the episode as played, which Arment says is the feature most requested by users “by far”. You can also mark an episode as played by scrolling up and clicking the icon.

Photo: Marco Armant

The Friday update is primarily focused on making your podcast library management experience even better – after you launch one, the layout will be exactly the same as the previous version, except for the theme color you choose which will be used all the time. Arment promises podcast screens are up and running now and individual podcast screens will get their own new paint in a future update, so there’s something to look forward to.

After trying to update a bit, I was impressed. In a year or two I’ve been using Overcast, I’ve never clicked on a playlist or queue system, but at least the new design makes me want to shoot it.

And while I haven’t used it long enough to see how much of a difference some bug fixes and background notification improvements will make, I liked some of the small quality of life tweaks (the finer details, because it’s named Cloudy in the settings menu) too. I’m excited to see what Arment has in store for the new launch screen, as this is the interface I use the most.