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It’s a really nice app and I bought it instantly. The App Sore’s podcasting landscape is filling out nicely, with a diverse selection of high-quality apps for m
by arrrg 12y ago
It’s a really nice app and I bought it instantly. The App Sore’s podcasting landscape is filling out nicely, with a diverse selection of high-quality apps for many different tastes. I wish there were as good a selection of apps for many other purposes.
There are Instacast, Downcast and Pocket Casts with tons of features, though all with slightly different approaches to UI and graphic design. A nice selection for anyone who wants every feature and everyone who has a very particular and personal way of listening and organising podcasts that doesn’t fit with the way simpler apps organise the podcasts. For me their design (both UI and graphic design which in many cases is just awful) is a bit too noisy and loud and while they do have customisability the developers don’t seem to have put as much effort into making the experience map well to typical listening scenarios right out of the box, making you do all the work. For me personally they are a bit to complex and confusing, but for people who need the features they are great.
On the other end of the scale is Castro with its simplicity (and excellent graphic design) that makes it very streamlined to use – if your approach to listening to podcasts fits with what they designers had in mind. For me it just fits perfectly. (I really need nothing besides a list of podcasts and a list of unplayed episodes. That’s perfect for me.) Plus, background downloads work very well, even if they do consume a bit more battery. I can understand going with a server component, but it wouldn’t have been an absolute necessity.
Overcast fits somewhere between the Instacast-Castro complexity spectrum (with some cool extra features no one else has), filling that gap.
Sadly, Marco Arment doesn’t have the graphic design prowess of the people who made Castro, and since my demands are very simple I will stick with Castro for the time being. But I’m always up to switching it up and I can imagine it being a great app for many people.
(Those boxes I put those apps into aren’t hermetically sealed. In some respects Overcast actually is simpler than Castro in very thoughtful way, for example. But in general those categories work well for me.)
- nicky0 12y agoI can see why some people would say Castro's design is better, but to me Castro is "over-designed". The visual slickness gets in the way of actually using it. I'd say Overcast is actually better designed, because it is more usable.
- arrrg 12y agoI don’t think it does get in the way and I wouldn’t see how … But point taken. It uses less standard controls, certainly. I have nothing against standard controls, my issue with Overcast is more with alignment and layout (especially the alignment and layout of the podcast images, up there in a corner). In the end my willingness to trade usability for graphic design might be slightly higher than that of many other people (at least those who care).
- zw 12y agoAs an example (I'm not the guy who you responded to), I've been frustrated in Castro a number of times while looking at an episode in show's feed because the native swipe-back gesture takes you back to the list of shows rather than than that show's feed, and it gets especially annoying considering the lengths of the transitions involved. It's obnoxious, and something one would get used to, but I seem to keep forgetting it. It's one of a few elements of navel-gazing "over"-design… of course the user would follow the steps, they're the steps! They're right there in the design.
- arrrg 12y agoHa, of course! That’s an issue I also have run into. Luckily it’s not often that I browse my podcasts that way, but if you do, that clearly sucks.
- w4 12y agoAgreed -- I grabbed Castro thinking it was gorgeous, but using it was super unwieldy. I went back to Downcast after about a day because it's much more useable, despite being far less easy on the eyes.