I'm Known on My iPad as an iPad Guy

Welcome to the very first episode of Comfort Zone. This is a new podcast all about pushing ourselves, well, outside of our comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, a YouTuber that's been covering apps, productivity, automation, weird hardware, iPad stuff since 2016. With me every week is Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I am doing great and I am so excited to get this podcast going. Tell the people a little bit about yourself and what you do. Yeah, so I am a product designer by day, and in my free time, I have been talking about technology as well for many, many years.

And I am a blogger, a YouTuber, a podcaster previously, and I'm super happy to be podcasting again today. Nice. And with us also every week is Niléane. Niléane, tell the people a little bit about yourself and how you're doing. Hello, I'm super fine today. I'm so excited to be started on this show. And I write on macstories.net. You might have seen my weird posts on the site. And I'm also an activist in my daily life. And yeah, that's it, I guess.

I'm also doing another podcast in French So that's my first one in English I'm sorry if Sometimes words come out Wrong, they come out in French Kind of Franklish I don't know So that will be it That's just fancy You're making this podcast extra fancy Chris, at least you're a California guy I'm a Midwestern guy It's going to be tough I'll just be like, hey, you guys eating In-N-Out burgers?

okay crickets on that joke never heard of it the premise of the show is that every week each host is going to bring something new to talk about technology adjacent this could be apps automation weird hardware some strange gaming device whatever something technology adjacent we're each going to bring something new to talk about that kind of you know, keeps us from talking about the same things over and over again. And then we'll kind of discuss how that pushed us outside of our comfort zone and what that did.

But then at the end of the show, we're going to have a challenge where one host challenges the other host to do something they probably don't want to do. And we have one of those for you this week. And the purpose of the challenge is to get us to do something we probably wouldn't do voluntarily. We're really excited to be joining the MacStories family of podcasts. They have an ever-growing list of podcasts that are just really great, and I'm really excited to be a part of it. I know for me I've been reading MacStories for a very long time.

Neelion, you're a contributor there. Matt, I know you've been reading their stuff for a long time as well. Oh, forever. Yeah. So we're going to put links in the show notes to MacStories stuff and where you can subscribe to this podcast if you just found us on YouTube or something like that. because not only is there an audio version, but there is also a video version as well that is hosted on the MacStories YouTube channel. So with that being said, let's get into the first episode, guys. Let's do it. Let's do it.

So, Matt, I believe you're up first. What new thing have you been trying this week? My comfort zone is definitely Apple stuff. And so the thing that took me outside my comfort zone this time is the MetaQuest 3. which is not Apple's headset. I do have Apple's headset, but I got this one a few months ago and really started using it quite a bit recently and wanted to kind of just talk about what's nice about it, what's actually better than the Vision Pro.

And I'm curious what you guys think about it. I'm not sure. Have you guys either used the MetaQuest 3 at all? I have heard Mark Zuckerberg defend it against the Vision Pro. So I'm going to guess that you agree with Mark Zuckerberg, which is something. It's not a usual thing. I've used it very briefly. It's not something I don't own one. I got to try it out for maybe 15, 20 minutes. Okay, perfect. After the Vision Pro came out, Zuckerberg did do a review, I guess, of it.

and his takeaway was actually the Quest 3 is not only a seventh the price of the Vision Pro, it's actually a better product. And I thought it was funny at the time. Like, obviously, he thinks his product is better, but I don't think he's totally wrong. What have you been using it for? Yeah, so I have been using it admittedly more for gaming stuff than what the Vision Pro is focused on.

but I think I'll get into the details I think the reason is that while the Quest is focused more on gaming use cases and kind of like immersive VR things and the Vision Pro is more pitched as like a productivity device and like an actual computer I think the Quest does a better job as a gaming device than the Vision Pro does as a computer if that makes sense so yeah weeks I've been just saying yes to playing more games in VR. I've downloaded Beat Saber, which I

know is not new, and pretty much everyone with a headset has played, but it is so awesome. It is so fun. It is so engaging. It's so immersive, and then I compare that to like, there's a game called Synth Riders, which is on all VR headsets, but it's kind of the equivalent that's on the Vision it's not even close. It's so much better playing even Synth Riders. It's better on the MetaQuest than on the Vision Pro.

Does that have to do with the fact that it has controller support? Exactly. This is the big thing that makes the Quest so nice to use in my opinion. The controllers are awesome and I want them on the Vision Pro so badly or something like this on the Vision Pro. on the vision pro you're just using your hands you're just using your hands yeah so like in in on the vision pro you're just waving your hands around but like with the quest 3 you're

you're moving your hands around basically the same but like you're getting haptic feedback when you hit a note it feels different when you hit it perfectly versus you just kind of clip something like you can tell when you're missing things when you're doing well um for other games there's buttons and triggers that are just satisfying. I played Half-Life Alyx on this thing, hooked up to my PC. It was awesome. It was so, so awesome. And like people have hacked it to work with the Vision Pro kind of, but like when you're like doing a shooter,

like playing a shooter, having a controller with a trigger makes just feels natural in a way I don't think you would just kind of like pinching at the air with the Vision Pro like you would do today, if that makes sense. That's interesting because I – so I have a PlayStation VR 2, and I definitely enjoy playing games on that more than I do the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is definitely a computer and a movie and TV watching device for me, except for the last few weeks.

But that's just because I've had new iPads. But I definitely see where you're coming from that, like, a controller makes a big difference, especially, like, motion controllers and stuff like that because that's what the PlayStation VR 2 has. And there is a Horizon game. It's Horizon Call of the Mountain where you're literally, like, climbing up mountains in VR. If you get vertigo or afraid of heights, like, it can really mess you up.

Like, I have a fear of heights, and it... I had a hard time completing that game, but I had to do it in, like, small chunks here and there. But I definitely know what you mean. I, for a long time, have said Apple needs to make a controller. Now, I meant, like, a traditional video game controller, but I also agree with you that they need to make... Even if it's optional, video game controllers for Vision Pro. But considering the Vision Pro price, it shouldn't be optional. it should be in the box but yeah yeah for sure um so the controllers are a huge thing i i love having

the controllers oh and like like if you have a vision pro you know like you pop it on and then you have to like type in your password and you have to like look at each number and pinch on each one to kind of hit it and it's fine it works but like it's kind of slow i cannot tell you how fast I am on the Quest with a controller just going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom on every single when I'm typing, when I'm doing passcodes, everything. It's so, so, so much faster and so much more precise. So I just love having the controllers. So even the general experience of using apps and I'd say the desktop experience, you found it better?

So that's where it is different. There's a few other things that are better, but this is one of the things that is definitely worse. So if you want to get things done, if you want to do task management or even browse the web, the apps are not as good as on the Vision Pro. So your apps probably aren't even there in the first place. And if they are, they're not as good as what you would get on the Vision Pro. It's just it's not built for that. And there's also kind of, if you want to do multiple windows, right now, I think they're really not an update soon,

but like right now you can have three windows, three apps in front of you, but they're kind of just like locked together in like one larger frame. So you can move all three of them around, but you can't move like one on its own away from the other windows. They're all kind of locked together. Yeah, it works a bit like split view, right? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, split view with up to three apps. Yeah. That's, I don't, that's terrible. I mean, the whole point of, the whole idea of working in a VR environment or even a mixed reality environment is I can put as many windows as I want wherever I want.

And that's like the big draw for me as a Vision Pro person that I can, I can put Obsidian over here and things over there and music over there and stuff like that. So yeah, that's weird. I think it, I think it's, they, again, they are doing an update that's going to add that pretty shortly, I think. Okay. I think the reason it wasn't there originally is because it's really all about the VR experiences, not necessarily the working with windows floating in your space, which is more the Vision Pro sort of thing.

So they kind of had different focuses on what they wanted to do. But yeah, it's definitely better on the Vision Pro, moving windows around. Interesting. Now, with the MetaQuest 3, I know you can plug it into a computer, a PC, and I believe a Mac as well. and mirror your desktop so you can work in a full v on vr environment with the desktop right you can can you do that with an ipad as well or is it just pc and mac you can only do pc and mac um and i would not advise it oh okay that is also not good uh and that's it's just it's the resolution of the screen like it's there you can make you can do the same thing you can do with like

the uh vision pro where you get like this virtual display and you can resize it however big you want like i made my display as big as my entire living room but it's just too blurry it's like looking at a 720p monitor it's it's working but it's not it's not crisp gotcha yeah yeah that's the retina jump has kind of ruined a lot of those things for me i've i have tried a couple of like those ar glasses and stuff like that and they work pretty well um but that's just because they're they're just mirroring they're not trying to do any fancy vr stuff they're just mirroring the display so uh yeah

that's that's kind of yeah that's that's interesting i've i've looked at the meta quest 3 but i just don't play there's not really like any big vr games that like oh i need to play this except the game that i really want to play in vr that i haven't got to play is vader immortal the Star Wars game and I just haven't found somebody that let me borrow one long enough to play it yeah and there's I think there's a Batman Arkham game coming out later this year so there's there's some stuff coming before we move on I wanted

to mention a couple of the other things that I want the Vision Pro to get that I like about the Quest 3 so there's no external battery on the Quest 3 and that is so awesome. The external battery on the Vision Pro isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's so annoying. We're going to look back on it and be like, that was really annoying when we had a battery just dangling from our face and we had to put it in a pocket or whatever. It's fine. I understand the trade-offs, but it's so, so, so nice to have a headset that feels just as light on your head

and has the battery inside so you can be totally wireless and not worry about it. So I really, I really, really like that about the Quest 3. I also really love, this is a huge thing for me, and I really think it would make the Vision Pro better for families, is sharing this thing. Like, when I want to show something to my wife that's, like, really cool, it's so easy to just have her put on the headset, and she's instantly using it. There's no, like, five-minute setup process.

there's no realignment of things that needs to happen. She just pops it on and she can use it and she can play Beat Saber. She can play like whatever, whatever I want to show her. It's not a whole to do. Like with the Vision Pro, I like I find something cool that I want to show her. Like I wanted to show her that Gucci app, that kind of movie they made. That was pretty interesting. And she's like, oh, I have to do the caliber. Like she didn't want to like go through the whole setup. And that for like this, like Halo device that I think you would think Apple to want people to have like the crazy person in the house who bought it to be able to show their family.

Here's the cool things that I'm getting out of it so that when there's a cheaper one, they they'll want to get it, too. But it's just it's such a pain right now that like she doesn't even want to see anything on it, which is a bummer. That's that's the same thing with my girlfriend. Whenever I'm like really excited about Vision Pro, I want to show her something, but I know she's not going to want to go through the setup process. So I'm just like, eh, like whatever. It's kind of wild that the Vision Pro doesn't allow you to save like almost like user profiles or something like that.

Like it knows when you put it on because it has optical ID. So it knows when like me, Christopher Lawley, puts my Vision Pro on because it scans my face or my eyes and unlocks automatically. So it's kind of weird that it can't have multiple profiles in there. And yeah, that is a weird limitation that hopefully gets fixed in a week or so. I'm not hopeful that it's going to get fixed because iPadOS has been this way for the past 10 years.

And there's absolutely no reason. Unless you're in education. Yeah, for some reason. Or if you're in a work-managed environment, I guess. yeah so my my hope for wwdc is they add a vip guest so like maybe you can save someone else's settings even if it's just one person like let's you say one other person so when you open guest mode it's like is it the person you literally share this with every single time and we can just use their settings um or is it someone new um i think that'd be awesome so we'll see we'll see

what they do but yeah that's something that i really appreciate about the quest 3 super easy to share but yeah i think that's really it for the quest 3 that's all i wanted to talk about um i'd say the the the last thing i'll say is over the last couple weeks i've definitely used the quest 3 more than the vision pro um and that's i i wasn't trying to prove anything that's bad right that's bad for the vision pro that's not good yeah so yeah count me in uh in on the people who are really looking forward and praying for some really exciting things at WWDC for

VisionOS because it doesn't really scratch my itches outside of watching a couple movies on the weekend. Yeah. So my thing this week that I have for you guys is kind of a biggie for me. You know, I'm kind of known on the iPad or I'm kind of known on the Internet as one of the iPad people. You are on the iPad. That's it. Chris is so big on iPad. I've known on my iPad as an iPad person as well. So, but yeah, no, I've kind of known on the internet as one of the iPad people.

I work from the iPad. That's my main computer. But when we were putting together this podcast, I realized I'm going to need a Mac because we wanted to do a video version. And all the stuff that I looked into, it didn't really seem like there was a great option to do video podcasting from the iPad to the level that I wanted to level I would be happy with. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to get a Mac in order to do this podcast, right. And I'm a big believer, if you're going to do something, do it the right way. So yeah, I ended up getting a Mac

mini. But what I didn't want is I didn't want this to replace my iPad. I don't even want this to be a productivity machine. I like, there is no obsidian, there's no things, there's none of that stuff installed on there. Literally, the only productivity apps in the doc are Notes, because that's where we do the show notes for this show, and Fantastical, because that's where we put the calendar appointment and the link to launch the service we use to jump into the podcast. So that's it. I'm not working from this machine at all. But what I wanted to do is I wanted it to mount it

underneath the desk that I film at. If you're watching the video version, it's the desk I'm sitting at right now. I wanted to mount it underneath here and I never want to plug a monitor into it. So I've been using this Mac Mini completely headless. And this is a base Mac Mini. It's 8 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage. It's the cheapest Mac you can go out and buy right now. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to come up with a way to use this in a headless form without without ever having to bring in a monitor into this room because I don't have any monitors or

TVs or anything here in the studio. The goal was to use my iPad as the display. So there's a couple of ways you can do it. There's a lot of remote desktop apps. Those have been around for a long time, like Jump Desktop, Screens. I really like Jump Desktop. That's the one I used way back in my IT days. It supported mouses before mouse support was even on the iPad. They had this funky little mouse that you could buy that it worked with that and it was it was kind of cool but oh wow i had no idea yeah it was this little thing it was way too small for my hands i hated it but

it was the only mouse that kind of worked with this app and literally it just worked with this app it like just passed through whatever like gesture or how you were moving it to the computer kind of thing it didn't actually give you mouse support on the ipad os um so there's that way of doing it and then with ipad os 17 we got capture card support uh so you can plug in an hdmi cable there's an hdmi port on the mac mini you can plug in hdmi capture card right in the side of the ipad and you could just mirror the display or or use the display as a monitor it's a wired connection

That's what I'm doing right now while we're recording this. But I was playing along with continuity quite a bit. And the way that works is, you know, I was kind of inspired by our friend Federico Vittici. He decided to take a MacBook Air, lop off the screen, basically, and use the iPad as the display. So he has the world's first OLED MacBook. He's a genius. He's a genius because it's not only an iPad with iPadOS, but it's also a Mac. and it's this whole thing. We'll link to the story.

But he basically uses continuity and he found somebody that wrote a script and shortcuts so that you can launch continuity right from the iPad because that's not something you can do natively from iPadOS. You can't launch the continuity screen capture or the screen mirroring from that. And basically what this does for those that aren't aware is it puts macOS, your Mac, on your iPad. So you see what is on your Mac on your iPad screen.

And that's how I've been using it. And honestly, guys, I can't tell the difference between continuity and capture card. Except for the fact, the only way I know the difference is continuity puts the screen resolution at the proper 4x3 aspect ratio. And capture card always wants to force 16x9. And I know you can get those dummy HDMI things, but I'm using the HDMI port for the capture card, so it doesn't really work. But yeah, I've been using this Mac Mini completely headless just to record these podcasts.

And for a couple of other automation things, I installed HomeBridge on it to get my security system, which isn't HomeKit compatible, and my garage door, which also isn't HomeKit compatible. into the HomeKit app. So that way for the garage door, I have CarPlay in my car. I can hit the button when I pull up right from the entertainment center and it opens it up, which is really nice where I can open it up remotely, close it remotely. If we have somebody come over and need them to put a package in the garage or something like that, I can open it up remotely.

Such a nice feature to have. Really, really nice. And then the alarm system, this way I can see all the cameras and stuff right from in the home app. So that's really nice. Just having a headless Mac Mini, there's just so many things you can do with it. Next up on my list is I want to automate the publishing of my YouTube videos. Right now, half of it is automated and the other half isn't because a bunch of reasons and iPad stuff. But now that I have an always-on Mac Mini that's always connected to the Internet, there's a lot you can do with it.

Welcome to the Mac. Back to the Mac. I wouldn't say that. I'm not working from the Mac. I want to underscore and stress I am not working from the Mac. I'm not back to the Mac or anything. I'm still an iPad person. That's what we all say at first, yeah. Look, I could have. I was originally looking at getting like an Intel NUC for, or not an Intel NUC. I'm sorry, Raspberry Pi. And then I also looked at Intel NUCs and then I found out those were getting discontinued. But the Raspberry Pi, I looked at Raspberry Pi for a little while.

but they're impossible to get. You cannot go out and buy a Raspberry Pi. They're always sold out. You always have to join some waitlist or something like that. And I was just like, I don't want to do that. You think people, they want people to buy their stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's like buying custom keyboard stuff. You should be actually very familiar with this. That's true. That's true. I do have a custom keyboard problem. But yeah. You're the keyboard nerds. Oh, we're going to get you on that train.

100%. We're 100% going to get you. I can totally see a challenge happening. Build a keyboard. Mostly, I could see me issuing that so I can, you know, justify buying another keyboard because, you know. Yeah, this is the keyboard enthusiast mindset. I need to build another keyboard. I have to. I have to. I need one that feels just, you know, 2% different. Yeah, I'm curious. this is maybe selfish but how how do you automate your youtube uh workflows um because mine is totally manual i've been in a lot of people's are so like how do you make this easier how does the

mac mini make that easier for you so the um one thing a lot of people don't know is every youtube channel actually has an rss feed uh it's kind of a pain to get to but uh there are a ton of articles out there on how to find it. So what I do a lot is I set it up. I either like I've done Zapier in the past or shortcuts automation. That doesn't really work because there's no RSS trigger, but I tried to do some time things. It didn't really work out so well. But Zapier does a really good job of being able to watch an RSS feed. So whenever a new item is added to an RSS feed,

I have Zapier see that and then send something to Pushcut. And Pushcut right now just sends me a notification I have to tap on manually and then run that shortcut. So what I'm hoping is I can use – and this is something I just ran out of time. I haven't been able to fully flush this out. But what I'm hoping is I can use one of the plethora of Mac apps that can get a notification from either Zapier or watch an RSS feed or something and then trigger a shortcut in the background automatically. So what happens for me right now is it triggers this shortcut, it builds a blog post, adds it to my website, uses working copy, which is a Git app, and then pushes that blog post to my website.

I've been waiting for Threads API support to come out, which should be out next month. Or no, I think it's coming out in June, so it's coming out this month, right? I've been waiting for Threads API support. So what I'll do then, once that's out, is I will build in Mastodon and Threads posting as well. Right now, I'm manually writing out a post, copying and pasting it, adding the thumbnail and stuff like that. So I would like to be able to add all of that automation into one. So that way, when a new video goes live, it adds it to my blog.

It makes a post to Mastodon. It makes a post to Threads. And then maybe I can get it to kind of, like, clean up my task. Because a lot of times I do a lot of project management and things, which we'll get to that in a little bit. But we will – so that way I kind of want to see if I can get that to clean up a little bit. But just having an always on Mac, there's a lot of possibilities you can do. And I'm kind of excited to explore that a little bit because the iPad is not meant to be that kind of device.

The iPad is a very portable machine. Take it with you on the go. Whereas the Mac Mini is you set it and forget it kind of thing. So I'm kind of excited to have this device in my arsenal. Nice. Yeah, I have actually the exact same M2 baseline Mac mini in my house as well. I use it mostly as a file storage device. But it is, I have screens set up so I can log in from anywhere. And it's just a nice escape hatch when the iPad can't do the thing I want to do.

Normally it's command line things I want to run. It's just nice to be able to quickly hop in there, do your thing, and then go back to the iPad. So it'll be interesting to see kind of what gaps it fills for you. Like you said, once you have one, a million things pop up. So I think it'll be very fun to see what you discover it's useful for. So that's kind of my thing this week. Neilian, what do you have for us? Yeah, so I was on vacation lately.

Yeah, I was visiting my family on La Réunion Island. And since I'm not getting to see them very often, it's pretty rare actually, I was able to seize this opportunity to scan old family photos. And import them into Apple Photos. At first, so it turned out to be quite an adventure. Not an adventure I wanted to take on, but I did.

because so I thought at first I'm just going to use the scanning functionality in files in the files app on iOS right that doesn't work well I don't know if you've ever tried that but old pictures old photos printed photos are glossy most often and so you can't just scan them you have a reflection of either yourself or your phone or your phone case if it's a bright color like mine So that doesn't work at all.

So I started looking for an app that would allow me to scan old photos like these glossy photos. And it turns out it's a bit of a nightmare to find a good app. There are a bunch of pretty good ones out there, but they're often very expensive. And I'm cheap, or another way to say it is I'm poor. So yeah, that was not a good solution. But then I remembered something. Google made an app for that.

And it's called PhotoScan. And it's free. And they made it for Google Photos users at first. But you can use it for anything, for any photo service you use, since you could just save them to your camera wall on iOS. And the way it works is super interesting. So you position the photo in front of you, flat on a flat surface. And you just start scanning in the app. And it tells you to move your camera around to all four corners of the photo.

And it's just doing some magic in the background and removing the glare, removing all the reflections that you might get from doing that. And it works. It's pretty cool. You should check it out. And it's a bit weird that Google is doing this for free. I expect this app to go away anytime now that I've talked about it. Yep. But yeah, it took me a couple of hours. There's about, I'd say, 500 photos I had to scan.

And I was in a rush to get on my plane back, but I was able to do it. And the aftermath of that was pretty insane, too, because my parents don't know how to manage old photos. They don't have dates. They all scrambled. I have no idea how to import them into Apple Photos without them getting messed up with all of my photos. So I had to go through every single one of them and date them basically by guessing.

I had to guess. Yeah, look at faces and, okay, that guy is probably 10 years old at some point. Anyway, it was really, really cumbersome, but I made it. So, yeah, I don't know. Have you ever tried scanning old photos like this? No. My mom took a lot of photos. That's like her thing. That's probably where I got the photography thing from. But she has an unbelievable number of photos that are just printed out from over the years.

And she's talked quite a bit actually about getting those digitized. That's like a retirement project she wants to do. But she doesn't know where to start. I don't know. And she like asked me because I'm the tech person in the family. Like, what do you do? And I've never had a good answer. So this is actually super interesting to me. And I know you're saying about it, maybe looking abandoned and may not be long for this world. The App Store screenshots show what I think is an iPhone 6. Oh, that's not a good sign.

That's not good. The last update, I looked it up. The last update is from a year ago. So, yeah. And I'm going to be so sad when it's gone because it will be gone. Let's face it. I'm going to be so sad when it's gone because I'm honestly not finding any good alternatives that don't require me to subscribe for, I don't know, 50 euros per month or something crazy like that. uh yeah yeah my my mom uh was is a big scrapbooker so she loves taking physical photos and you know putting them in books and making nice pages and stuff out of them and stuff like that so

i would never want to take the photos out of them but i probably should figure out a way to scan the photos without um ruining the uh the the scrapbook itself uh one of the things when when i was a kid our film camera burned in the dates to the uh photos yeah you know that was a setting for a lot of those cameras and that's actually a really nice feature uh so you always know when when the date was but we actually had a digital camera very early on my dad um he he used to we used to joke he

would win everything he would he would just literally sit on the internet and like enter drawings and stuff and he'd win so much stuff one first dvd player uh computer all sorts of stuff so You want a digital camera. So we have digital photos going back very early, you know, probably when I was like 10, 11 years old. So around 2000, 2001, probably around then, sometime around there. I mean, early digital cameras, the quality is not good. Oh, yeah. I found some of those.

They're the worst. Yeah, they're not good. But, I mean, there's still photos. They're still there. I believe they have the metadata in them. My dad has most of them. I need to get copies of them and back those up and stuff like that. But yeah, no, this is a really interesting app. I'm definitely going to try it because, like I said, I have some physical photos and scrapbooks and stuff. So I'm going to see if I can scan those and get those to be digital copies so they're backed up properly. Yeah, and it's kind of making me wish that it's something coming to WWDC next week, right?

That would be nice. I could legit see this, especially with Apple putting the True Tone Flash on the new iPad Pro. They're clearly pushing these devices as scanners. I use the file scanning app quite a bit, the built-in scan feature in files a bit, but just for documents. I don't use it for photos for the exact reason you said that photos can be glossy.

Glossy photos don't really work well with camera scanners like this and stuff like that where they can have light from the room reflecting off of them and stuff like that. You need to like put them in like a scanner bed or something like that or have an app that's dedicated to doing this kind of thing. So I could definitely see this being a feature at WWDC. That would be really cool. Yeah, and they could add some AI magic in there too. Like Apple Photos can recognize faces.

Maybe some interpolation in there could make it so it can guess the ages of the people in the photos and date the photos or something. Well, like I said, so like our film camera burned in the dates on the images. You might have seen this, you know, on old photos and stuff like that. When you scan the image, look for numbers. If the numbers are a date, you know, like that kind of thing, use that as metadata. Yeah, in my case, the issue with that is there are dates on those photos that my parents took.

But, like, out of 500 photos, 100 of them had the same date on them. So I'm guessing that my father is not pretty good at setting the date on his camera. Was the date January 1st, like 19-something? No, it was a random date. It was 27th of October, 2002. Pretty random. Fantastic. Interesting. Fantastic. Thank you, father.

Making your life easy now. But yeah, hoping for WWDC, that would be nice. That would be cool. I can see that being really cool. And they could even go further, too. I was just thinking, like, AI, like, if you have a picture of Disneyland and you're standing in front of Cinderella's castle, they could add the location data to that and stuff like that. There's a lot they could do with that. That would be a really cool feature. I'm totally on board with something like that. They could even, with content to where Phil, that every photo app has these days, they could even remove those burned-in dates from photos if you want to remove that.

So pull it into the metadata and then remove it from the photo if you want. Look at us brainstorming. This is great. I want this. Apple. Hire us. We will stop the podcast, but hire us. You can't afford any Apple. Just kidding. But like the content aware Phil, so Lightroom just got a really nice update that uses AI to allow you to remove objects and people and stuff from a photo. And I took a photo of a busy San Francisco street.

I made a Mastodon post about this that kind of blew up. And I just went in and removed people and cars, and it did an amazing job. It did a fantastic job. So, yeah, totally 100% on board with something like this. All right, Matt, you had a challenge for us. What did you force us under pain of death to do? Yeah. So we're going to do the challenge every week. And we're going to have each other try something new.

Again, get out of our comfort zone. And leading into this first episode, we wanted to have something to talk about. So for the last two weeks, I think, we've all been using Apple Reminders as our task manager. which, as I learned when I issued the challenge, Chris is like me and uses things and is very invested in things to get his work done. And Nelian uses nothing, which I don't understand how you are so productive still.

I don't get it. I still don't get it. So this was a weird challenge for everybody. But it's been a couple weeks. and I've been using reminders and I have a few thoughts on it but I wanted to hand over to you two to see how it went. How did it go? Yeah, so I'm a bit like the straggler kid at the back of the class and I found all the ways possible that I could get out of this

and still call it done. So, I do use Fantastical for some events show up in there and I like it and I like the app. So I started to go from this basis and started using Fantastical as a task manager since it integrates with Apple Reminders. So in the end, I did not have to add Reminders to my screen. This is the most Mac Stories answer.

Yeah, I know, right? And nothing changed. No, nothing changed apart from the fact that I did try to use reminders in this way. So I was on vacation, though. So that was a bit of a weird context. But I did find it pretty useful. I remember the times when I used to enter tasks in apps. And yeah, that was pretty useful to remember things all day long. So yeah, I would recommend.

The fact that Fantastical mixes up your events, your calendar events, with your reminders is super useful to me. I think I would not trust myself to remember to go back to a separate app to look at what I've entered. And, like, I could just use reminders and enter things in there, but I would forget about it. Even if I use a widget or if I spam my home screen and lock screen with widgets, I would just forget about them.

So, yeah, the idea to just use Fantastical, which I already use and I'm already used to look at, even if it's pretty empty most of the time, having those tasks in there, it did help. And it helped a lot to organize my vacation, actually, with my boyfriend. So we were able to, yeah, we had a shared reminders list in there. So he was not happy to have to use that just for my sake.

But he did, thanks to him. But yeah, pretty useful. I think it went well. And I cheated, but I'm happy that I cheated. I think in spirit you did it. You used the back end of reminders, basically. I can't. I disable that feature right away in Fantastic Al. I just don't like the idea of having my reminders and calendar tasks mixed together. But actually, that's weird because in things, I enable the feature to see my calendar events and things.

Maybe it's because I'm more task focused than calendar events. I don't have a ton of calendar events. I usually have like two or three a week. And then the Formula One schedule. So, you know. I went all in on it. reminders in my doc in my widget except for when i recorded a couple of videos because i always get questions if i swap out task manager always get questions about oh you're not using things anymore and i wanted to avoid that so i i put things in there when i recorded the video and then i took it then i took it back out but um i hated this no i am so excited to be recording this episode

not just because it's our first episode and i'm excited to talk to you guys but because as soon as we hit stop i am taking reminders out of my dog i missed things i love things so much i love the design of it i love how it works i love the shortcut support for it it's just it works with my brain there are a couple of things about reminders i really do like uh the grocery list the auto sorting grocery list is a really cool feature so uh for those that don't know you can tell a project to be a grocery list and as you enter in items you can be like filet mignon bread um ice cream

whatever it'll start to break it up into the different sections that it'll be in a grocery store kind of a nice feature but not really enough to make me switch uh the built-in kanban view is nice but i kind of build that in with things by using uh headers in projects uh so i kind of have built that myself already um the thing about reminders that still drives me nuts is the font the font that's in the top left corner it just reminds me of fisher price for some reason i'm just like it's just it feels like this like kind of like toy and it just doesn't feel serious

to me um i just don't like it i don't know why so you're talking about sf round yeah yeah sf round Yeah, and SF Round on its own is not bad. But with SF Round, when you start to add the colors of reminders into it, it just kind of feels a little toyish. And, like, it doesn't feel serious. And I run my life out of a task manager. When Matt told us we had to do this, I was like, oh, no. I even asked him if I could still keep things on my device because, like, I have so much stuff in there that,

Especially this last week or the last two weeks since we recorded – we did a test episode, y'all, two weeks ago just to kind of like see how this would all go and stuff like that. And since then, like I've just been – like I've opened things to just check to make sure the stuff that was due today that I had set up weeks or months ago was still the same stuff that was set up in reminders. I didn't miss anything, so that's good, but things just feel so much better.

I'm running my life out of it. I'm running my business out of this app. It just feels more solid, and it doesn't feel like I'm punching with kids' gloves. I think I had the best experience of the three of us then. Okay. I was shocked how much I actually enjoyed the app. I'm going back to things as soon as we stop recording today. But I was surprised. I kind of liked it. The groceries list is an absolute killer feature.

I adore that. Like, I was walking around my kitchen before we went grocery shopping, just typing in the things, and it automatically sorted them. And you can go into that groceries list and, like, resort every, like, section of the store to match up with wherever you shop. Super awesome. I love that. I love that when I save a link in the like notes of a task it does like a rich preview of that link in the view so I can like see it a little more visually I think that's awesome um it has a little

bit of natural language inputs like if you like say take out the trash Tuesday 7 a.m it there's like a little uh suggestion thing that says do you want to do this is the due date Tuesday at 7 a.m and you would say yes? I can't get that to work right. You have to put the colon in the time. No, that's, I did that. Okay, I did that. But like sometimes it would suggest it, other times it won't. And I know I'm not alone. I know our friend Federico Vatici had issues with that as well when it was introduced.

I remember him talking about that. But it worked for me the last time I used Reminders, it worked for me flawlessly. This time, it was hit or miss. Okay. Yeah. Well, when it works, it was pretty good, but it was still not as good as things just typing in more natural language and getting whatever you want. But, oh, and I was able to, a big thing for me is I use my personal devices and then I have my work computer and I need some things to sync between those because I may think of a work thing I need to do while I'm on my iPhone, for example, and I want those tasks to sync.

So I basically shared all of my reminders with my work iCloud account. And so everything was syncing nicely. It sunk, sank, sunk, synced, synced reliably. Sunked. Sunked. Sunked is definitely the word. I love that. I like that there's smart lists. So I was able to make a smart list called no due date. So I was able to, if I accidentally made a task that didn't have a due date, all my tasks have due dates.

I never make a task without a due date. So this is kind of like an error section. I was able to make a smart list that says if the task has no due date and it's not in the grocery list, you can do these really custom, really elaborate smart lists, which you can't do in the Photos app for whatever reason still. You can't do in the Music app for whatever reason still. But you can do it in Reminders, and it's great. So I did like those things. I like the location-based reminders.

I liked you could have reminders pop up when you are messaging someone. These are cool. These are cool. But it was such a pain to move tasks. So if I am not going to do a task today, I want to bump it to tomorrow. It's so hard for me to find, like, where do I tap on this? Where do I click on this to, like, actually change the date? How do I drag it? Part of the task is draggable. Part of it isn't. so some of that is annoying um moving things between lists is annoying so i didn't love it but i honestly thought i would hate this experience and it was okay i i would probably survive if i had

to use reminders forever which is not a thing i would have said a couple years ago so it's definitely gotten better since last i used it that's good i yeah i i didn't chris is like i don't relate i don't relate i look i typically will use remind when there if there's a big update to reminders or notes or calendar or something like that in the os betas over the summer i will typically use them and then i immediately run back to things or something like that and i use them so i can make videos and stuff about them and have a better understanding uh and i did that last summer too

And I don't remember hating reminders, but this time, maybe it's just because I've had so much going on. Typically, the summers for me are not very busy, but right now, I'm just dealing with a move. So I've got a bunch of move projects and house projects and stuff like that in there. New iPad Pros just came out, so I'm dealing with a bunch of video projects. I'm prepping to go to WWDC. I'll be at WWDC, so I'm prepping for that. I'm also going on a trip with my girlfriend in the next couple of days before WWDC.

So there's just a lot of things going on. And it just felt like it just – if I didn't have a ton happening, it probably would have been fine. But the thing that bugs me the most about reminders is how many steps it takes to just set up a timed reminder about something. You have to hit the I button. You have to go in and select date. You have to go and pick the date, then select the time. And it's just so – like, there's so many clicks that has to happen to add metadata and to add stuff to a task.

It just – it drives me up the wall. I'm just – You know what app makes this easy? Fantastical. But then I would have to enable that feature, and I don't want to enable that feature. Just write whatever, 10 a.m., and then it's done. Boom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I tried being one of those people that use their calendar as a task manager just as an experiment.

And it doesn't click with my brain because a lot of the stuff I do isn't time-based. It's day-based. So most of my tasks today are not, hey, I need to have this done at 10 a.m. I just need to have it done at some point today. So I'd rather just have a list of tasks than appointments. But yeah, I hope Reminders gets better. I know a lot of people really like it. Whenever I make a reminders video, it's always very popular because people use it and people want to know how to take advantage of it. But I'm just like, it's not there if you are somebody that lives out of a task manager.

All right. So I have a challenge for you guys this week. And I'm really excited about this one. I want you to take an iPad. You all have iPads. I know Matt just got a new iPad. Neilion, I know you have a – what iPad do you have? the iPad Pro which one is it? M1? still the M1, 11 inch perfect, that's perfect I want you guys to take your iPads and turn them into a gaming computer

and my thought process is there's a lot of ways you can do this you can just go to the app store, download some games pair an Xbox, Playstation one of the made for iPhones or whatever they're calling it now one of those controllers you know one of the game sir ones or whatever you could just pair a controller and play you know knights of the old republic or divinity original sin 2 or i think the new assassin's creed game is out now and or or not the new one but the assassin's creed mirage um you can play any of those games you want you could do that if you want or you can go the game streaming route and look at something

like the nvidia geforce now or the xbox cloud gaming service or you could go even further if you have like a pc and set up something like moonlight and actually stream games i i just want you guys to tinker a little bit with this this is something i've been really uh excited about we had my girlfriend's mom staying with us for a week and i didn't really want to hog the tv while she was here so i've been playing um and streaming some games on my ipad i i overhauled my network

i modified a controller i i did the federico vitici mod i took one of the game store controllers and modified it so it works with a 13 inch ipad pro um and i've been streaming games that way i've been downloading some games from the app store and playing them locally uh there's a lot of things you could do i will say i'm about one bad lag moment away from just building a gaming pc and doing the whole moonlight streaming games from a pc internally on your network because what i've heard is it's

very very good so i'm i'm i'm getting very close to that moment but we'll see um so i i want you guys you can interpret this however you want but basically play some games on your ipad uh but try something new. Don't just grab your iPad and download Stardew Valley and use the touch controls. That's the best game though. It is a good game. I will fully admit Stardew Valley is a good game. But if you're going to do it, pair a controller with it or find a controller or something.

Elevate it just a little bit. I've got a Stadia controller in front of me. That's a service that lasted. That's a collector's item. that was one of those things that i i actually think google could have done a really good job with that if they would have held out just a little bit longer and put some more resources behind it uh but in typical google fashion let me say it was great on the ipad yeah i i i heard nothing but good things from stadia but the issue was is people didn't want to at least from my

understanding people didn't want to buy their games from stadia because they weren't playing their games primarily on it like in like that's why i really like these services like um the xbox cloud game streaming or the nvidia geforce now is that so for me i play a lot of my games on xbox so the xbox cloud streaming service a lot of my games that i've already bought or have access to via game pass or whatever are already there so i can just load them up and start playing i don't have to buy them again uh the nvidia geforce now kind of works with xbox but it's only the ones that

like Xbox Play Anywhere games, basically meaning it has PC support, but it also has support for streaming games from Steam, and I believe the Epic Store as well. So there's a lot of different options out there. I am definitely going to be trying some new stuff, and I will report back as well, but I want you guys to try playing some games on your iPad in a new way. Okay. All right.

Yeah. I have not played a lot of, maybe this is when I finally play Genshin Impact. But, but elevate it. No, I, all I'm going to say is, all I'm going to say is don't just use the touch controls. Bring, do, do something, add a controller, do something. But, but you have that fancy new OLED iPad, Matt. So all I'll say is the games that I have been playing look absolutely stunning on the iPad. the new OLED iPad they look amazing okay I'm excited for this one yeah probably more excited than you two were for

using reminders well playing video games versus using Apple reminders you know yeah they're fun in different ways I'm not sure I'll be able to find a way to play games via Fantastical you know what you could do some like test text adventure game like in your calendar or something like that so you're gonna meet somebody and just keep moving the event around

i'm excited for this all right so that just about does it for comfort zone this is our first episode So thank you so much for listening if you made it all the way to the end here. We're going to put links to everything we discussed along with links to where you can find us on the internet, subscribe to our podcast, and also MacStories, our host. And I want to give a big thank you to MacStories for hosting us. They really took care of us. They got us this amazing artwork and audio and music, I mean. I'm just – I'm so excited.

So thank you guys so much for listening. Matt, you want to say goodbye where people can see your stuff? Goodbye. And yeah, check me out on YouTube. A Better Computer is the channel. But I'm on a vacation from that channel, actually. So actually just follow me here. This will be the best place for the summer. And Niléane, say goodbye where people can find your stuff. Yeah, goodbye.

And check out the video version because my cat made an appearance. And I think that's the best part of this show so far. Apart from the challenge. You can find me on Mastodon at Niléane and on MaxTorys.net where I write things. Nice. Yeah. Goodbye, everyone. You can find me on YouTube, Christopher Lolly, L-A-W-L-E-Y. You can also find links to all of my stuff on theuntitled.site.

Again, big thank you to MacStories for hosting us, and we will talk to you all next week.