Undercast is a small third-party desktop applet for Marco Arment's popular iOS podcatching app Overcast.
Overcast has become a popular alternative to Apple's first-party Podcasts app. It's simple and clean interface makes it easy to access your shows, and it has a few nice power features like voice boost and smart speed. Overcast also has a syncing service to manage your subscriptions and playback progression across devices, but it unfortunately lacks an official Mac or Windows client. Overcast does sync your data with Overcast.fm however. Overcast.fm lets you access your subscriptions, and offers a basic web-based player for listening to your shows.
On it's own, Overcast.fm is a good solution for accessing your podcasts on the desktop when in a pinch. It lives in one of your browser tabs however, so there's a chance you can accidentally close it, and more critically, it lacks support for the ubiquitous keyboard media keys.
Undercast tries to make up for these shortcomings. Rather than writing an entirely new podcasting client that highjacks Overcast's syncing service, Undercast simply wraps the Overcast.fm web player inside of a desktop applet that lives in your menubar or system tray.
- Undercast lives in your menubar or system tray.
- Click on it to pull up the Overcast window, or right click on it to access the options or quit.
- Media Key Support. Undercast supports keyboard media keys on both Mac and Windows.
- Play keys will play and pause your podcast. Stop keys will pause the currently playing podcast. Forward/Rewind keys will jump your podcast forward or back by a few seconds.
- The amount of seconds Undercast skips is determined by a setting on the iOS app. In Overcast, tap on the Overcast icon on the top left of the main screen, then go into the "Nitpicky Details" menu, then change "Seek Back By" and "Seek Forward By" to your desired values.
- By default, Undercast will attempt to bind your system's global media keys to it. If you would like to free up control of your system's media keys to another application, right click on the icon and deselect "Bind Media Keys".
- Playback Indicator
- By default, Undercast's icon changes from white to orange when a podcast is playing. This setting can be disabled in the right click menu.
Version 2 of Undercast brought the Electron and Menubar packages up to speed, so there should be a few bugfix and performans improvements there. The current architecture of Undercast is based on the Webview and Remote compoents of Electron, both of which are currently being sunset, so we'll see how long it's able to hand in there without a full rewrite.
Undercast now supports Electron-Fordge for building distributions. Simply npm install, then npm run make if you need to make a new distributable. npm start still gets things up and running when you're developing.
Additional Changes:
- The window placement issue on Windows machines where the taskbar is on the left or right of the screen has now been resolved.
- Due to changes in the Overcast.fm website, Undercast no longer provides the option to disable media hotkeys.
- Undercast now remembers the previous window size when you restart the application. Window size settings are stored in the user's App Data or Application Support folders in the
window-state.jsonfile.
On macOS 10.14 "Mojava" and later, the operating system now requires you to provide Undercast accessibility access to gain control of all media keys. To grant these permissions, open the System Preferences application, then browse to the Security & Privacy section. Navigate to the Privacy Tab, then choose Accessibility from the list. If you have launched Undercast before, you should see it in the list of applications. Enter your system credentials using the lock icon in the bottom right corner of the screen, then check the box next to Undercast.
Additional details on this requirement can be found in the Electron docs.
Undercast uses a technology called Electron. It was developed by Github for use with their Atom text editor, but has become a generalized tool for creating cross platform applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Using Electron, Undercast creates a sandboxed instance of Overcast.fm's website. As far as the website is concerned, it's just been opened in a standard browser instance. Undercast then injects a small javascript API into the Overcast instance to enable media key controls. The menubar aspects of Electron are handled by maxogden's menubar package.
Precompiled builds of Undercast are located in the /releases folder. Simply unzip them and launch the .app or .exe file.
Undercast is a standard straightforward Electron application. Run npm install to download the necessary Node packages, then run ./node_modules/.bin/electron . to launch the application. Compiling the application for production can be done with the electron-packager . Undercast --ignore=\releases npm module.
Undercast is not an official Overcast application. It has no relation to Marco Arment, and offers no guarantee that it will continue working in the future. Undercast is a free open source project available under the MIT license.