Steadcast – Free Mac podcast player for learning, not background noise
Hey HN — I'm Aaron, and I built Steadcast because I was frustrated that I listen to 15+ hours of podcasts a week and retain almost none of it. Steadcast is a native macOS podcast player (Swift, SwiftUI, AVFoundation — no Electron) designed around one idea: podcasts are how a lot of us learn now, but no podcast app actually treats them that way. What makes it different: • Learning domains, not genres. The app is organized around 10 knowledge domains (AI, science, history, philosophy, psychology, etc.) with 90+ editorially curated shows. No true crime, no celebrity gossip. * On-device…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN — I'm Aaron, and I built Steadcast because I was frustrated that I listen to 15+ hours of podcasts a week and retain almost none of it. Steadcast is a native macOS podcast player (Swift, SwiftUI, AVFoundation — no Electron) designed around one idea: podcasts are how a lot of us learn now, but no podcast app actually treats them that way. What makes it different: • Learning domains, not genres. The app is organized around 10 knowledge domains (AI, science, history, philosophy, psychology, etc.) with 90+ editorially curated shows. No true crime, no celebrity gossip. * On-device transcription. Every episode gets transcribed locally using the macOS 26 Speech framework. Every word becomes searchable. No cloud processing, nothing leaves your Mac. •AI summaries. Apple Intelligence generates summaries that capture the key ideas from each episode. • Memories. Press Ctrl+Cmd+K while listening and Steadcast saves a timestamped bookmark with the full transcript context around that moment. So when you hear something worth remembering, you can actually find it later. • Smart Speed. Intelligent silence trimming with a live counter showing exactly how much time you've saved. • Keyboard-first. Global hotkeys, full keyboard navigation — built for people who work at their Macs all day. It's free on the Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/steadcast/id6760033638 Requires macOS 26. Built as a solo project. I'd love feedback on the curation approach especially — is a podcast app that has opinions about what you should listen to a feature or a bug?
Does the same job
all alternatives →
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, April 2026
the whole month →
- AG
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · jaso1024.com
- IB
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
AI · Apr 2026 · github.com
- BC
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · sam-burns.com
- IB
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
AI · Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app