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I’m Marco Arment : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast. Apps • Podcast • Twitter • About The Overcast Redesign: Part One March 25, 2022 ∞ https://marco.org/2022/03/25/overcast-redesign-2022 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 ! ◆ Ten years after we lost Steve Jobs October 5, 2021 ∞ https://marco.org/2021/10/05/steve-jobs-ten-years 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. ◆ The future of the App Store September 13, 2021 ∞ https://marco.org/2021/09/13/future-of-the-app-store After the dust settles from the developer class-action settlement , the South Korean law , the JFTC announcement , and the Apple v. Epic decision , I think the most likely long-term outcome isn’t very different from the status quo — and that’s a good thing. Allowing external purchases Here’s what I think we’ll end up with: Apple will still require apps to use their IAP system for any qualifying purchases that occur in the apps themselves. All app types will be allowed to link out to a browser for other purchase methods. Most apps will be required to also offer IAP side-by-side with any external methods. 1 Only Reader apps” will be exempt from this requirement. 2 Apple will have many rules regarding the display, descriptions, and behavior of external purchases, many of which will be unpublished and ever-changing. App Review will be extremely harsh, inconsistent, capricious, petty, and punitive with their enforcement. 3 Apple won’t require price-matching between IAP and external purchases. These few but important corrections reduce Apple’s worst behavior and should relieve most regulatory pressure. The result won’t look much different than the status quo: Most big media apps (qualifying as reader” apps) won’t offer IAP, but will finally be allowed to link to their websites from their apps and offer purchases there. Many games will offer both IAP and external purchases, with the external choice offering a discount, bonus gems, extra loot boxes, or other manipulative tricks to optimize the profitability of casino games for children (commissions from which have been the largest portion of Apple’s services revenue” to date). Most importantly, many products, services, and business models will become possible that previously weren’t, leading to more apps, more competition, and more money going to more places. External purchase methods will evolve to be almost as convenient as IAP (especially if Apple Pay is permitted in this context), and payment processors will reduce the burden of manual credit-card entry with shared credentials available across multiple apps. The payment-fraud doomsday scenarios argued by Apple and many fans mostly won’t happen, in part because App Review will prevent most obvious cases, but also because parents don’t typically offer their credit cards to untrustworthy children; and for buyers of all ages, most credit cards themselves provide stronger fraud prevention and easier recourse from unwanted charges than the App Store ever has. No side-loading I don’t expect side-loading or alternative app stores to become possible, and I’m relieved, because that is not a future I want for iOS. When evaluating such ideas, I merely ask myself: What would Facebook do?” Facebook owns four of the top ten apps in the world. If side-loading became possible, Facebook could remove Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger from Apple’s App Store, requiring customers to install these extremely popular apps directly from Facebook via side-loading. And everyone would. Most people use a Facebook-owned app not because it’s a good app, but because it’s a means to an important end in their life. Social pressure, family pressure, and network lock-in prevent most users from seeking meaningful alternatives. People would jump through a few hoops if they had to. Facebook would soon have apps that bypassed App Review installed on the majority of iPhones in the world. Technical limitations of the OS would prevent the most egregious abuses, but there’s a lot they could still do. We don’t need to do much imagining — they already have attempted multiple hacks, workarounds, privacy invasions, and other unscrupulous and technically invasive behavior with their apps over time to surveil user behavior outside of their app and stay running longer in the background than users...