I have written a bit before about podcasts. I love them. They are a very useful way to stay updated on various topics. They are great for getting some entertainment. And they can be great for studying as well.

A couple months ago Marco Arment released his podcast App Overcast to the world. I was sceptic at first and it is not the most beautiful of all podcast apps. Why would I need to try yet another app to listen to podcasts on my iOS devices? Because it allows me to save more time.

I have a lot of podcasts in my queue every week. Listening to all of them in original speed would take a huge amount of time, so I like to speed things up. The usual features for listening with increased playback speed is in basically all other podcasts apps. But Overcast goes a step further. The feature “Smart Speed” skips over segments in the podcasts where there are pauses in the conversation. This might seem to like nothing at first, but this feature already saved me more than 30 hours of pure listening time since I have started to use Overcast sometime in July.

Another nice to have feature is a minimalistic web interface to keep a quick overview of all your subscribed and not yet listened to podcasts. It also offers the ability to listen to your queued casts from the web browser, if you wish to do so.

Before I finish this up I’d like to share a couple of the podcasts I recently subscribed to and which I can recommend:

• Grammar Girl
• Analog(ue)
• Star Talk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Turning This Car Around

I hope you enjoy some of those podcasts as much as I do. And maybe you’d like to give Overcast a try.