I Made A Podcast App in Less than an Hour

I wrapped Overcast.fm into a native Mac app (with nativefier and Electron). Download the app here.

Update: There is now a version for linux desktop as well! https://github.com/esthor/overcast-electron-app/tree/master/overcast-linux-x64

I have been pretty bothered by not having a decent native Mac app for podcasts since Instacast went under a couple years back. I especially liked the interface and that it synced across my iOS and mac devices. Since then, I have tried out a handful of iOS podcasts apps and liked Overcast the most. Nice interface, smooth and fast, with nice playback features and sync across devices. But there is no Mac app. 🙊 Since I spend most of my time in my Mac environment, that’s kind of a problem.

There is overcast.fm, which I can open in yet another browser window or tab, but that’s exactly the problem. I don’t want yet another browser window or tab open. Things start to get messy and lost when I have more than a few tabs open and my productivity plummets. Plus, I always seem to forget about my podcasts tab. How am I supposed to passively get more clever if I don’t remember to have a podcast playing in the background while I work?! 🤔

Oh. Right. I can just wrap overcast.fm into an Electron app and…Presto!…a Mac app comes out. Even better: I can install nativefier CLI and with a few flags from their API get a nicely packaged Electron app for Mac in 2 commands:

npm install nativefier -g
nativefier --icon /User/location/of/my/overcast/icon.icns “http://overcast.fm/podcasts`

• The first command installs nativefier on our machine globally.
• The second command packages a mac app using nativefier for the website “http://overcast.fm/podcasts” and we (optionally) pass a custom icon via the icon flag followed by the path to the icon.

In case you don’t want to mess with the command line, I’ve done it for you here: https://github.com/esthor/overcast-electron-app

esthor/overcast-electron-app-mac

Download the release here (or the whole repository) and open the app. Now you have Overcast for Mac! (unofficial)

(If you are new to the Command Line and feel a little intimidated, I highly recommend you try out this ‘project’ with nativefier. I think it could make for a nice introduction to get comfortable with the terminal and get something useful out of it very easily. Plus, you can impress your friends by wrapping any web app!)

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed it, please give me some claps! 👏