Handing Off Podcasts via Overcast

I was listening to a podcast on my iPhone via Overcast on the way home (my pregnant wife needed a milkshake at 9pm after all). I plugged in my headphones when I got home and was going to continue listening to the podcast on my phone as I usually do when I try to squeeze in a few minutes of work at night before bed on my main computer.

I’ve recently purchased a new Macbook Pro in the last week or so, and I’m still discovering things that I had heard of but hadn’t realized yet. Instead of going to my desktop to work on some logos with Illustrator, I decided to try out the Macbook since it runs Adobe apps just fine.

When I flipped it open (with my headphones on and still plugged in to the iPhone playing a podcast via Overcast), I was surprised to see this small item in the Dock:

Overcast and Main Window

I was surprised to see Overcast using Apple’s much touted but overlooked new “Handoff” component to its ecosystem (as part of a wider initiative known as Continuity).

While I try to avoid lock in to one physical or software system (I still use and love my large Windows desktop for heavy graphics work and I keep my Moto X plugged in and try to use it at least once a day but that’s dwindling), I keep finding myself pleased by things that Apple is getting right on the hardware front. Their software and approach to the “cloud” is still behind but with things like Continuity, it looks like they are getting better and better at that in the post-Jobs era.

Kudos to Marco Arment on Overcast. It’s a battery hungry app, but that’s because I use it so often on my iPhone. It’s a beautiful piece of software, and little surprises like being able to handoff podcasts between my phone or iPad to my Mac without skipping a beat is pretty magical. It’s the little things.

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