My Magic Mouse Is Pregnant

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. As always, I am joined by Mr. Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I am doing great, and I have no witty remarks. Okay. And we're also joined by Ms. Niléane. Niléane, how are you? I'm doing great. My cat is photobombing, as always.

It's always great. Always nice. I'm going to leave this in the show, but one of your air conditionings is going nuts. I can hear it. Yeah. That's probably mine. That's Matt. Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah, I can hear it do the thing. I can turn out mine then, right? No, that's okay. If we all have the same white noise, there's no white noise. Yeah. It might just be peaceful then. Oh, if you run yours, maybe it'll cancel out because that's how noise works. Yes.

That's how the AirPods Max work. Yeah. That's how you get two times better noise canceling? I don't know. I don't know. That's right. Anyways, tiny topics. That's what we do next, right? Yes. It's been a week, guys. It's been a week. I have a tiny topic. I finally got around to playing the remake of Star Fox on the Switch 2. It's amazing. It's fantastic. Yes, there is the original Nintendo 64 on the Switch through the Nintendo online service thing.

But the nice thing is this one's been modernized. Modern controls, better graphics, better just like a lot of quality of life improvements. It is so much fun. I forgot how great that game is. And it's not long. I know a lot of people are complaining it's not a $50 game. I don't care. I'm having fun with it. I'm fine throwing 50 bucks at it. If you haven't played Star Fox, if you've never played Star Fox, totally worth checking out. If you loved the Nintendo 64 Star Fox, yes, just it's an automatic buy. Never heard of it. What? Oh, my God. It is sitting on my Switch right now.

I am looking forward to playing it. As a child, I played the first two to three levels of that game a thousand times, And nothing past that. So I have no idea what's actually past the first, like, probably 15 minutes. Yeah. I, yeah, it's such a good game. Oh, my God. I love that game. It was one of those games. Like, Matt, I was good. I could get to the third level. I could get to the third level, no problem. But past the third level, it was lucky if I got past it. Oh, yeah. But now, modern quality of life improvements, plus I'm just better at that stuff. No problem. I already beat it.

oh well done yes um Niléane we got here you got something here what's happening explain yourself I told you in our group chat a few days ago that I got something cursed from my desk set up okay and I'm not going to use it ever but it's so cursed that I thought it would be fun just to try it out

so basically remember how we always talk about mice on the show we complain about the logitech we complain about mainly the logitech of course and not every other not my not my 360 no-sup golf livery mouse that's for sure i don't complain about that except for the fact that like i do complain about it because there's a lot of weird things with it and it cost me a hundred dollar tariff bill. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I forgot about that. I was pretty mad about that. So, anyway, but turns out

the perfect mouse was there all along right here on my desk. It could be the magic mouse. It's the magic mouse. Oh my god. Except it got pregnant. My magic mouse is pregnant. It looks like this now. It looks like a shoe. What is that? Which way do you hold it? Like this. Like that. What? Oh, boy. So to explain, my magic mouse is in some kind of plastic case. So it's inserted in there, right?

It gives it a hump on the back half of it on top. It gives it some booty is what it gives it. Which means your hand rests more comfortably on the mouse. And also it makes it wider. So one issue with the mouse, the magic mouse, is that on the sides, it's very hard to hold. Right? And this case adds some thickness to the sides. And it's also a bit more...

It's slanted toward the outside instead of toward the inside. So it makes it easier to hold. so there you go my magic mouse is pregnant I try not to be this guy but I'm going to be this guy for a minute yes Steve Jobs comes back from back to life what does he say about this I'm just genuinely curious what you two think he would say about this the ergonomics were hard to get right you know I think he loved it it looks like a

it looks like a slipper so I think it does look like a slipper looks comfy perfect for getting in your comfort zone yeah ooh said the thing alright so there you go if you want the so lightning review it's great to hold but the magic mouse is still terrible it makes you realize that they designed the magic mouse and the sensor inside

everything to take into account that you would hold it with a claw-shaped hand. Now that you have a good, firm grip on it and try to move it around, it's the worst mouse. It's even worse than in its original form. Because for some reason, it's hard to move around, to move your cursor. And even if you put the cursor speed all the way up, it's hard to move around. It's like this sensor was not designed for a mouse that is correctly shaped. So why is this good then? It's not good.

It's cursed. Okay. There you go. Okay. All righty. And I hope that my magic mouse is pregnant is the title of the episode. Absolutely. Yes. There you go. All righty. I don't know how to move on from there. So I'm just going to. Maybe I will have many baby magic mice. Okay. That's. In nine months. You know. All with little humps. That would actually be. That would be a long con.

If nine months from now. You've like just been buying cheap magic mice off eBay. And then like. You just come on to an episode and dump them all out. There you go. Subscribe to Cozy Zone to help make this happen. speaking of cozy zone there we go uh speaking of cozy zone this week on cozy zone which is our members only show where you get an extra episode of us every single week and sometimes they're comedic episodes sometimes they're teachable episodes sometimes they're i don't know how to

explain them sometimes uh but this week uh we talked about our development setups all three of us have been working on apps uh some of us have a fleet of apps others of us just have one or two but we've all been working on apps, and we talked about our development setups and some tips for getting started if you're interested in doing some app development. Yeah, so go check that out. Yeah. And a quick segue before we get to your topic, Chris. Not only do some of us have an array of apps already,

some of us will stop working on one of their projects, and another one of us will take it over. That's true, too. What I did two days after Tangerine UI was set to pasture, put out to pasture, whatever the phrase is. Sunsetted. Sunsetted is the proper phrase. I waited two days and I was like, I can't live in a world without it. And so there's a new project with a name that I've never actually had to say out loud.

Tangerine Neuer, I guess is how you say it. Oh, there you go. Helvetica Neuer. I always thought it was like Helvetica New. I honestly thought that for four years. It's Neuer. It's German for New. Neuer. Why do we got to complicate everything? Anyway, it's going to be maintained and works on 4.6 for Mastodon. And if you like it, check it out. It's crazy how many people have been messaging me about how I will stop using Mastodon now. People are so dramatic.

That's a little much. This is how I felt. These are my DMs. How dare you? I saw somebody post that this Tangerine UI was the best social media UI ever made. And I was like, oh boy, okay. Wow. Well, I'm glad you feel this way, but it's definitely not true. There you go. I mean, they should check out X, the everything app. Not only can you see racist posts, but you can also send inappropriate DMs and send billionaires $25. Yeah. And maybe Matt will make X Neuer when X dies.

That would be a project. We should make Matt solely responsible for bringing back Twitter. Twitter Neuer. Twitter Neuer. And Matt's the only one allowed to work on it. And maybe when Matt dies, it may never happen. Although it does happen to everyone. This is dark. Your, yes, your, I don't know, children or whatever, your lineage will be called Matt Neuer and then Matt Neuer Neuer and then Matt Neuer Neuer Neuer.

No, it's Matt Neuer V2 underscore final. Oh, and maybe there will be at some point in the line, Matt Neuer. And then that person, Matt Neuer, will have a child named Manuel Neuer, and he will become the goalkeeper for the German football squad at the World Cup. Oh, now we just made it boring. Well, then they'll, yeah, anyway. Then they'll have to do a hard reset, and they'll just be Matt. That'll be great. Yes.

No, that's when they do the get thing, and they go back to the other branch, And it's just like Matt. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Can we pull a ripcord on this? Yes. Thank you. Okay. So, last week, I talked about my app, Parchment, and I talked about the development of it. But this week, I want to talk about how I'm using it. It has been approved for the App Store. What? Matt and I made a bet that I would get it in under three submissions or less. I got it in two.

First one got submitted because of the Mac OS. I was very dumb, and I forgot to handle, like, basically what happens when you click the red X button in the stoplight controls. I forgot to, like, basically either the app needs to quit, like it needs to be a single window app, or you need a new window option. I forgot to just slip my mind. I didn't even think about it. So I made it a single window application because I don't really see it making sense as a multi-window app. I don't know.

Maybe somebody can tell me why and I can reverse that. Open the day-de-note in its own window. Maybe it could stick around like a sticky or something. It could just stick in place. Oh, you could have multiple days. You could have multiple today days. That's wrinkling my brain. You could use aerospace to have all seven of them lined up for a second. Oh, God, no. It's my topic. No aerospace. And then you rename the app Stickies Neuer.

I wonder if Apple would approve it if I did that. I'm not going to, but that would actually be really hilarious. I just spilled a Red Bull on me. Nice. There you go. So where does Matt lose then? He lost. Matt lost. Matt owes me a beer. So whenever Matt and I meet each other in person for the first time, Matt owes me one beer. Okay. You suggested five beers, but I'm older. I can't drink five beers anymore. Make him drink them. I don't know.

No, I'm not going to make him do that. He has to buy them. I can't. I mean, he can. We'll figure it out. We'll go into a bar where there's only five blokes at the bar and buy them beers. There you go. Okay. All right. Anyways, I'm completely lost. This is one of those episodes. It's been a whole. Yes. So Parchment, my app Parchment and how I'm using. So this is the app I open first every single day now.

It is the app I leave open, whether I'm on my iPad or on my Mac or I just like, I don't know, I have my iPhone next to me. I always have this app open and I'm using it to manage all of that day's tasks and events. So whether it's meetings, stuff I need to do, whatever, I'm using it to manage my tasks. And I talked last week about the agenda section and how I broke it up into two parts. I'm kind of curious what you guys think about this. So there's the all-day section. So if an event is an all-day event, like somebody's birthday or something like that, or it's moving day, I don't know.

Whatever. It's an all-day event. Or a task doesn't have a time, but it's assigned to do today, but I don't have a time assigned to it. It's on that left column. And then the right column is the more agenda time where like this, I have a meeting at 8 a.m. I have comfort zone at 9. I have, I need to take out the trash at 10. I need to write a blog post at 11. Like that's where that stuff goes. And I broke this stuff up because what I was finding when I was using like a calendar app that had support for both your task management and your events, stuff would get blended together and I would still miss things.

So having these two separate columns has really helped me kind of distinguish. These are the things I can take care of at any point today. These are the things that have to happen at a specific time. I'm kind of curious what you guys think of that idea. I always think all day events and calendars or tasks or whatever should always be separated off. Those are different. Those should get their own space. And yeah, I've definitely used like calendar widgets, for example. I forget what apps have done this. None of my current ones do, but they would show you, like, here's your list of events for the day.

And it would get filled up if you had all-day events. And you wouldn't see, like, what actually has a time. And, like, what am I doing at 8 a.m.? I don't know. Because I know that all day it's John's birthday and it's somehow also Jeff's birthday. And it's the 4th of July. And none of those are super relevant to what is happening at 8 a.m., which is what I really want to know. So I do like how you kind of have it split out there. And I made sure I did the same thing for the widget too. So if you use any of the widgets, there is the all day section and then there's the time section as well.

So that's kind of the top part of the app. Then there is the daily note part. And this is kind of the stickies part of it. This is where, you know, I use this for just kind of throughout my day. I will kind of use it as a journal a little bit, but I'll also use it for planning stuff. I had some meetings this week, and it was really helpful for just taking notes during that meeting and just, like, jotting things down. I'm working on something with Redacted, about Redacted, that's going to be really Redacted. Heck, yeah. Yeah, right?

It's huge. Huge, huge, huge. Doing something with MKBHD. no it is not with Marques he's working on propaganda with the Trump administration to wow no no I have my price but there ain't enough money in the world for that one but I also I guess a little bit of personal news I also used it to plan my engagement I got engaged this week and parchment in the daily note section was really helpful to plan all this because there was

lot of coordination that went involved in that so yeah look at you yeah there's probably already been a post out about it so it might not be news to everyone but thank you i'm uh i'm very happy i mean it is weird that you have other people in your life apart from us but yeah i'm okay well how do you know i didn't i didn't get engaged to the two of you oh fascinating you guys didn't realize that was it was to the two of you yes i i did not i feel very weird about this okay i don't know

i'm pulling the ripcord on this again because no no no let's explore this i don't know MacStories hr might show up john john stay off the call um no uh so anyways yes danielle and i got engaged uh this week or by the time you're listening to it it would have been last week because that's how this whatever it doesn't matter uh if you can't tell i'm very tired um but yes uh so i've been using this for a bunch of planning a bunch of like i'm getting back into video stuff after some family stuff happened after wwdc after

planning the engagement i'm finally getting back into video stuff so i've been using this to like plan out my next set of videos and that's been very helpful as well uh the apple pencil uh section has been really nice for just like sketching things out and drawing things. I talked last week about how I really wanted the type text in the Apple Pencil section to be in the same area. It just wasn't going to happen. There just isn't a good way to do it. When you have devices that change sizes and you have sync and all that stuff, like even Apple doesn't do it.

So I had to break those two sections up. But yeah, so I've been doing that. Oh, I should point out that the app was approved for the App Store the same day I got engaged. So, I mean, I'm not... Pretty big day. Yeah, like, kind of, like, I mean, which one was bigger? I'm just kidding. Danielle, if you're listening, I'm just kidding. Obviously, it was the app. Kidding, kidding, kidding. Sure, sure, sure. Kidding. For sure. For sure. But this has really fixed reminders for me. Reminders has a lot going for it.

Reminders is great. It is built into the OS. It is free to use. It is a great project management tool. But there is some stuff that it does, like not separating out all day tasks or tasks with no times versus tasks with times. Like it does have that section in there where it breaks things up by morning, afternoon, and evening, but I don't really like the way it does it. This is fixed reminders for me because it also has natural language input. So while I have been using Siri AI mostly

to like enter new tasks and events, if I have parchment open and I'm right there, I'll just click the plus button and just type in what I want. And I, you know, I did it in the Fantastical style so I can add it to lists and I can add priorities and things like that. The metadata I care about, I can add that to it. And that's been really nice for me. The other thing I really love, and this was a Niléane suggestion, part of the UI, is the Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow tabs. Great, great, great addition. Thank you so much.

And you talked about it last week. You were just like, yeah, you just needed something up there. But I've been using the app, and what's great is I can click on Yesterday really quickly and reference my notes. Or I can click on Tomorrow and leave myself a note for tomorrow, so when I sit down at my computer, it's there for me tomorrow, Or today, that day, whatever. And I've just been really happy with how this app has turned out. And I'm really excited for it. I'm hoping by the time this episode is out, the app is out.

But I also want to send it to some media people and stuff like that. So it may not be. So it'll hopefully be out around the time this episode is out. But I will have a video on my channel when the app is live. kind of walking through like how I use it, the UI, all the little hidden touches, because I've put in a lot of nice stuff, like quickly jumping back to today, making the widget, giving the widget a theme color that matches the app color. So you can make the widget orange or yellow if you want to, or you could just have it be the system color.

There's so many little things in there that I just, I love about this app. And it's been one of those things that like, It just started off as a thing for me, but it's become a really key part to my day now, and I can't see living without it, which means I'm probably stuck in reminders until I understand the Todoist API. Oh, no. Yeah, I know. But you don't need Todoist. I mean, I don't need Todoist. So I still use reminders.

I use reminders for managing the business and like my overall projects and things that are farther out. Plus there's like the Kanban view and stuff like that. So I use that for managing my like video projects and stuff like that. So I still use reminders, but I don't really just use the today section and reminders. I basically use all the other sections of reminders, but the today section has been kind of like repurposed into parchment. I'm curious if you guys have any, any thoughts on it. If you played around with it anymore, totally okay.

if you haven't. I know you guys are busy. No. I did something in this realm, though. I unsubscribed from Fantastical because it was about to renew. And I went back to the Apple Calendar app. It's worse in so many ways. It's better than new updates, but yes. I do agree. But it's fine. And I had completely forgotten that, like, the calendar app also has reminders now built in.

So that's one way that I've been using reminders again, mostly for medication reminders and stuff. Yeah. See, Parchment doesn't have notifications or anything like that. Like, I'm very much not trying to replace reminders. Yeah. Like, this isn't, I'm not, I don't want people having to run reminders and Parchment together. Like, or I don't want Parchment to have to be a replacement for Reminders because there's a lot of stuff Reminders does really well, like the KM-Bam stuff and the notification stuff and things like that.

This is just meant to kind of be an app that stays open alongside whatever you're working on. Like, I've had Parchment and SlideOver on my iPad, like, pretty much all week, just as I'm, like, going through things, taking notes, writing stuff down. like as engagement stuff was getting locked in, I was doing stuff. It was really nice to have. It's a great slide over app, especially because you can resize slide over apps now. This was a 26 thing, not a 27 thing,

but you can resize slide over apps. So you can make it just a little bit bigger, and that way you can kind of like have a little bit more space to write things and not as much text wrapping. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, nice. Is this where we do feature requests? Sure, please I do it to you You do do it to me The natural language input Very nice A little mysterious though Before you submit So you don't always It would be nice

And this is going to be hard But it would be very nice If when you typed like at 9.30am It would somehow indicate to you that ah there i will use at 9 30 a.m as the time and if they uh put something else that the natural language will pick up if it's not part of the actual name if it was indicated somehow that would make it awesome so basically like syntax highlighting for natural language yep okay all right i will work on that i i don't think it's going to be a 1.0 thing because right now i'm focusing on shipping

but um i i i like that a lot and yes i i can i can kind of work on that but yeah like some kind of like time turns blue location turns green exactly thing like yeah okay i can i can work on that i i like that idea yeah um another thing okay before we may just pick in requests um i i don't know if we've ever talked about how i tend to have a lot of meetings No, we've never mentioned that.

So mine tends, the agenda section tends to be incredibly tall and really knocks the daily note down. So I like to have the agenda in the collapsed view. However, in the collapsed view, I do just see my all-day events. So if the next events could be at the top, then the collapsed view would be even better for folks like me. That's a good point. Oh, yeah, the collapsed view could be just like an up next widget. yeah yeah I agree that is

yes that will be in the next update yes 100% I agree with that can I have a feature request as well sure don't use the app yeah yeah the default theme should be orange I think somebody has said this last week and I want to help them get the message through you know look I agree with you that the orange actually looks better than the blue, but people expect a blue theme. I don't think that's true. I think you're making that up.

I don't think people expect any color, really. If this isn't blue, I'm going to lose my mind, Chris. It's fantastical blue, for instance. It's not blue. It doesn't have an inch of blue. And we're all canceling our Fantastical subscriptions. I'm just saying. There's blue in it. If you're in the month view, it wraps around the month. What? But yeah. I don't know. Well, I don't know.

See, here's the thing. I don't even use the default theme. I use the dark green one. Okay, sure. It's half a joke, half a real suggestion, because your app is called Parchment, and like I don't see how parchment is blue. I think parchment is more like beige, like old. I should have a beige theme. Vintage paper. You did suggest that I use a paper theme and that is something I did. I had it in a very, very early build was a paper theme, but I didn't like the way it looked.

It was just, it was hard to get right and it was one of those things I was like, I kind of want to just ship 1.0 and I'll play with this later on. It's one of those, it would be nice ideas, but it's hard to execute well, probably. It is, it was, it was really hard to, because it's like, okay, should the agenda view also be that paper theme? Like, it was, there's a lot of like designing. Especially with SwiftUI, I'm guessing it's mostly SwiftUI. Yes, it is pretty much all SwiftUI and all Swift. There's a little bit of app kit in there,

but it's pretty much all SwiftUI and Swift. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little tricky with that. Like, SwiftUI is great. It's fantastic. But the minute you want to go out of the bounds of SwiftUI, you're going to have a rough day. It's like iPadOS. Yes, you know what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. pretty much but yeah I will play around with the paper theme

I don't know about the orange theme being the default I don't know about that but people expect the blue that's okay people listening send feedback yes please do send feedback in our feedback form it's in the description tell us I agree with Niléane Chris is wrong I don't expect blue you know something like just examples of things

Chris something you could do I don't know if you're doing anything with analytics in the app but if you are you can do basic analytics on what colors people are using so you could find out what color they like I wasn't going to do any analytics you should do analytics I probably should do analytics. You don't have to do privacy invasive ones. Just like, are people actually using it? What features are they using it? Especially if you start to get a good number of folks actually using it.

It is very helpful to understand how people use your product. Niléane has the gift of people love to talk to Niléane. And just tell her. People love to talk to me too much sometimes. But it can be very helpful. You absolutely don't need to, but I have found it is nice to have. Do you use a third-party service for your analytics, or did you build your own thing? I have my own tiny little basic thing that's kind of annoying. I use PostHog for QuickReads, which is the biggest one.

Okay. Is that your biggest app now? It depends. Okay. All right. I think it's highest by revenue, not highest by users. Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Okay. Oh, my God. I just looked at the PostHog website. This thing's amazing. Oh, it's very fun. This is awesome. This is fantastic. This goes up as one of the... This is one of the best websites I've ever seen. PostHog. Just PostHog.com. dot com. This is fantastic.

See, you know, it's not orange, but this kind of color palette, Chris. I'm with you. I think I do need to add a beige. Yes. There you go. I'm going to add a beige. We're getting there. I am going to have a big 1.1 update. This is the way. Windows 8.1. Remember yeah once when windows got good again uh no uh okay all right well this is pretty cool i i'm

so anyways my my point is is i'm loving this app i know i built it myself for myself so it's a little self-serving not a little self-serving that is literally the definition of self-serving uh but That's the point. Yeah, but that's the point is I made a tool for myself. Yeah. And I think I just found another bug. I keep trying to minimize the parchment window, and it keeps opening. It keeps opening on its own. What is happening? Okay. All right. I got to fix that. Okay. So maybe this build won't be the one submitted to the app store.

Maybe I will get into all your other features really quick. And it got through app review. Can you believe it? And I got through app review. Unbelievable. I mean, the bet wasn't that I would release it on the build that got through. It was just that I would get through in under three. That's true. Yeah. And I did get through in under three. I got two. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Your superpower was not doing it at purchase. That's your superpower. That's where they get you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I didn't do it in. It is going to be a flat $5.

The reason why I'm doing it is I was thinking about it. I was like, I have a tool that most developers don't have at my disposal. I have a YouTube channel with a pretty big reach. And I can make a video demoing it and show people how it works and the fact that it works. And that should go a long way. Yep. Anyone can make an app, but can you sell it? That's the thing. I've talked to some developers, especially at WWDC. marketing is always the thing that they say is the hardest.

And I'm like, well, that's probably going to be the thing that's the easiest for me. If not one. Yeah, one of the things. Unless people expect anything but blue. I mean, there's literally a bunch of other themes. You can go in there and change the themes. There's so many other things. There's different app colors. The one thing I wanted to add, but I couldn't get it right. I wanted to add a pride app color because I thought I was going to release it in June. I wanted to add a pride theme color for the app icon, but every one that I did, it did not look good.

It just looked way too busy. So maybe that might be one that down the road I hire somebody to do. Yeah. Have you thought about doing a parchment-looking app icon? Like a beige one? Sure, but maybe a roll of parchment or something. Yeah. I mean, my thing is it's got to be a full squircle. It's got to be the full squircle. I know. We've talked about this. For sure, for sure, for sure. It's got to be a full squircle. So I'd have to figure out a way to do that.

But I'm actually really proud of my app icon. I'm kind of curious if we were tier listing my app icon. Where would you put it? And you can be mean. Feel free to be mean. It's down there, you know. Is it in my own tier? It's in the Chris tier, obviously. Yes. It's just blue and not orange. What can I say? There is literally an orange app icon, though. But it's not the one you see on the App Store, etc. Yeah. I know how productivity apps work. If one thing I know, it's how productivity apps work on the App Store.

I think your app icon is fine. I just think it should, like, tie in more with the name. I was trying to, like, demo, like, make it look like the UI. Like, you have the task section up top, and then you have the daily note section. Yeah. I didn't want to make it just a checkmark. Ooh. What if the people demand a checkmark? A blue checkmark. Matt would have done this, I think. He would have done a pretty cool checkmark. I could, look, if the people demand a checkmark, as a man of the people, if they demand it, I will do it. Yeah.

Anyways, this is Parchment. I hope you're all interested. if it's not out yet you can join my Patreon if you really want to try it the test flight's on there but it should be out pretty quickly around the time this episode comes out I would be shocked if it doesn't come out before the next episode send feedback if you're shocked please send feedback send feedback in general yes nice well congratulations Chris

thank you thank you it's been a big week alright now I suggest that we do a game and whoever ships whoever announces a new app the fastest from now on wins okay Matt what do they win? starting now so like I have to like a brand new app whoever among us three announces a brand new app that's gonna be Matt

Matt, can you begin? I'm in the middle of working on one, yes. Oh my god. There you are. Yeah, no, it's going to be a minute. I want to finish this. I want to get this one to a really good probably 1.1 set before I start working on something else. Plus, I need to get back to making some videos. Oh yeah, that little thing. Yeah, the thing that pays my bills. Yeah. All right. Well, that's parchment. Yeah, Matt, what do you got for us this week? Matt. What I have is not something I made, but something I inspired.

So I am bringing the app In Your Face, which is a calendar app. Oh, my gosh. Of course it is. But not a normal calendar. This isn't your father's calendar app. No, it's going to be a cult. this is in your face is effectively super aggressive notifications for when your calendar events are about to start and so most calendars have like a little notification that appears at

the top of your screen or in notification center and some of them will put it in the menu bar and that's all great but what if that's not enough what if you need to absolutely have your entire world taken over by the event that's about to happen in your face does this so you connect it to your calendar you can use your on device calendars or you can just manually connect a google or outlook account um no iCloud but i guess it would just work through apple calendar um and as soon as an event is about to happen at whatever time you want at the exact moment it starts

four or five minutes before whatever you want an entire full screen thing comes up covering what you're working on and says here's the event click here to join the video call and it's super aggressive this looks horrified this is this seems like the perfect Matt Birchler thing with like yes yeah that would like i kill me i on on their website it says ideal for adhd and focus issues

yes i've been looking at this tagline i so it says ideal for adhd focus issues and neurodivergent users experiencing time blindness um i blindness i don't know but that's cool if it works for some people yeah this is I would not be okay with this on my computer my flavor of ADHD is it's 10 o'clock in the morning I have a meeting at 3pm this afternoon I cannot bring myself to do anything until 3pm this afternoon

I'm exactly the same way yeah that's my ADHD when I need to schedule stuff especially on I don't know, whatever. But there are days where there's something that's planned for the evening on some weekday. And I will not schedule anything for that date if I know there's something I have already planned, even if it's in the evening. Because I know anything before that I will not be able to achieve. Amen! Yeah.

There's like a countdown in my head constantly. I'm just like, okay, six hours from now, I got this meeting of 10 minutes with whoever. Even for the most mundane thing. It literally happens with comfort zone. I don't do anything work-wise until after comfort zone on the days we record comfort zone. And there are days that we've had to push recordings like an hour or two, and I just don't get anything done until we finish recording comfort zone. This is why I always try and schedule my meetings first thing in the morning.

Oh, my God. I just checked. I had 37 meetings this week. Jesus Christ. So this works great for me because I need 30 seconds notice that I need to be on on some totally different topic like now. So anyway, so it does this full screen alert. You can theme it. They have a bunch of different designs and you can fully customize it to like whatever blue, purple, orange you want, whatever. I like the icon. It looks like the older era of Microsoft Office icons.

Oh, it does. Yeah, those like folded, like ribbons or whatever. Oh, yeah. I don't know why. I find it disturbing for some reason. It's a bit disturbing. It's a bit disturbing. No, I like it. I like it. It doesn't use a full squircle, so. It does not use the full squircle. Nor should it. What I love about this app and the reason it got on my radar is because over the course of 2026, I have been making these little micro apps, which are things that I just like, let me take an hour and build a little thing that solves a little problem.

And I just back in May, I my 17th micro app of the year was called NextUp, which was just this idea of what is my next meeting? And you would like hold down a key keyboard combination. And just in the middle of your screen, you get this little thing that says your next meeting is in two hours and three minutes. And here's what it is and whatever other information. And I was like, oh, this would be so great because I, you know, sometimes it's in five minutes. Sometimes it's in three hours. And I just want to know, like, real quick, what is it?

And the developer of InYourFace is on Mastodon and saw this post and was like, hey, would you mind if I just built this into my app? And I was like, please. Because I was getting deep in the weeds of like figuring out Google Calendar authentication. And like, it was just annoying. And I was like, if you've already got that figured out, please do it. And so he's implemented it and released it about a week ago as we record, two weeks ago as we release this episode.

And it's great. It just works. I put a screenshot in the show notes so you can kind of see what it did for comfort zone. And it's just like, hey, in 20 minutes you've got comfort zone. And here's the timeline. Here's, yeah, it's very simple. So it is just a small banner. That one is just a small banner. Yes. So the default thing is a whole full screen notification. It also works on the iPhone. They have an iPhone app that uses the, I think, iOS 26, the alarm API. Yeah. That was such a cool thing they added.

It's a very good thing. I don't use it, but I see the use cases for people, and that's fantastic. Yeah. So it does kind of have this, it replicates the same thing of like, here's a full screen thing for the meeting at the exact time. So I like it because I have a stupid number of meetings. And yeah, I just wanted to shout it out. It is a paid app. It is just because I always like to mention pricing. It's $25 a year or $4 a month. There's a $69 lifetime purchase. Nice.

So it's a little, you know, it's a little steep for a notification thing for your calendar. Yeah. But if this is a thing that's useful to you, and yeah, it can be worth it. So I am actually, I'm on the monthly subscription right now because I did want to give it a go and we'll see if I stick with it. But I thought it was a cool thing to shout out. It also runs on Windows if any Windows folks are using this or listening to us. A rare instance where something we talk about is on Windows.

I have something to complement your pick today. It's something I've been using. It's called Naiste. What? I put it in the show notes if you want to read it. It's written with a merged A and E letter. Okay. Naiste. Anyway, so it's a small menu bar app. I believe it's free. Let me know if it is actually free because I've already got the app, so I'm not raising the price.

I'm not seeing where you put this In Notion below Matt's screenshot I'm not seeing Matt's screenshot Oh We're on episode 108 Yes? Yeah What's going on here? You're on episode 108 Going back out and coming back in Oh now I'm seeing it Oh okay interesting So it is It is I've been using this. Basically, this is,

it serves a bit of like the same purpose as in your face. So it just shows you your next event in the menu bar. And if you click on it, you can see like your upcoming events after that for today. And that's pretty much it. Like it's very, very minimal and it looks nice. Minimal and looks nice is a good pair. I like it. And no notification.

No, like it doesn't want to be in your face. It's just in the menu bar. And there's a countdown until your next event. And this is nice because, like I said, when I have something planned for the day, I will count down in my head to whenever that happens. And this is just one way of embracing that instead of fighting it. It's just, okay, I will have a countdown in my head, whatever is planned during my day. So why not have that countdown just displayed in the menu bar?

It actually relieves me a little bit because I don't have to keep it in my head. It's just right there in the menu bar. And it has just a nice little feature. If there's a meeting attached to a video call link in that event, you can just click the drop-down and it will open the call. So there you go. It's another flavor of that app, I guess. But it does exactly the contrary, not in your favor. Yeah, it is minimal. And this is a very different vibe.

So yeah, I was happy about this because in a world of like AI everything, It's nice to just come across a new app that's like just a cute little guy. Yeah. And not, you know, all the things. Yes, I agree. Yeah, I like these small little apps. These are, I mean, this is kind of the stuff that I've been building for myself. I talked about Balance Audio last week where it was just like a tool specifically for my needs.

And maybe a few other people might need it, but like it's something specifically for me. And then Parchment started off as something for me that fixed a specific problem for me. But I think it probably is going to have a much bigger audience and could help a lot of people. And, yeah, this is cool. It does feel a little culty, but, you know, whatever. I think you should check out Nasty, Chris. I haven't, yes, I just downloaded it. I haven't played with it yet. That's more culty. That's way more culty.

It's got, like, a weird character. If you can't pronounce one of the characters, you don't even know it. Chris, what is that character called? Backwards. I know what it's called in French. It's a symbol. It means Satan. It is bad news. Wow, I'm cool with that. I'm cool with that. Hey, I'm all about that rock and roll lifestyle. That's why I can't hear. I listen to that rock and or roll. In French, we call it Adanle, which means A inside E. Yeah, see, it's A inside E, Matt. I knew that. Why are you trying to be all elitist and stuff? Big business boy.

You know what? He's probably working on an app just like this, Nistat, whatever, and he's jealous that they got to market first. Yeah, that's it. That's exactly what it is. That's what his new app is. Makes sense. Makes sense. He secretly hates me because I got through app review and just like two goes. I think that's probably it. Subconsciously, that's it. For sure. I'm just jealous. Makes sense. For sure. For sure.

All right. How about a challenge? Yes. For once. Oh, wait, no. I forgot what the... Oh, why did you forget? Have you not been using it constantly all week? We'll get to it. We'll get to it. So the challenge was use Snick, S-N-I-C-K, for the week. And Snick is an app I made you discover, apparently, last week. You were not aware of Snick until I mentioned it. It's a small app you install on your Mac, and it adds little clicky noises for when you're scrolling in every app on your Mac. Every app. Every app.

And if you're using the Magic Trackpad, it triggers the little haptic as well when you scroll. It's an option in the app. And you have... So, I will... And we had to use that for the week. So, I will go first. And things I enjoyed. I enjoyed the little sound options you have in the app. I think my favorite one is the default one, the one called Knock. Because it's low and still a bit clicky. So this is my favorite one. Apart from that, in the first for the history of this show,

I think you were right and I hate it extremely much. Yes! Yes! Victory! I think this is... This is not good. I think it's fun for 10 minutes and then you lose your mind and you just want to go back to Clack and nothing else. Just pure Clack. A Clack plus Snick setup is cursed. A no Clack, no Snick setup is cursed.

A pure Clack setup without Snick is blessed. Wow. Wow. Okay. Did you use it all week? No. I gave up. I gave up so fast. How fast did you give up? I don't know. Next day? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Next day. Okay. So the impression I'm getting is I'm the only one who took this challenge seriously. I used it every single day.

You used it every day this morning? Every day. To be fair, it was a short week between recordings. We did recording on Monday this week. We did. We're recording again on Friday. So it was a short week. It wasn't a full week. But even then, it was a long week. So I have numerous issues with this app. First off, I agree. The default sound is the best sound. It feels good. However, you're going to hear it thousands of times.

It is going to make you not want to scroll. It's going to make you ration your scrolling. Like, do I need to scroll now? If I don't need to scroll, maybe I just won't. Maybe I just won't. It is a lot. It is a lot to take in. Also, I don't like that it doesn't seem you have to have it open in the dock. There's no way to run it just in the menu bar. The menu bar icon is a full color icon. So it's not an SVG, which makes it look out of place.

And I also found like I would start to feel a sense of calm and serenity come over me after a while of using it. And it was because it actually stopped working. So like the app just like was just kept closing randomly. And I like it didn't notice. So maybe I was doing something that was closing it or it's crashing or I wasn't getting any macOS alerts. I was like it unexpectedly quit. So I don't really know what was going on. But yeah, like I wouldn't actively go to close it, but it would just like stop clicking at some point and I'd have to reopen the app.

So I don't really know what's going on there. Yeah, it's a lot. It also shows you the onboarding screen every time you launch the app, which is not necessary. I did not notice that. Well, I did. Because you quit too quickly. Yeah. I like that you can change the volume. That is nice. I like that you can like knock it down so it's more subtle effect. The haptic stuff, even worse than the sound. I thought it was atrocious.

It felt like it turned my trackpad into like sandpaper or something. Like it was just like, it was misery. It was misery. So I think this is a perfect app. If you are someone who is struggling with an addiction to scrolling, this will make you stop scrolling. You will hate it so much. But if you don't have an addiction to scrolling and you're able to live a life, then I don't think you should use it properly. But it was a fun experiment. For the trackpad, I think you're right. And it's because, and you can't tweak it either.

And it shows a very light haptic feedback. Even though, like, as an app developer, you can send, like, a firmer feel to the trackpad. And I think it needs to be firmer to be more satisfying. Because it shows a very light one, it just feels like your trackpad is vibrating softly and just feels weird. And also, I think the one reason why it fails at being satisfying, because I thought it would be satisfying, but it's not.

And I believe the reason it's not satisfying is because it's extremely hard to get it to match the real scroll wheel that you have under the finger. The beeps and the clicks don't match the actual feeling of your scrolling, ratcheting under your finger. Whereas clack, when you tap a key, it's instantaneous. You associate in your brain. Clack is the goat.

We all love clack. Do not say that. Do not throw me in that bucket. Can I do a dramatic reading for you all? Of course. Thank you. Peter Piper picked a bell. Okay, I'm ready. Here we go. At 2.10 p.m. Monday, right after the day we recorded, I just got back to my Mac since we recorded. This is hell. 2.13 p.m. three minutes later,

this is the most annoying sounds I've ever heard. Even clack is better than this. Yes. 2.16 p.m. three minutes after that, six minutes after I've installed the app, We see the Seinfeld gif of Kramer coming into Jerry's apartment, slamming the money down on the table and saying, I'm out from the bet episode. And I type, I can't do it. I lasted six minutes. I get ready, editor Chris. I hated this app.

And you made me spend $7 on this app. That means for every dollar I spent, I didn't even make it a minute for every dollar I spent. I spent $7 on it but only used it for six minutes. This, I spent $1.10 to use, wait, no, that doesn't matter. Wait, no, it doesn't matter. Anyway, no, that's not right. I forgot how math works there for a second. I spent a lot of money. I spent too much money on this app. This developer owes me $7. You know? You know.

you can use your EU consumer rights and request a right of withdrawal on reportaproblem.apple.com within 14 days and get the full refund. This was through the developer's website. This was not the App Store. Well, then you can send an email to the developer and request a right of withdrawal under the EU consumer rights. No, I'm going to ask for a freedom refund. Where's my freedom check? Yeah, I hated every second of this.

And then it didn't quite work right with Final Cut. For some reason, it didn't know what to do with horizontal scrolling, where it would fire sometimes, but not all the time. And I'm trying to edit this episode. I was trying to edit this or our last episode. And I was like, what the hell is happening? I was so mad. And the haptic stuff was bad. I hated everything about this app. You're welcome. Yeah, this was a bad one. Man, oh, man.

It was a good challenge, though. It definitely was a challenge that I lasted six minutes for. So I was the one that lasted the least, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I did four days. Why? That's impressive. Did you have to do any screen sharing with your colleagues and the HUDs? Oh, they heard it? No, they didn't hear the clicking. They don't hear my computers. I mean, because sometimes we hear your computer sounds.

Maybe they did. That's true. With AirPods in, it all works. It's all good. Yeah. One thing I wish this app had is metrics. I would love to know how many clicks it's clicked. That would be a great... That would make it more addictive. You could try to beat your high scores. They could have achievements. Yeah. No thank you. It's a good app. No, it's not. The execution is failing. If make the trackpad feel more clicky

and find a way to allow us to make it match to our actual scroll wheel, I think it would stand a chance. Yes, it's one point release away from being brilliant. No. Side note, my internet keeps bleeping, and I have no idea why. Goodbye. Okay, well, let's move on, so that way we can get you out of here. I'll reboot my router in a bit. Okay. Let's not do that right now, though. So it's my challenge,

and I have a challenge for you guys. And I'm calling this a palate cleanser challenge. coming off this last one. It's like a nice amuse-bouche. What? Sorry. Amuse-bouche. Amuse-bouche. Amuse-bouche. Whatever. Is that one of your presidents? I thought that was French. Isn't that French? It is. That's why I'm mocking you. Amuse-bouche. That's why I'm making fun of you. It is French. Okay. We don't know what it means, though. No, I don't.

Anyway, I'm moving. Okay, so the challenge is build a shortcut using only describe a shortcut. So that's the new 27 OSs. So basically you're not allowed to go into the shortcuts editor. You can only use describe a shortcut. So build a new original shortcut only using describe a shortcut. Okay. And what I will say is, no, you can't go into the editor. You just need to run it, and if it doesn't work, you need to tell it what it did wrong and let it fix it. So the thing to keep in mind, it does not support third-party apps. Okay. Not a problem. All right. Cool.

You're going to be blown away by what we do. Yeah. It's going to make some annoying sound all the time. Yeah. It is now. Using the alarm API. Oh, God. All right. So that brings us to the end of the show. And it was a busy week, so I didn't come up with the end of the show question. I have one. Do you guys have an end of the show? Okay. What is it? I put in one. How have you been liking the World Cup? okay I've actually seen about 20 minutes of it because I went to go get a haircut and they had it

on the TVs and I was forced to watch it because it was in front of me it was the most boring thing I've ever seen what game was it? it was England versus I mean England sucks they just won it I don't know it was on let's see it was Wednesday they were supposed to blow them out and they did not. Yeah, that was against... Who was it? I forgot. I forgot too. They can't be that memorable. Democratic Republic of Congo. Okay, the Congo. Yeah, no, it was boring.

It was not interesting at all. So yeah, that's the only bit I've seen. Oh boy, I'm enjoying it. I started watching, I watched that game. I watched the US game on, what was it, Wednesday night, I think? where they won, which was really cool. I heard, I read afterwards that that had the highest viewership for any soccer game in the U.S. ever. So like three people? No, like nearly 30 million people. It was huge.

And it was also on Telemundo, it was the biggest, I think they're confirming it, but like the biggest or the second biggest ever game in Spanish language broadcast as well. Nice. So people are watching. People are watching in a way they don't normally. Except for Chris. Although Chris, he got the clockwork orange treatment at the hair salon, I guess. We literally got to bring it to your turf, to your backyard, for you to care about the biggest event in the world. I don't know if you guys have heard about the soccer thing they call a football. I think it's going to be pretty big.

Right? It's taking off, right? You know what's happening right now? The Silverstone Sprint shootout. And I'm missing that right now. No one knows what that is. Matt knows what that is. I know what that is. And I'll be watching it as soon as I can as well. Yeah, as soon as this is over, I'm going to go watch that. I don't even want to know. Just know that France is about to win the World Cup. There you go. I believe in, I think we've got it. It's a pretty fantastic team we've had this year.

As we've had for the past 10 years. This team is broken. and it's great. Every France game is, literally in this World Cup, every France game is a delight to watch. Not always been the case that. They have always been pretty strong but sometimes some competitions, especially the last Euro, very frustrating team to watch sometimes. This World Cup, very enjoyable. They score a lot of goals.

They play very technically, tactically. It's amazing to watch. It's very satisfying to see a tactical play come together from this team. I'm liking it. I'm liking it. All right. I think your stadiums look extremely weird, and I hate them. Because they're probably set up for football or baseball. Yeah, basically, yeah. American football, the fields are smaller, so they had to make the fields bigger, temporarily for the World Cup. And also the stands are too small sometimes for some stadiums, I believe.

And they had to increase the capacity, which means the stands are weirdly, extremely close to the field. So, yeah, anyway. You know, no one's ever done this before. We're figuring it out. Eh. Eh. People don't care. We can half-ass it. Anyways, we need to wrap up the show here because Big Business Boy Burschler needs to do some Big Business Boy stuff. Yeah, his app is about to take over his screen. It is actually. It is.

My screen is going to be full screen, something else. Let's wrap up here. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you to MacStories for having us. We are at MacStories Podcast after all. Be sure to go check out the website for all the other writings and podcasts and things they got going on over there. Thank you all. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.