They're Putting AI in the Mice

Oh, who's doing the intro? Hello and welcome to Comfort Zone. This is episode whatever number 103. It's just me, Niléane and Chris. And this is the show. What is the intro again? This is the show where we get out of our comfort zone. There you go. We do. And I am not Chris. Me neither. Okay. I'm pretty sure you called me Chris Oh sorry yes Oh my god Yes Chris isn't here this week So it's just us two And my cat

Maybe if there's a white frame At some point you will see there's my cat in the corner But there you go So we'll try to make do Without him is that okay I think it's okay I mean honestly It's kind of Chris should have had Codex Join the call for him use his computer be the be the avatar yeah this is the future it should be able to do podcasts as well and control it from his phone absolutely so we have some feedback in the feedback form

uh regarding one thing especially at some point was it in a cozy zone on on a on on the regular show that we talked about uh what's the correct order to watch star wars in this was in our episode 100. Oh, yes. And someone asked what their order was for a newcomer. And so we published a clip of this on Instagram. I believe Chris took care of that. And this clip popped off. I don't know if you noticed that

there's a bunch of people just arguing in the comments about first about our takes, about what the order to watch Star Wars in, and people just giving out their own orders So, yeah, and we got some people in the feedback form as well. Dave M. messaged us and says, Sigh, I'm afraid you're all wrong. The correct order is 4, 5, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9. Then just watch the cool fight scenes from one. This is outrageous, I think. This is outrageous.

This is like they just threw them all into a box and shook it up and just whatever came out came out. And then he was like, oh, no, I forgot the one. So, yeah, just include the cool fighting from one. And then he goes on. This gives you the surprise in Empire, then Vader's backstory, then the redemption episode. One is too messed up by George Lucas with his awful dialogue and midichlorians to be an official recommendation. Oh, boy. I will say episode one, I think, has the highest highs and lowest lows of the prequel trilogy.

There are parts of that movie that are so atrociously bad, but the good stuff is very, very good. Like George Lucas said himself in the behind the scenes, I may have gone too far in some places. There you go. Perfectly good. He was in the room right now. Yeah. We got somebody else in the feedback form. You'd think they're not talking about Star Wars. It's Griffin, by the way, from... What's that website again?

Cult of Mac, yes. I was on their podcast lately. It was fun. So Griffin writes, correcting a few facts on the Apple Newton, because we talked about the Apple Newton. He says, one, cellular was never an option. You could, however, send the fax. Obviously, Matt, you could send the fax using the Newton. I hadn't considered faxes. Yeah. Second, you can get a PCM CIA card. So there's CIA in there. So I'm wary of this already.

We have very fragile flip out Ethernet Jack. Okay. Okay. Okay. And third, early Wi-Fi is also possible with a big, chunky PCM CIA card. for the 30th anniversary I wrote an article on two main use cases I had for my Newton in 2023 and I wrote this article that he wrote on Cult of Mac it's interesting, I like it, it's fun so we'll have the link in the show notes he goes on if you wanted to do a Newton challenge I'd suggest each of you gets a different generation of a product

a message pad 1x0 a message pad 2x00 and an e-mate oh apple was able to name things interestingly what does that mean yeah that's weird yeah so you'd think that was all it but no the message ends with by the way the correct star wars movie order is as follows star wars 1990s 1977 um the empire strikes back the return of the jedi and then you're done.

So he's just threw them all to the end except the first three ones. I think, listen, I think that is a reasonable take. I think you can live a happy life just watching those three Star Wars and never engaging with anything else. It does lean in a bit to my theory that the most hardcore Star Wars fans haven't enjoyed Star Wars in 45 years. Everything's bad, but it's there. But they love it. I like you, Griffin. but this is a sad take. I think you're just missing out on so many things.

All right. Okay. We have one tiny topic. Yeah. Miraculously. Yeah. And so it's about rad weather. So the developer contacted us actually about this. And this is why I tried it out because the developer messages and I was like, here's promo codes to get the in-app purchase for rad weather, my new app for free. and I was like, hey, I like free stuff, so I will try it out. But for real, though, I installed it, and I do love it.

Like, this is my new favorite web app. This is very weird because I've never heard of this before. The developer emailed us, and I think you should check it. Did you check it out? I think you should check it out. It's amazing. No, I have not checked it out yet. So it's got a weird design where everything is dot matrix kind of vibe-based. and the design is fun there's like illustrations still in like in the dot matrix style and you have many color themes. What I like

about it is that it has this very interesting feature where it will show you how confident it is in its forecast because it's comparing the various sources that it offers and a bit like Carrot Weather and the others, you can customize the layout. You can move cards around to see if there's something specific that you want at the top, you can have that at the top. For example, I'm very sensitive to pollen, so I can move up the card that shows you the pollen allergies forecast. But overall,

it's mainly the design that I really like. The default design, it looks very like Matrix movies, kind of like the movies. but you can change that. There are some light themed colors that preserve the pixel art stuff. And yeah, I think it's awesome. The widgets are really cool as well. And it's on the Mac. And it's on the Mac? And on the Mac, there's a menu bar thingy that you can add to the menu bar

and there's a drop down with your forecast. It's really well done. I really like it. Okay. I still need to check this out. Oh, it's got a very cool icon too. Yeah, the icon is cool as well. And yeah, one thing that I really like about the sources that it has. So it has Apple weather, the North American stuff. It also has Open-Meteo, which is like an aggregator for many national weather sources in Europe, including in Europe.

That means in France, it's actually using data from the National Weather Service in France, that is Météo-France. So this is like in terms of data accuracy, this is up there, right? So in my case, I really like this. And you can also fully disable Apple Weather. So if you want to focus on the National Weather Services. Yeah, that's it. I'm glad we got to give it a shout out. Okay. This week on Cozy Zone. When is this episode coming out?

This episode's coming out right before WWDC. Yeah. So last week on Cozy Zone, if you want to hear what we talked about, we made our WWDC predictions or wish list. I don't know. We got a little ambitious. Wish list. Wish list. Yeah. It'll all definitely come true And this week on Cozy Zone Niléane Had a very Niléane evolved the format We've done several tier lists But this was a game and a tier list Where Chris and I had to guess

A whole bunch of discontinued Google Products based on their crazy Logos alone and then Tier list them and this was You really elevated The tier list format so this is a good one yeah i think so yeah it was very good and also it was filled with nostalgia for products that we wish weren't dead as well as products that we are glad they are dead yes and we uh we are it shows how our memory has has faded chris and i's at least uh where we were we thought several apps

were completely different things. We were convinced they were different. And we still confidently spoke to them. It was great. Very fun. Sign up for Cozy Zone. New episodes every week. Monday morning, start your week with Cozy Zone. Wow. Well, we should probably get into the main topic. And even though Chris is not here, I have taken his place in the show notes where I have a list, a big outline, and you have two words. So what are you bringing to the show today? Yes, I'm bringing something that I mentioned in passing three weeks ago or so on the show. I had a mouse on the way.

I got a new mouse because this thing. Let me pick it up. The Logitech MX Master 3S. I like it. I do like it. The software is a struggle. I mentioned that you can use better touch tool to replace LogiOptions Plus. You can use better mouse. But the fact that you have to install all those things just to make it work barely is annoying. Also, yeah, it's getting hot right now.

There's a heat wave right now in France. We are still in May, but there's a heat wave. Everything is fine. But yeah, the material on the MX Master 3S the soft rubber kind of thing. I'm starting to sweat. This is what I'm trying to say. I'm starting to sweat and this is becoming sticky again. It really sucks when the MX Master feels sticky. I know exactly what you mean. It's so nice, but then it gets into it feels weird.

There's six months of the year where you feel gross touching it. It's a moist mouse. Anyway, so I got a new mouse, and the new mouse is the Keychron M6. This is what it looks like. It looks, if you just look at it, it looks similar, right, to the Logitech? Yeah, it looks like the Logitech one, but they kind of pulled it. It's a little thinner, maybe, or taller. Yeah, maybe it's a bit longer. It's taller as well, but not by much. But yes, the general shape is basically the same.

There's like a thumb rest on the side. You have a horizontal scroll wheel as well on the side, back and forward buttons. On the top, left and right click, the scroll wheel is a metal scroll wheel. Contrary to the Logitech, you can tilt the scroll wheel left and right and you can map that to things. There's a button in the middle which switches between ratchet mode and like fully, freely flowing scroll wheel.

Very interestingly, everything's mechanical in this. Like, I don't know how it works inside the MX Master, but I feel like they're using magnets, right? Like the scroll wheel is levitating a little bit or something. Yeah. Yeah. In this, it feels much more mechanical. like there's more friction which i kind of like um and this button is not like it's not electronic button or something uh this presses on something inside which unlocks the scroll wheel like you can

feel that it's actually unlocking something inside okay so yeah but it it's really well it's really well made um it's so much lighter this is a very light like very light this mouse compared the mx master i know you like matt what i just said i know you like light mice yes you have one okay that's one of the worst things yeah yeah it's one of the worst things so i'm glad that actually

makes it more appealing to me. Yeah. So if you want the shape of the Logitech, but without the weight, this is definitely-- this is an option that comes up a lot. And I can see why much lighter. What can I say? So this is the M6 8K model. So it means it goes to 8,000 in terms of polling rate, whatever that means. What it essentially means is the sensor is very fluid, like very responsive, and you can feel it.

Like I've not set it to 8,000. I've set it to 1,000, which like it seems reasonable. And yeah, you can feel it. Like even on the 60-hertz display, by the way, you can like the mouse movement, very fluid. It's very nice. I can see it most on the MacBook Pros display, which has promotion. You can see it's very good compared to the MX Master. So, yeah. Yes. How do you customize it? You said you can... Yeah.

You can customize it using Keychron's web app thing. Keychron Launcher, I believe it's called. So you open that in the browser. If you've got the dongle plugged in, it will detect your mouse immediately. This mouse also supports Bluetooth, in which case you will have to plug it in to be able to customize it with the web app. And this comes to the point that I was making earlier. The Logitech, it depends on software that has to be constantly running on your Mac.

The Keychron mouse, you customize everything in the web app once, then you close it. There's nothing running on your Mac at all times. It's just saved to the device. Every setting is saved on the device. You set it once, you forget about it. So this is really nice. And you can customize pretty much everything. I've set up my usual mappings. There's one thing, though. On the MX Master, I was using the top button here below the scroll wheel to do mission control gestures and stuff.

So hold it and pull up for mission control, left and right for switching spaces and all of that. On the Keychron, as I said, this is not an electronic. It is not connected to anything, this button. It's a mechanical button, so you can't map this to anything, obviously. However, the Keychron does have additional two options compared to the MX Master, which is that you can tilt the scroll wheel left and right, and I've set that to the mission control stuff.

So what I've done is tilt left to open mission control, tilt right to actually do the smart zoom on webpages. I do that often on webpages. Okay. Yeah. you do so much more with a mouse than i do this is like the browser mouse gestures yes that you got very upset at me and Chris or not understand this is yeah okay well i like that it's a web app and it's not it's not something you

install it doesn't sound a background process it's just updating the mouse itself so that's Honestly, I always love that. I hate, hate running extra software to make my accessories work. Completely agree. Yeah. By the way, I opened this. I have opened the mouse. Oh, warranty. That's fine. So to open it, it's actually very easy to open. To open it, you remove those two bottom sliding like pads on the bottom here and there.

there, you open that, it reveals some screws, you unscrew that, it pops off, boom, and inside, it looks very interesting on the inside. First, most of it is empty, which is why it's so lightweight. But why did I open it? Because I felt like the scroll wheel in ratchet mode was too grippy, like too much friction. And I saw some people online on forums who were able to alleviate that by opening the mouse

and just cutting a little bit of the spring that holds this button in place, the button on the top in place. Okay. So it relieves some tension on the mechanisms that hold the scroll wheel in ratchet mode. See? It feels very complicated, but it's not. You just open it. You find the little spring underneath this button. You cut it a little bit. Just remove a millimeter or two. Put it back together. And there you go. In ratchet mode,

it's much less grippy than before. It's actually very nice. I like it very much. Okay. That's a risky modification. There's no going back. You can't make the spring longer. You can't make the spring longer. But I read several people who did this, and I don't know. I felt like I won't use this mouse unless I fix this, because for real, it was very... I used the scroll wheel in the ratchet mode. I hate the continuous scroll wheel, so I had to fix this unless I knew that I would not be using the mouse, or I would return it. Okay.

I thought that was a good deal, and I'm glad I did. one thing as well when you order this mouse you can pick the type of switch for the for the left and right buttons and I picked a silent one there's a silent switch option and it feels really nice I really like it I don't know if it will come across in the mic I can barely hear it

But the feeling as well is really nice. Maybe I can compare to the MX Master. I got to be honest. I can't tell how it feels from the audio. Yeah, I can imagine. But it feels better. Okay. It feels like a bit more satisfying. I don't know how to explain. It's more of a thock and more of a spring on the button. Okay.

I mean, that was one of the things I was always amazed with. Was the 3S the first one that was the silent? MX Master? I think it had the silent option. Okay, okay. Whatever the first silent one was, I don't know why I got it, but I got it, but I was really worried it would feel bad. Yeah. It's not going to feel satisfying to click. And I was surprised it actually did feel pretty good. But it's not quite as good. But yeah. I did look up the weights just out of curiosity. Yeah.

The MX Master 4 weighs 150 grams. Yours weighs 78 grams. So half the weight. But my little guy here is still undefeated at 36 grams. So another half of your giga. Yeah. Logitech is a hefty boy, though. Considering the material, this is plastic, obviously. But it's matte plastic.

And it's actually really nice. It's smooth and matte. I can imagine that after using this for a few years every day, it may become like a bit glossy some places where you hold it. I can see how that is that kind of plastic that will age like this, which probably is fine because that takes a while to happen. But in the meantime, it feels a lot nicer in the summer.

And it probably won't get sticky next summer. Yeah. okay how is um are you how does it charge are you able to use it while you charge it yes like any of them yes uh yes usbc of course in the front um on the bottom doesn't look pretty look at the look at the amount of buttons oh yes i love i honestly i love that where unless you set the polling rate and the yeah so there's report rates on the right dpi on the left Oh, okay. Yep.

In the middle, you switch between dongle, USB or Bluetooth. Top right is you can switch between three devices. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Jeez. And to turn it off, which like this was weird to me at first, but to turn it off, you put it in USB mode. Yep. And just keep it unplugged. That's how a lot of mechanical keyboard work. Yes. At first, I was like, how do I have to remove something?

But no, it makes sense. Okay, and that means it actually uses, when you are in USB mode, it's actually a wired connection. Yeah, probably. Which is another good thing over the Logitech, because even when you plug in the Logitech, it's still the Bluetooth connection. True. It's never truly USB. Yeah, and not using the battery. But the dongle is actually... I don't have it on the handle because I put it away, but the dongle package has too many dongles.

But maybe that's a good thing. I don't know. So there's a tiny USB-A dongle that they give you. Very tiny. But there's also like a big dongle that's USB-A to USB-C, but both female. And there's also like a very small USB-C on both ends cable. But then there's also, I don't know what else, like there was an adapter to A to C. It's really weird. Like, I don't know what they want me to do with this. One USB-C dongle and one USB-A dongle would have been fine.

I don't understand why they gave me also like a short cable with a female on both hands adapter. Very strange. Oh, boy. I'm looking at what's in the box right now I think that's a receiver Wait what? I think you can plug the dongle into the USB A side of that thing you can plug a USB cable USB C cable into the other side

and then it's supposed to sit on your desk so if your computer is under your desk or away somewhere, it can have clear line of sight to that. And it just has a better connection. Wow. This is a thing gaming mice have sometimes. I don't understand. What's the receiver? So I have one for my mouse here. Mine is just, there's USB-C and nothing on the other side. But this plugs in to a USB cable.

and mine lights up because it's a cool gamer thing. But it's on my desk, like right at the back of my desk. And so it's like a foot away from my mouse. -Okay. -And so the receivers vary. So if you have like connectivity issues and use the dongle, I think that's to make it so you can get the dongle closer to you. Or closer to the mouse. Okay, that makes sense. Okay. I see. So that's cool, I guess. That's all in the box. I had no idea what to do with it, so... I put it in a dongle bag somewhere. Yes. I'll never see you again. No. One day I will want to use it

and we'll never be able to find it. There you go. I think this is a really nice mouse. I'm using it in combination with Mos. I've talked about this multiple times. It's a very small app that you run on your Mac to have smooth scrolling everywhere. So that's really nice. Now, instead of having, say, better touch tool running or with all the bindings in there running

or better mouse or whatever, now it's just all the settings are just done and set. And there's just Mos running for the extra smoothness in the scrolling area. There you go. Nice. Okay, great. Okay, I was going to say, if someone is considering an MX Master, would you recommend this? It's like half the price. I think, yes. I think I should stop recommending anything Logitech.

The situation has become too dire to recommend anything Logitech anymore. And I've been using Logitech stuff for so many years. And I've come to this conclusion. It's just too frustrating. They're going to put AI on all their mice and it's going to fix everything. It's going to be great. I don't know why you got to be so negative about this AI mouse. Yeah. All right. Anything else to say about the mouse? No, that's it. No? It's my new mouse. New friend. New mouse, new friend. Okay.

Okay, so I wanted to talk today about some of the things I've learned. And you just launched an app recently as well, Tiny Start, in the link in the docs, link in the show notes. I just wanted to talk about some of the things that I have learned making quick reads. My read later service, which is different from a lot of the other stuff I've made previously. I've learned quite a bit.

So I can kick off. Somehow, this is the first project I've ever released that has user accounts. Every other thing I've done does not have user accounts. I have like my quick stuff website, a quick tier list website, but you don't sign into those. You just go there, there's stuff to do. And I use like local storage to save like whatever I need to save. But that doesn't really work with a read later service. If you like save something on the web and then you go to your phone and it's not there, that's not going to work.

And so also it's a paid thing. So there was a lot here. So setting up user accounts was more complicated. I should also say I do this. I have a bunch of iOS apps. No user accounts in any of those. You just sign in. Apple just handles. Oh, this is Niléane's phone. And, ah, yes, she paid for this thing so she can use it. Super simple. More tricky on the web. So I had to set up authorization. How do I get people to sign up and sign in?

I think I talked about this when I launched it, but it's magic links with email and passkeys. No passwords. I refuse to do passwords. But I did have to make, okay, well, how do other apps interact with it? So I had to do API keys. And even those I learned in doing this, the reason why a lot of websites will let you create the API key. And then they say, copy it now because we'll never show it to you again. And that is because the safer way to store these is a hashed version of it. So I don't even know what the API keys are.

So I literally cannot show you those keys again. I don't know what they are. You send me the key and I compare it to the hash. very cool um but a thing i had to learn and figure out um another thing i learned is oh i need to manage these users i need to know who who's contacting me or who's having an issue who who do i need to help who do i need to if they're abusing the service i need to be able to shut them down if they need support i need to be able to uh view their account in some way and see

generally what they're doing. I need to be able to like give extra time for text to speech or like a free month or whatever, if like for whatever reason, something happens. So I had to create an admin portal with a user search and just a whole backend for it. And navigating abuse is another thing that I haven't had to deal with yet, but as a thing I had to think about, because I was like well what are people going to do are they going to figure out loopholes around like signing

up are they going to like just do what i did when i was young and create infinite accounts with free trials that i just start over and over and over again maybe they will be selling accounts on craigslist honestly i would be honored uh there's no wait list anyone can join just join um but I had to think about these things and I have some ideas in place for what I could do if I notice anything

I did add some friction to sign up so you have to give me a credit card on file to start the free trial to try to avoid this issue and I also had to add some terms of use to my API because there's an API power in all of this and I was like in theory someone could just pay for one like six dollar a month subscription and just like make have like a hundred people sharing that and like it was a whole thing so i was like i need to add

terms of use oh lordy um so just lots more to cover than i was used to but it was fun uh to learn how those things work and how you do those things yeah i can imagine this is one of the reasons why I haven't been, I haven't wanted to deal with software licenses with Tiny Start because this is a rabbit hole, like no other rabbit holes. I think similar to user accounts, like you have to maintain a database

of all the credentials. And maybe you have user accounts when you do software license, you don't have to, but it would be easier if you want people to manage or you could sign up for a third-party service that will handle all of this for you, but then it's another expense. And for software that you're selling at one-time purchase, is it really a good idea? It's a whole thing. This is why I'm not dealing with software licenses. I'm just... 100%. Yeah. No free trial. Just buy it and you keep it.

And feel free to install it on multiple devices. Don't be a jerk. But yeah, I don't think people buying my app are jerks, but surely maybe there's some jerks, but that's okay. There's always jerks. There's always jerks. Yeah. I've also learned that people love tags. Have you seen, Chris?

yeah chris loves tag tags uh he's pestered me personally about it i literally never tag anything in anything in my life i don't use tags do you use tags are you do you like there's only one place where i use tags and that's in my gmail inbox okay i'm honestly i'm not sure why i do this because i think i just took the habit of tagging stuff in my gmail inbox just because it looks It looks cute. Okay. All the cute colors. Yes. And I don't know. I never navigated to a tag. So it's extremely useless probably.

When I'm looking for emails, I just search for them. So I don't know. Okay. Well, people freaking love tags, it turns out. And I had tags on day one. Like you could add tags. Like it was fine. and you could, there was a search page and you could filter by different tags and far and away the number one bit of feedback I got was this looks cool. I can't even begin to use it until there's like way more tag stuff. And I was like, all right, well, what do these people want? What are these tag sickos want?

And I think I've done better. Um, I shouldn't call them sickos. That's not helping the cause. But, uh, uh, so I had to add a dedicated tags page, uh, which gives you the ability to like edit tags and like it updates all the articles with that tag. Um, I had the ability to remove tags and remove it from all those articles. Um, I added some auto tagging rules so you can set up some, like if this domain is saved,

tag it like this, if this keywords in it to tag it like that. Um, so that I think is kind of cool. Uh, over the past week I added colors to them so you can make each one colorful and, um, delightful. And I had fun creating like a custom color picker. You can pick your tag colors and they go bloop and bloop, uh, which is always delightful. Ooh, I can add sound effects. and then on the ios app uh i when i save an article i want to hit the share button hit the

save and then have it go as fast as humanly possible i just wanted to be like okay i saved it and then the share sheet disappears uh and so that's what i did and it works great it's lovely but then our good friend chris texted me and said hey it would be really nice if when i'm sharing saving an article with the share sheet uh i could add my tags there as well and i was like Okay. Okay. That's fine. Whatever you want, Chris. And so now you have to turn it on because I like the fast by default, but you can turn it on. So when you save an article, you can go through your tags and it sorts them for most used and everything.

I've used an app that did this, GoodLinks, I believe. Okay. And just like yours, by default, you just press the share sheet, and there's this tiny thing that pops up on screen, and it disappears. It's saved right away. But they have an option, probably because Chris tried to use the app one day. Yeah, it's probably Chris asking for it every time. And they have an option just so you can add a tag while you're saving. Okay. It's not like you're doing something that's wild. Yeah, no, it makes sense. People need this.

I do, I'll go quick through the last two things. Metrics. Metrics are good, actually. It is actually nice to know what people are doing. As I said when I launched this, this isn't one app. It's technically seven different projects that are all doing similar things. And so what are people doing? Which ones of these seven are they actually interacting with? And so having metrics on this is nice. I'm using PostHog to collect kind of just basic usage metrics. And I added a variable to the save API endpoint.

So when you save an article, I added a source value there. So I know where people are saving things from, which let me learn that even though the iOS app is only in beta right now it's only in test flight uh that is by far the number way number one way people are using the service they are using the ios app and so um people love apps i guess but um but yeah it gets me error logging there's some silent errors that happen some of them don't matter some of them do um but like being able to see my errors and get notifications when there's

an increase in errors that's super useful so um metrics are nice and then finally the last thing I've learned is I just love building on the web. It's so nice compared to app store deployments where like I need to increment the build and numbers accurately and everything. And I need to upload to App Store Connect and wait for it to process. I need to fill out like all this form, create a new release. Here's the release notes. Here's all these things and then submit for review and then a day or two or three later, it'll be released.

And it's a whole thing. And with this, I can just be like, let's make this better. I tested locally. It's better. I just push the pull request to, or I merge the pull request into the main branch, and it's automatically picked up, and it automatically deploys, and it's just there in seconds. It takes like a minute and like 10 seconds for the build to finish, but a minute after I commit, it's there. And it's live and I can just go on social media and be like, here's a cool new thing. And that's so nice.

To be fair, this is also the experience kind of when you're not using, like when you're not publishing in the App Store. That's true. That's true. You do have to manage release notes if you want to do this well. But once everything's set up, like this has been what I've been doing in the better phase for Tiny Start. It's just I iterate and push and just message a bunch, like 10 people at once. Is it good now? Do you like what I did?

So, yeah. And I can adjust very quickly. Yeah. But I agree with you. Like just building on the web is so fun. It's so nice. I wish I had more projects on the web. Yeah. I wish I had more projects on the web. Me going. Yeah. So anyway. was there anything you wanted to mention that you have learned in your time i don't know i've talked about it too much i think okay okay yes i it's just a tiny app

buy it if you like it i will be happy i will pay for bills uh there's a cat here like the cat food there you go you're paying for the cat food uh so it's a good app i don't know what to say i've learned that oh yes i've learned one thing i've learned that um because you were talking about metrics and i was kind i'm kind of missing metrics but also i don't want to add in a mac app like too much stuff especially if i don't know how to do this well um i don't have anything on the website either.

So the Tiny Star website is like a static page of most basic web knowledges that can... It's a very basic static page. There's nothing going on. So there's no metrics there either. However, I've learned that the audience that uses and that buys and uses these kind of apps, they are very talkative. They will tell me everything goes to their mind. They will tell me, I like this, I don't like this, I want this, I would like this adjusted. I have so many emails, Matt.

I've never received so many emails since releasing Tiny Star in my personal inbox, at least. And this is nice, actually, because people, at least this kind of audience, does not hesitate to just give feedback. And it makes sense because I'm that kind of person as well. When I use an app that I really like and I want something tweaked, I will always, almost always message the developer just asking. - Nice, yeah. If you know it's one person, that is...

- Yeah, especially. - That is nice. - And always respond within a day. So if you do have something to message to me about Tiny Start, feel free. Yeah. This is the thing about the web as well. And I guess Tiny Start is when you don't use the app store. It's like, I have gotten like bug reports of like someone saying this doesn't work and I can just push the change and it's out and I can say, it's fixed. Not be like, well, as soon as whoever at Apple is going through the 10,000 app submissions today,

get to it, your issue will be fixed. Okay. We don't have a ton of time left, so we should get to the challenge. And it's unfortunate Chris is not here. I really wanted to see what cult he would join. The challenge was join a cult. Join a cult. It was his, right? No, yours. It was mine. It was yours. And he said he's already a cult of Dr. Pepper, Ford, and Muscle Cars,

and he has not joined a new cult, which, fair enough. But I have joined a cult, and I hope you have joined a cult. Yes, I have. So last week we talked about the Whoop band briefly. I forget why. Did we? Which is like a fitness band that costs $200 or $300 a year. if you stop talking about it suddenly why oh it's like the fitbit uh google released a fitbit

tracker thing that's like the whoop and this was the thing i i feel sorry the post that was like i feel sorry for anyone who bought a whoop the fitbit just killed it uh uh so anyway i almost got a whoop but then i was like this is stupid this is so stupid um spoiler for a future episode i did get the Fitbit because I had $100 in Google store credit apparently. So it was 30 bucks. So I have the Fitbit coming. A future episode where I'll talk about that. But I figured it wasn't okay to

just say I bought something that I haven't gotten yet and say that's the cult. So instead I joined the Bevel cult, which is this, I'm kind of having the summer of like fitness right now. So what is this? It's an app. It is an app. So Bevel is an app that is kind of a competitor to Whoop. I think Whoop has actually sued this company. I don't know if it's a good guy or bad guy here. But people love, love, love this Bevel service.

And basically, it's an app you install on your iPhone. I think it's on Android as well. But I'm using it on the iPhone. And it kind of hooks into Apple Health and any other devices. I think you can pair it with like, uh, uh, Garmins and other sorts of things. Um, yeah, other sorts of devices. And it just gives you like this overview of your health. Um, it does, it gives you a strain level. How stressful are you being both exercise and just like, it uses heart rate data from

your watch to like, try to understand if you're like stressed. It has this recovery metric, a sleep metric. And yeah, I think it does a thing where it tries to determine your biological age as well. Oh, no. That always freaks me out. Yeah. It's kind of those apps that predict how long you have to live. Yeah, I don't like it. It feels like tempting fate. Like, I don't want to do that. Oh, boy. I'm having to tell me my biological age right now.

Okay. Oh, that's rude. It thinks I'm 41.5 years old. Oh, so younger than you actually are. One year older than I am. One year older. Well, that's messed up. Okay. 52% confidence. Oh, yeah. Obviously, it's wrong. So, okay. So, I'll look more into this and see how I can get younger. but uh it's cool it's a nice design nicely designed app um i don't i've only been using it for a few days so i don't have a ton to say about it but it is yeah it's it's interesting

it is very expensive though so i'm on a on the free trial right now still it's 15 a month or a hundred dollars a year so i find it unlikely i will stick with it especially now that it's roasted me for my age um but uh yeah get insulted for 15 dollars a month exactly be absolutely offended so i'll look more into that but uh they just had a 3.0 release so i guess they made a bunch of updates that i don't appreciate because i'm a new user and uh yeah it's all right but it's very

expensive and all this like fitness like life tracking stuff is so expensive the whoop is like two to three hundred dollars a year uh this is a hundred dollars strava is like 80 bucks like you can spend a ton of money on this if you uh if you want to so okay yeah feels like a cult and uh oh i i will put a link to their announcement for the 3.0 uh their video that they did on YouTube, it is very the browser company coded and you will love it. Oh no, I want to see this.

It has the same, not the same level of pretension. Like I don't know if it has a grain. Oh, oh, there's a grainy video. Oh, the grain. Okay. So that's my cult. Okay. Well, I joined the cult as well. And for free, I did for free. And I've actually been messaging you both about it. I'm wearing the Apple Watch. There you go. Welcome.

This is the Apple Watch cult. You're in it. So this is for free because this is my old Apple Watch that was in the drawer and stumbled upon it while moving. So there you go. Apple Watch SE. I don't remember if it's the second generation, first, whichever. Probably the first one. 2020, I think I got it. So right in the pandemic, it was the gift from my partner.

And I wore it for years. It was really nice. But also, like, I'm not into health. I smoke, I do drugs, I do alcohol, I do all the bad things. So, yes, when I say drugs, my allergies, you know? So, anyway. Yeah, the Apple Watch cult. But, however, so I wanted to give it a try once again because it's still working first.

Sad thing is it doesn't support WatchOS 26. And I've discovered that if you don't update to watchOS 26, you can't see your workouts on the phone anymore. So that's one way that my Apple Watch is getting obsolete. Some things are no longer working on the iPhone with it. You can still do all the workouts on the watch itself, but nothing on the phone. But everything else still works. I've disabled all the notifications.

So, by the way, what I did is I wiped it and started from scratch because it had all my old stuff on there. Made no sense to me. I was a weird person in 2023 when I stopped using it. Things I like. I like waking up to a tap on my wrist. So this is the thing that I miss the most. This is what I loved the most about it when I was wearing it all the time. Yeah, the silent alarms on the wrist.

Amazing. And I think I will just keep using it at least just for this. So I have a charger set up beside my bed. And so I can just pick it up before I go to sleep. Set an alarm. And in the morning, put it back. So almost not wear it during the day. I'm wearing it right now because I put it on while you were talking about the bevel. I put it on discreetly. You did not notice. But yes, there's a bunch of neat things as well.

I forgot how nice it is that you can walk up to a Mac and it unlocks when you're wearing an Apple Watch. So you don't have to reach for the Touch ID sensor. I like that there's an option on the iPhone for Face ID. It makes it much nicer to your face, less strict. So it's an option in there that's not enabled by default, but you can enable it to unlock with Apple Watch. And that means that if it's recognizing your face but not quite,

it will not throw an error and it will unlock more easily. And they added this, if I remember correctly, during the pandemic or right before. I don't remember. I remember it being useful during the pandemic when we were wearing masks. Yeah. But yeah, I turned that on and it's nice. It's nice especially for when you're using your phone on a MagSafe dock, on a vertical dock on your desk. Because the phone is far away and most of the time it's not recognizing me quite rightly.

So with the Apple Watch, it unlocks more easily. Apart from that, I think most of it's useless. There's a weird honeycomb grid of apps on there. I don't know what all of this is. I don't get it. Why is there the train? My train app is on there. I don't know why. I'm riding the train with my watch. I'm not doing that. I don't know. No. I've got a very simple infograph, whatever, face, watch face.

It's got my heart rate, the solar cycle in the sky, my activity rings, weather and alarms. And that's it. Yeah, that's classic. Conclusion, the Apple Watch cult sucks. Probably because I'm mad that my watch is no longer supported. Okay, well, seems a bit like a you thing, but okay.

By the way, I looked up on Apple Store, how much is it worth if I trade it in? 25 euros, baby. Yes, this worth, baby, is worth 25 euros. Yeah, that's not much. Yeah, that's pretty funny. It's in a pretty good state. Like when the questionnaire that they ask you in which state is the battery, the screen, I answered all of it positively. Like maximum answer to everything, 25 euros. That's what we can do with 25 euros. Yes.

There you go. Okay. Maybe I will get an upgrade at some point because I feel like it would be nice if I was able to wear it again, but definitely not urgent. All right well I'm glad we joined cults Okay So The next episode Will be WWDC week So we are figuring out what we're going to do

But we are probably going to have a WWDC Episode we'll see what the production Is we'll see when it releases but We want to talk about WWDC and All the great things that are perfect and there's no issues with that Apple announces. So we'll see. Next week will be a weird one. The episode will come out whenever we can make it happen. All of this to say we're not doing a new challenge right now. No new challenge. Chris isn't there and WWDC will be weird. Yeah.

So we can't do it. Challenges will be back after the next episode. But that's it for us today. Thank you so much for listening. The predictions we made on Cozy Zone. Check out the predictions we made. Oh, yeah, you can just skip WWDC and watch our predictions episode. That's what's going to happen. Consider it a summary. Yes, so that's it. And, yeah, anything you wanted to plug or say before we go? No, it's fine. I'm all good. Thank you very much. Chris. All right. Chris, we hope you're back next week. Yes. And that's it.

We're MacStories Podcast. Yada, yada, yada. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.