I'm the Guest, I Have No Consequences

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, but this week we also have a fourth. As always, I'm joined by Matt and Niléane. How are you guys doing? There's an extra square on the screen and I feel weird. It's strange, yes. We are joined by D. Griffin Jones. Hey, Griffin, how are you doing? Good evening. I apologize for turning this three-up layout in Riverside

into four rectangles. It's never been seen before. I have no idea what the YouTube video is going to look like. My ADHD-riddled brain is like, what is this going to be on Monday when I go to edit this? Is this the first time you've had four people on at once? I think so. Yes. Oh, no, no, no. We had Federico on, but that was when we were at Apple Park. But you were on the same video. We were on the same video. It's not quite the same. But just remove your face, Chris, so we can just have three faces. Oh, that would actually be the easiest way to do it. A no-Chris episode. I mean, I don't know how.

As an egotistical maniac, I don't know how I feel about that. Just keep your existing layout and make me like a tiny little circle overlapping in the middle. What we could do is actually we could make you the DVD screensaver where you're just like bouncing around the screen the whole time. Oh, yeah. And I just animate you. You're just like moving. That would be fantastic. Every few minutes, we should all act like we're about to see him hit the corner and then be like, ah. And then when I do, I change code. This is a big edit for you, Chris. Yep. This is going to be a weird one.

You know me and change. But Griffin, I got to say, I love your background. Thank you. If you're not watching the video version, you're missing out this week. Do you recognize the computers that are behind me over my shoulder? Of course. It's pretty small. Sure. So that's some kind of TV on the right, like a Panasonic TV for something. Only able to like show three broadcast channels or something. And the one to the left of that is a soldering iron terminal. 0 for 2.

I think the one in the middle is an early studio display. That's my guess. A little bit of bezel. And the one on the far left, is that a Performa? I've got a Power Macintosh G3. That's a gateway monitor, so that makes it a little challenging. I apologize for that. I'm so upset. I'm just going to end the call right now. I have a Commodore 64 with a Franklin monitor. That's what I was thinking. And a Commodore Executive SX64, which is the same except all in one,

and it's technically portable because the keyboard flips up, and it has a handle on the back, and it's only 23 pounds. It's got a handle. It's portable. Yep. Tech with candles is great. It's just as portable as Chris's iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard. No. There's more. There's no handle on those. No. Currently, my iPad Pro is running the iPadOS 27 beta and does not get more than two hours worth of battery life. It's not very portable right now. All right. We got some tiny topics. Yes.

Neilian, I'm just going to go ahead and assume these are all you. Yeah. First thing, a tiny update on my journey to music independence. I have unsubscribed from Apple Music. Please applaud. Did you sign a declaration of independence and send it to Tim Cook? No, screw him. I don't care. He's on his way out. Yeah. So I've unsubscribed because what pushed me over the edge is price increase. yet another one.

I barely use it anymore. I just purchased my music. It's the way to go. Please do that. Please purchase your music. It's great. It's awesome. It's liberating. And then you get to manage files. Who doesn't love that? It's great. Yeah. Every iPad person ever. I respect that. I respect that. I feel like I'm maybe another year and years worth of bugs not being fixed in the macOS Music app to being where you are. There you go. Oh, this is a sore subject on the Comfort Zone podcast. Yeah. He knows.

The Apple Music Mac app is actually a torture device. I was like, what are you guys talking about? It's fine over here on the iPad. It is. It's totally fine on the iPad. It's not the Mac experience. It is not. I will give you, the Mac app is very bad. Because the Mac app is still iTunes, right? Like, it's still, like, with, like, just more and more crap plastered on top. it's actually amazing how much of apple's empire is technically just the itunes music store

just in different interfaces as somebody that's been messing around with app store connect the last month yes holy crap is app store connect bad but at least it is a real app on your computer that you can add files to can't do that on your ipad that's true i can't that's that's why i guess the correct I'm the guest here, so I don't have any consequences. I can make you as mad as I want, and I'll just be gone in an hour. He'll be gone. That's true. That's it. I'm bouncing you over to that corner of the video. Another tiny topic.

You know, Google has an AI mode. Oh, yes. I've heard about it. It's been a while. It just finally rolled out in France, and everyone's upset. is that we were an island of prosperity on the continent. For some reason, all the European countries all around us all had it, but now we have it as well. And people are getting mad, especially like news publications. They are not happy about this.

French news publications, not happy about this. Anyway, so that's it for me. Yeah. Welcome. Yeah. The comfort zone. Are you considering switching to a different search engine? Like what's your next step from here? Or just ignoring the... Because there's also like the URL hack that you can do that supposedly hide the AI stuff. I've not tried anything yet. It's only been two days. I will do something. I will report back.

I don't know what I'm doing yet. TBD. It's time for DuckDuckGo. Once again. I have one tiny topic it is just called I impressed Neilion oh I just wanted to say yesterday Neilion signed up for quick reads and I oh my god I had like 60 unread messages yeah I had like 60 unread eye messages and I just was like I had no I just

I had no idea what was going on yeah she said the buttons made her feel things and that is what a good UI does. I never inquired if they were good or bad. Your buttons are very satisfying to press. I love me some good buttons on the web. And yesterday I was like, I was needing something to just save a bunch of links for a specific work thing. And I will need to do this over a few weeks. So I'm like, what can I easily add to my browser? so can I easily save links over the span of a few weeks?

And I just remembered, oh, I have a friend who does this. And yeah, and he got me a promo code, which is great. I think this is a great business deal that we have concluded, you and I. And I got to use one of my favorite GIFs too regarding the promo code. So if you can figure out what one of my favorite GIFs are, you can probably use that promo code create so all you Sherlock Holmes people out there get to work. You know it's an old people thing using GIFs. No, it's a young person thing. It's like

putting an LOL at the end of your messages or an emoji to express your feeling. This is what the young people do. I know it. Or saying on fleek. Riz. You got some Riz. I don't know what that means. What is that? It's great. 6-7. 6-7 guys. 6.7. Okay. All right. This week on Cozy Zone, we talked about some of our favorite video games. All right. Video games we're currently playing and some stuff we're looking forward to. And, yeah, it was a good time.

Cozy Zone is our members only show. If you'd like to check it out, it's only five bucks a month, and you get a whole extra episode of us every single week. I mean, who doesn't want more of us? It's unofficially known as the tier list podcast, if that makes you. But we didn't tier list anything this week. No, we should have. I don't think we needed to. All right. Let's get into the main show. And Griffin is first up in our document. And it just says spoilers. So I have no idea what this is. For the first time, I didn't actually click the spoiler to see what it was ahead of time. Wow. Okay. Oh, come on.

We all do. We all click the each. I try not to. I sometimes don't. I really don't. I was trying to be respectful. I didn't expand any spoilers. Okay. So I'm going to switch to camera two. What? Let me see if this works. It's been a little twitchy this morning when I was testing it out, but we'll see. Camera two? What kind of podcast is this? What? That doesn't make sense. Are we on NBC right now? No. We don't have any money.

A little twitchy, so don't get too impressed. There we are. Oh, my God. It's a top-down view. Production levels never seen on the show before. Wow. And then I unelegantly slide my chair over to the other part of my desk. I would like to discuss. For audio listeners, really quick, Griffith just switched to a second camera of a top-down view, and I believe this is a Newton we are looking at. So I proposed this as a challenge for you a few weeks ago.

I think through the feedback, you didn't pick up on the challenge. So I'm just inviting myself on. to talk about it myself. You know, if you want something done right, do it yourself. So I would like to discuss the Apple Newton MessagePad 2000. This is Apple's PDA from the mid-90s. I think, like, what a lot of people forget is that, like, the Apple Newton was really, like, the vision pro of its time in a lot of ways. It was, like, far more expensive and more computational and powerful than everything else, like, in its class compared to, like, the Palm Pilot or, you know, other ones.

I think HP had like a cheap one. There were like a few different like mini little DOS-based awful little pocket PCs you could buy at the time. This, the Apple Newton, was the beginning of the ARM-based processors really in like consumer devices like this. Apple heavily invested in and like owned a significant portion of the ARM, corporation at this time, they developed a mobile version of the chip specifically for the Apple Newton line of PDAs.

Of course, John Scully basically invented the term PDA describing the Apple Newton personal digital assistant. John Scully is like a former kind of John Turnus. He's his dad, probably. And then MessagePad 2000, which was their later design, was one of the first projects designed by Johnny Ive at Apple. And you can really see it, I think, in the stylus. It's like this big continuous... Wait, is that the same Johnny Ive that now works at the hit company OpenAI? The very same. The very same.

This was an era in Apple's design aesthetic that largely gets overlooked. They had a language called Espresso that had a lot of curvy, wavy, organic lines, as they described it. Like if you look at the 20th anniversary Macintosh, it has like a lot of same like waves in it. Oh, yeah. So, you know, you've got this door that like flips around to cover up or protect the screen when you're not using it, flip it around. This like solid aluminum stylus that's very nice.

You have a, it's like a passive sort of cheap LCD display, the kind you would see on like a Nintendo gaming watch. And it has a built-in backlight that makes it slightly brighter, but not very much. So it's still mostly illegible. So that's fun. Is that on right now? Yes. This is the on position. Oh. This is the off position. Oh, my God. Wow. That's some Game Boy-level backlighting right there. Yeah.

And it also makes a high-pitched eee as soon as you turn it on. Oh, my God. The screen is about the same size as like a big iPhone, like a 7 Plus. But it has the resolution of the original iPhone, 240 pixels by, or no, 320 by 480. This is so well prepared. I was not ready for this. He's got all the accessories on him. Yeah. So I started using this like for actual like productivity stuff.

I mean, when I was in college, because at the time the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil hadn't come out yet. So, you know, in the early 2010s, mid 2010s, this was still Apple's most recent pen input device. And so I used it to take notes in college. I would, for studying for an exam, I would rewrite all my handwritten notes on the Apple Newton. And the like Uncanny Valley, almost good enough handwriting recognition made me like rewrite and try and summarize and shorten the notes as I was writing them.

And, you know, that sort of forced me to think about them and, you know, really relearn the topics that I was writing. So, you know, compared to the early Apple Newtons, they, you know, they were famously made fun of extensively for their bad handwriting recognition because they had like a built in dictionary and they would match every word you wrote to whatever was in the built in dictionary. Newton OS 2.0, like their second major version that ran on the message pad 2000 and their other later models, including the emate, they actually got much, much better.

So if you can write words outside of its dictionary and it'll like start matching like letter by letter, you can, I mean, another big advantage of the Newton is that you can write anywhere on the screen. You can write in full words. You can write in like regular print handwriting or cursive, you know, compared to the Palm Pilot that had like a little square at the bottom. You had to write like a specific, you know, input style. You can freely mix notes with like outlines and you can create drawings as well.

So if I create a new blank note here, you can pick between recognized text, ink text, which is sort of like stays as scribbles on the screen, or you can draw vector shapes or and it'll sort of smooth out lines that you draw. Yeah, it is very much Apple Notes. Except unlike Apple Notes, it like keeps the vector information about all the shapes that you draw. And you can then bring them around, like change the corners. You can scale them. You can move them around.

And then you can, you know, freely mix in other sketch styles if you just want to draw in weird, wacky shapes. I just had a brilliant idea for Chris. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Parchment should look like this. I'll go through a few. Let's not add more work to my play right now. Oh, wow. Some good drawings there. Oh, yeah. Instant Christmas tree. Bunch of dumb sketches. Computer cat. Sorry, I apologize to the audio listeners,

but I'm just going through a bunch of fun little sketches I've done. I also found out later that it's really good for Dungeons & Dragons as well. So I replicated all of my character sheets in D&D on my Apple Newton. I've got all of my weapons here on this note. I can scroll through. Is all of this super old or is that recent? I've been using it recently. I haven't played D&D in a few years, but this is recent as of like just a few years ago.

The great thing is that a big part of the Apple Newton is that the text recognition and everything, you can just write over any other letter or number on the screen to update it. So I can just take my HP. Maybe I take a big hit. I write a 6 over that, and suddenly my HP has gone down by 6 or a 5. That's pretty cool. You know, update it live. I can't really see what I'm doing because I'm presenting this to the camera. You did not update, but yeah. Okay, well.

yeah angle's not great so i mean the notes is the core feature but there's also like a bunch of other apps for it too like there's a uh there's a calendar so i've got the comfort zone podcast in here maybe let's say later in the day later in the day i'm going to watch the odyssey so i can just write that in or can you watch the odyssey on this the way christopher nolan intended yeah Nope. Didn't work out great. I can stretch that event to be the full five hours long that it is. I can move it later in the day, presumably. There we go. I don't know if it's spelled it correctly.

It says true audio. Okay. So if a word is split like that, you can just write a little V underneath it. Oh. Well, it's supposed to at least. It'll join two words together, hypothetically. this is definitely living up to the reputation of brilliant in concept it's really cool when it works these interactions are really interesting and like not this isn't exactly what I would expect

like an iPad app to work like some of these like drag gestures you're doing are I feel like I haven't seen these to explain what you just did with a calendar event You dragged the little line that highlighted the calendar event in this view. You dragged it down and you prolonged the duration of the event itself instead of moving it. You would expect it to move downward. It has a surprisingly advanced user interface system as well.

You've got these scrolling buttons on the bottom. You've got toolbars along the bottom. You can have floating little mini apps as well, like a calendar. Or slide over. Multi-window. Drag around on the screen. Multi-window. You've got this drawer of apps you can bring up. And there's this. The app library. Yeah. Oh, my God. Those little formulas things. So you can do like currency conversions, all kinds of stuff built in. Tiny start. Exactly.

Like date calculators, you know, little applets like that. And it has a built-in assistant as well. So I can say, please remind me to take out trash. and I'll hit do and it'll just create a reminder there.

As far as, I don't really know where that went, but supposedly it's in there. It seems like it worked. As far as dates go, there's like a software update. You can patch and do it to support like dates through like, you know, 2050 or something like that. I don't have it installed yet. So the Apple Newton thinks it's today in 2006 because that's just, you know, subtracting 20 years, that's the best as I could do. But yeah, that's how I broadly use the Apple Newton. I'll take any questions if you have any.

Oh, I have so many questions. So the software update, is that from Apple itself or people made it? I think it's like a community sort of hack, like a package you can install onto it. You can get data onto it. There's a little weird port on the top that you can, in fact, I'll bring that in here. So the port looks like cursed HDMI. Yeah, there's a little adapter that then gives it sort of like an S-video style connector.

And you can also use that port to connect a hardware keyboard if you wanted, like specific to the Apple Newton. Now, this is, I should mention, this is Apple's own first-party Apple Newton keyboard, and yet they designed it to require an adapter to plug in. I don't know why they just didn't give it that port to begin with, but... That's the Apple we know. That's fantastic.

It's sort of like a netbook keyboard, and then it's like 60% the normal size. It's extremely clicky. And of course, because it's Apple in the 90s, the arrow keys are in a really stupid arrangement. Oh, that's a cursed layout. That is horrible. That's even worse than like that, the like full size left and right, but half size up and down. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's terrible. They're linearly left, right, down, up, like all in a single row. To the right towards the space bar, yes. Upsetting. There are also three modifier keys,

like Apple, Option, and Control. I don't know why there need to be three modifier keys for a device that doesn't have a built-in keyboard 99% of the time. I don't know what all of them do. I don't think they all map to Mac keyboard shortcuts, but there you go. I'll give you a little bit of ASMR as I click the buttons for fun. Oh, yeah. Yes. Ooh. Ooh. That sounds better than any Apple keyboard today. Oh, yeah.

I'd take that over the Magic keyboard today. Like if somebody was like, you have to use one of these two, even with those cursed arrow keys, I would take that. You know, I'd like to see somebody try and use this with a Mac. I wonder if there's an adapter you can use. There's got to be, because that's just... I'm sure there is, yeah. Oh, what is that plug called? That's a pretty standard... Yeah, the old round ones for keyboards and mice. Yeah, why can't I think of what that's called? I keep wanting to call it SCSI, but it's not SCSI. ADB is what you're going for. I don't know if it's the same as ADB. Oh, okay. I can check. One moment. It's really cool.

No function row, just like the first magic keyboard. I keep seeing parallels to the iPad. Everything old is new. There's a function row on the iPad keyboard. Yeah, but the first one didn't have one. It's a little different to me. Okay. Okay, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I see it. Different pins. Oh, well. I would just rip out the pins that are extra. Those probably aren't doing anything. You don't need them. Yeah. You don't need them. Anyways, that's my Apple Newton.

I was actually using it earlier this week again for note-taking. I had like a rather technical job interview that I felt like I really had to study for. So I took a bunch of notes on it that way. You know, also helped me prepare for the show. It was serendipitous timing. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. I still find reasons to use it. Okay. I was going to say, it sounds like you're actively using it today for things. Why? What is it about that? I was going to say something. What is it about it that makes, is it just like the novelty factor, the fun?

It's just fun to use. It seems like an iPad would do these things and have internet access all the time. So I've played with iPads in the Apple store and I genuinely don't like the texture of using an Apple Pencil on a glass, a smooth glass screen. What's actually really nice about writing with this is that it's an old resistive touchscreen. So you need to not just like press the pen against the screen, but you need to push down on it. It's so much more like writing on a screen. Even the iPads that have the little paper-like textures,

I've tried using those too. But again, as soon as your pen, the Apple Pencil touches the glass, it's already taking input, and it's just not like that on the Apple Newton. It's so much more paper-like than an iPad I think ever can be. Hmm. Interesting. Is it a bit like the DS, I guess? Yeah, yeah. It's very much like the Nintendo DS. So like when I try writing on an iPad, I always hate my handwriting because it includes all the extra like connective lines between two letters and it ends up being much more cursive-y

than it's supposed to be. Whereas this, I can write in my normal handwriting much more naturally, I think. So I'll just toss on a new note here and write. handwriting handwriting on this is pretty good sure messed up on the word writing it sounds satisfying like the sound that it makes oh yeah you've got that little little tappiness

I'll make the bit of a size bigger so everyone can see how it messed it up But, you know, I can just tap and hold the select and try that word again. Writing. You know, much more at my sort of natural handwriting speed and it gets it adequately. That's very cool. How long does the battery last? Very long. It takes four double A's. You could replace them with like rechargeable lithium double A's. and it'd basically be like brand new.

And like you can actually go probably, when I was using it for D&D, like that would be a couple hours every week and I could go months on end without putting new batteries in it. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Nice. Wow. Especially if you don't have the backlight on. The backlight takes more power. So if you're in a well-lit room that's ideal for it, then it'll go a long, long time. I actually just put new batteries in it earlier this week can see it's like at maybe like 95 so nice pretty good the the older i get the more i actually

appreciate like replaceable batteries in products yeah like yeah yeah my old i have like old ipods yeah exactly that like i have old ipods that still function but the battery is so shot it dies after like 30 minutes and the only way to like fix it is to like you need to disassemble it which you're not supposed to do and is a horrible process whereas like i have old game boys that i just pop in double a's and it works exactly like it did way back then so it's super cool

this is great i had no idea that these were still alive somewhere in the world and you're proof of it there are people who replace the screens with like modern ones that a lot better. In fact, I think there's actually a modern Mac app. If you buy a specific kind of adapter that adapts this plug into a USB-C connector, you can plug it into a modern Mac and screen mirror it to your Mac, copy the data on and off of it much easier. iPhone continuity. Yeah. So that's not available in the EU then?

I don't think the European Commission has determined that the Apple Newton is a platform gatekeeper of anything. Yeah, I don't think it sounds like it is. It kind of sounds like it is. We're looking at a significant percentage of the active Newtons in the world right now. Right, right. This is cool. Griffin, do you know, is there like a homebrew community around this? Like, are there alternate versions of like the operating system that you can like flash onto this or anything like that? Have you played around with anything? I think Newton nerds kind of like the built-in operating system a lot.

It has a very interesting file system called ASOOP, where it also has a lot of echoes to the semantic index built into iOS 27 and Apple intelligence, in that all of the data on the Newton across a bunch of different apps can all be freely accessed by other apps. This is why it could never be an internet-connected device on the modern web. But it's got a really fascinating, you know, architecture to it. If you're into weird, esoteric operating systems, there's a number of like different apps you can get for it.

I mean, there are people who get like big, chunky PCM CIA cards that plug into the side and you can connect it to an old Internet router and do some semblance of web browsing on it. But it's not that great. But, yeah, I think there are a few homebrew apps that you can install on it as well. so maybe one last question I just noticed that it's called the message pad 2000 where's the messaging how do you message

you write down messages and you can so there's sort of like the system equivalent to a share menu is this mail button in the top so you can print it fax it beam it which uses is infrared to beam it to other Newton-connected devices or computers. Or you can mail it. And how you can do those things is there's a PC card in here right now

with a very delicate Ethernet or, like, phone jack that flips out the side. And then you can insert a cable in vertically through it. It's very scary and delicate. you can do that okay oh so this is like the phone the thin ethernet looking phone cables right I don't know where they are yeah I think the TV advertisements for the Newton may have showed or like explained that like you can plug this into like a

public pay phone and like fax stuff if you want if you're on the go so yeah Apple was very close to spinning off Newton into a separate company subsidiary so the 2100 the last model has like a circular badge on the bottom with the Newton logo and not the Apple logo wow so like Newton is sort of the make and MessagePad 2000 is the model okay I have one final question for you have you seen For All Mankind? I have

yes. So in that universe in the universe of the show the Newton is what takes off way before the iPhone on the iPod or whatever and in the later seasons, season 4 or 5 I don't remember, they are in the current day with iPhone looking Newtons on Mars and stuff and they look like thick iPhone 10s but it's newtons and everybody calls them newtons what's your as a newton like expert so in season

three they had apple newtons on the show that had color screens like little built-in cameras they could do some face time on them and i thought that was really fascinating like that is absolutely what i think like a message pad 3000 would look like if if it hadn't been killed off in like you know 2000 2001 or so so you know bring forward a little bit then they sort of disappeared in season four of the show and then in season five of the show they they brought them back as like iphone kind of things but i feel like we're missing a little bit of the the connective tissue there and it also

bugged me on the show that like everybody has the exact same model and that's true like you know in real life not everybody bought an iphone 10 at the same time i mean maybe maybe i maybe in universe they apple just shipped everybody on mars apple newtons of the same yeah maybe their company issue or whatever. I want to know what the timeline is of Apple in the For All My Kind universe. As somebody that used to do the corporate buying for a pretty big insurance company, everyone had the same iPhones. I didn't give people a choice of color or anything like

that. I just bought them all the cheapest one except for me. I got the nice iPhone Pro. I got whatever I wanted. Hey, privilege of being the person in charge. Yeah. Yeah. They were all mad. They would see and be like, what do you have that one? I'd be like, because I buy them. Well, thank you, Griffin. I think this is great. I'm going to try and switch to another camera now. Thank you so much. This was fascinating. I did not know the Newton was this capable. I think we may be setting up ourselves for a rabbit hole. I'm not buying a Newton. No?

Okay. Maybe not. No, I'm not doing it. I'm still not buying. I'm not a nostalgia tech person. I don't keep old tech around. I just, you know. Yeah. Especially when you didn't use, I guess. Yeah, like, I guess, I found a couple of Danielle's old iPods, and I do plan on doing, like, the modifying thing to make them modern iPods one of these days. And I do have, like, a first iPad laying around here, which I bought for the 10th anniversary of the iPad, and I was going to review it. but I never did it.

Oh, that would have been fun. It would have been fun. I just didn't do it. Well, the problem is I bought it off eBay and it was labeled as like new and then I got it and the back was all beat to crap. Like it looked terrible. It worked, but it looked terrible and I was just, I was like, I don't want to deal with this. Well, that's even better. Imagine the clickbait video title. I got scammed off eBay, whatever. That's not my channel. You know me better than that. I know you suck yep too serious yeah I know why am I serious well this is fascinating

but we have another topic to get to Mr. Matt Birchler what do you got for us this week well I I don't have a second camera to switch to so you're just gonna have to hear me talk I know lazy much Tough act to follow. Where's your theatricalness? Where's the pizzazz? Yeah, who needs that? What I would like to talk about is I'm technically bringing two things.

It was going to be one thing, and then I found a companion thing that was so cool that I had to bring it as well. So I am a huge clipboard manager fan. I didn't understand why you would want one, And I got one and I was like, I could never use a computer without this ever again. And that's why I stopped using the iPad. And Pastebot has been my favorite clipboard manager for a long time. Then I started using Raycasts because it was built in. But then Tiny Start threw a wrench in my life.

Because Tiny Start is so cool and does the launching, the emojis, but it doesn't do the clipboard manager. And I've gotten feedback that said, no, Matt's wrong. Don't put a clipboard manager in there. The people are on my side, let's just say. The people aren't always wrong, you know. They want a faster horse. Sometimes you need a clipboard manager in your launcher. But it's fine. It's fine. I understand. And to my surprise and delight, because I really thought they were never going to touch this app again,

I just jumped on the old Mastodon yesterday and saw this announcement that Pacebot 3 is out. And so there are some things where I will just buy them immediately. This happened to me earlier in the week. M83 announced a new album. I got the email. I clicked the link. I bought the vinyl. It's coming in a month or two, whenever it launches. I don't even know. You got the vinyl. Of course. Wow, you're old. It's the equivalent of like 500 million streams on Apple Music. So I'm supporting the artist. But Pacebot 3 as well.

I scrolled immediately to the buy page, got it, and then I read the release notes. They didn't change a whole bunch about it, but there are some cool things in the app that I wanted to discuss. So first off, the marketing page, if you haven't already, you should click the link to see the page because it is so delightful. Tapbots it's made by Tapbots I should mention they just have a cool style they have a cool thing and I will never forgive Elon Musk for making it so that they can't do Tweetbot anymore

because it was so good Ivory's great. And that's the only thing you can't forgive Elon Musk for. Everything else you're on board for. You love him so much you have posters of him on your wall except this one thing that's the one you guys see this wall all the other walls they're shocking honestly um murals of him obviously naked naked murals of him on your wall oh boy let's move on from this let's move on but anyway it's the style is so cool it's so nice and there's like a promo video they made

um i forget the names there's like two main guys at tapots mark and paul paul yes i think mark has really gotten into like 3d modeling and animation in recent years and their video is so cool it's just a really nice um thing there's a little poster that's like taped to the website if you click that there's a little little video i haven't seen it yeah it's it's really slick um so i i love it i think it's great i think it looks really nice and pastebot is it has the right

interface for a clipboard manager i feel like there's a lot of other clipboard managers out there which i will not name because i'm not the run shade at anyone in particular but they have a lot of ui and it's big and it's visual and it's like it's not what i want i want just a list of things most of the things i copy are text that's fine and a few things are images and i can tell from the thumbnail so i like the just like very small um interface pastebot is great super reliable works well and this new one is basically just updated to use kind of more tahoe style design

good news bad news i'll let you decide uh but it's nice and it animates smoothly and looks good and there's a couple features in here that are really cool um there's quick look so even though everything's small you can hit space bar when you have one focused and it'll show a bigger version of it with more info and i just wanted to say i genuinely think quick look is one of the top five features ever released for computers just hitting space bar and seeing a preview of it it's so good it's so so good i remember the first time i used a modern mac which i think was with

leopard and i found out about click quick look and i was like oh my god this is genius because I was a big Windows person before that. I mean, Leopard was when it was introduced. I mean, you go back to Windows after that, and it's like, oh, yeah, in the File Explorer, you have to go to a menu and toggle the preview pane, and then the preview is like a fixed size, and it's like, okay, do you want it there all the time or none of the time? And then it's really tiny, so you can't actually see what you're trying to preview, and you have to manually resize it.

It's a mess. It's a mess. A hundred percent. Quick look rocks. Guys, there's a video game on the website. Have you seen this? Where's the video game? There's a video game. I like video games. So on the website that you put in the show notes, scroll all the way to the bottom. There's an arcade. Oh, my God. Click on that. Oh, my God. And there's a whole ass pixel art video game. Wow. This podcast is turning into a Let's Play.

We're just going to... Okay. All right. You guys don't need me for the rest of this. that's crazy that's actually crazy there's a baseball video game right here maybe that was a secret that wasn't supposed to say no that's a little goody that's insane the website's the real star of the show yeah you guys don't need me right I'm good this is new game of the year there's a couple things one really cool thing

uh in pastebot are paste bins which are a thing where you can save things that you constantly need to paste so i have like links to all of my apps there because i often need to paste those and i'm i'm like going to app store connect which as chris has mentioned is not an easy place to navigate it's certainly not fast um so having those quick access is very nice uh you could do whatever you want and you have multiple of them and you can access them with keyboard shortcuts um keyboard shortcuts for everything customize it to whatever you'd like uh they have this cool stacks feature

where you can like uh queue up things to paste and then you can like paste them all one after the other uh which is very nice um they have filters so you can filter like you can take something and say like i want to paste this as plain text or i want to paste this as an html list and you can do just you can script whatever you want uh which means you can manipulate whatever text into whatever you want which in a previous world i would say is an absolute power user feature that no one will know how to use but in the world of ai i'm sure you can make claude do a crazy thing that just uh

manipulates the text to exactly what you want so that's pretty cool um it does iCloud sync so if you have i if you have a continuity setup on your devices so that what your copy or your clipboard syncs between your mac and iphone if you copy it on your iphone it'll show up in pay spot automatically which is rad um and yeah it's just uh it's just really nice uh it has gotten more expensive uh pay spot 2 was 10 bucks for life um which was not the best business model but was very

cheap in the grand scheme of things uh the new one is 39 bucks uh and you own it for life and you get a year of updates uh and then it looks like they're doing 19 a year to continue getting updates uh and if you buy it on the app store it's 25 bucks a year because they don't have any flexibility to do anything else they can't do their normal business model and we'll just leave it there but so that's cool and you should check it out and i i really like it um but i found this other

app uh this week as well which is called clop c l o p and clop is an image compression app and at first i was like i don't really did the horse browser make this app uh at first i had no interest in this because i was like i don't really i don't need like an app to compress my images really that's not really a thing I care about but it has this cool feature where it will

just run in the background and when it detects an image on your clipboard it will automatically compress it for you which is super nice for me because I often take screenshots which are pngs which are pretty big and I will just paste them into like a blog post or whatever that's going to go out and that can mean like three megabyte images and this one when this is running i just take a screenshot it copies to my clipboard and a second later clop is like here's one that's a

quarter of the size and it still looks great uh and it's just compressed a bit and it just automatically works it tosses the new one on your clipboard so it's just right there it's effectively transparent. There's a little UI that shows up in the bottom right of your screen that tells you it did its work. I'm not sure if you can turn that off, but like if you turned it off, you would just feel like you're magically getting smaller images when you copy them, which is cool. Because it just does it when you copy it?

It just does it when you copy it. Yeah. So I use clean shot for my screenshots, and you can configure that a billion different ways, but basically I have it so that when I take any screenshot, it immediately puts it on my clipboard. Right, yeah. Yeah. And so I just took a full screen screenshot of my Mac. It was 3.7 megabytes, and it compressed it down to 900 kilobytes. Oh, it works for video as well. Now I'm interested. I'm interested. An example they have on their website is convert to WebP automatically. Who wants to make a WebP?

that's what i want to get rid of that's my hobby that's that's what i do i literally just go online find images and make web peas out of them yeah that's my favorite thing this is uh i don't use hazel anymore in my mac but i used i used to use um i kind of trimmed down the things that it was useful enough for and i just stopped using it but the last thing that remained in there was an automation that looked at my downloads folder and if a new file was added with webp it would automatically convert it to uh i forget what it could convert it to but yeah i web p great for the

web awesome you know it's even horrible on your desktop jpeg xl i we we on the comfort zone podcast endorse jpeg xl yeah i actually agree with that 100 jpeg xl is great especially if you and and the iphone if you don't want to shoot raw but you want a good high quality jpeg jpeg xl is now is available, I think, as of a year ago? Yeah. In the camera app or something like that? I would love. I don't know.

These formats Apple keeps backing, they sound great and they are good, but they just never seem to get traction. Google Chrome recently added support for JPEG XL back in. So it's good. Oh, did they bring it back? Yeah. All right. Well. I'm seeing that Klopp can also optimize PDFs. That's good. I like this. I like this. Shortcut support. I think I'm going to use this for all of the use case, except for images. But it's great. It's great.

Like, I love to hear your use case. That's the one useless one. Yes. When I take screenshots or whatever, mostly what I'm doing is post them somewhere, and I want them to be crisp and beautiful and extremely heavy on people's bandwidth. Okay, you actually prefer that. Okay. Yeah. all right well that's a surprising take uh anyway clop is free to use the image stuff is totally free and then some of the pdf shortcut and video stuff is limited um it says five per session i

don't know what a session entails with clop but they have clop pro which is like 15 bucks or 15 euros which I don't know what that is what even is that give it to me in freedom units or don't give it to me at all wait I can I can currency convert it on my Newton using rates from 2000 yeah it is 15 euros specifically yeah it is why would I lie about that I don't know you're kind of untrustworthy sometimes you know being a big business boy

Why Tynistat is five euros? Parchment is five dollars. Five freedom units. Five Farenights? What does that mean? I'm not seeing euros on the list of currencies. I'm seeing countries so I can see. Was euros even a thing when the news arrived? Oh, no. It rolled out in 2002. Yeah. We were still using francs. Okay. Let's see. 15 francs. Why? That's only $2.90. cents. Oh, what a steal. I'm sure that conversion works out today.

Yeah, it's 5.18 per dollar, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we can all agree. For sure. Anyway, that's it. Pacebot 3 and Klopp. A great pairing. If I do say so myself. I like these. I've added both of these to my list to check out. Those guys who make Klopp, the low-tech guys, they're called. They make some great other apps as well that are already used at some point. Lunar is one. It is a tiny utility installed on your Mac to synchronize the brightness levels

across your displays or whatever. This is great. It can do it with using the position of the sun at your location. Very fancy. They also do another app that I use at some point called R-Command, R-CMD. And that's kind of a launcher using the right command key. You should check it out. It's very special. Some people love it. That right command key doesn't get much love. I don't know who uses it. I use it constantly.

You're going to need this app of theirs called Music Decoy. Stop launching the music app whenever you press the play key. That's actually a great app. That's super good. But you know Supercharge already does this. as always supercharged would like to sponsor this podcast we'd love to we do it for free anyway so they don't want to sponsor that's like there's a few apps that I used for I've used and stuff like that and services that sponsor a lot of my YouTube friends

but they never get in contact with me and I was thinking about it a while ago I was like why don't they ever want to sponsor me And it's like, oh, yeah, I give him free advertisement already. All right. Let's stop talking about Supercharge now. Okay. Then you give us money. We refuse to talk about you until you give us money. The app we shall not name. All right. Should we get to the challenge? Yes. The challenge was. It was your challenge. Yes. The challenge was. And we invited Griffin to take part. Did you take part? I did. Eventually. Amazing. Amazing.

So the challenge was 3D print something that will push me, Nilean, over the edge and make her order a 3D printer. So one of you may win. None of you may win. All of you may win. We'll see. I thought I would be at a disadvantage because I don't own a 3D printer. So I was searching my house for 3D printed objects. The best I could come up with was a 3D printed mock-up of the folding iPhone, which, as we know, is not going to be particularly effective at convincing you around to buy a 3D printer.

But this is much cheaper to get the iPhone experience than we'll have this fall. But it does reinforce feelings of tech elitism. So maybe not. That was not the challenge. You know, and we've all seen like these little 3D printed like toys you can get at like conventions or things or cons or like that. You know, you 3D print them and it's like a little, you know, dinosaur thing and it's got like snake like parts. But I was in the in the shops earlier this week. I tried uploading this image to Notion, but it wouldn't let me.

So I'm just going to text it to Neil Leon. Okay. I saw these little fidget toys and we've also all seen these like little like mechanical keyboard single clicky things. That's like a single key from a mechanical keyboard and you click them. Well, people have been taking the mechanism out of those and 3D printing like fun buttons out of them. Maybe if you want to share that with everybody else. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. There's like a pie where you click the cherry and whipped cream on top. There's a little cloud.

That's like a little cloud button with a little smiley face. An ice cream cone where you click the ice cream on top. A little cactus plant. And those are 3D prints? They're 3D prints. They look great. That are designed to fit around like a mechanical keyboard switch. So they click like a mechanical keyboard, except they're fun and cutesy. Like this. I've got a few of these right here that I just fidget with. And I use them for top-down product photography and stuff like that. they're fun to play with. I made a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme one. You could do a little bin of strawberries instead.

So that's what I've got. Okay, okay, okay. Okay, I will reserve the judgment for the end. Okay, Matt. Okay. Well, I found something that I thought really would speak to Neil, Leon. We've done over 100 episodes. I feel like I have a decent idea, although you always surprise me. And so I know you don't like... It's going to sound bad. You don't like organization, but... You wouldn't like...

We talked about it last week. You probably wouldn't like the grid affinity system. You'd be like, ah, that's too much. But I have brought an organization system with me anyway, which is called the Warby system. And if you click to expand, this is kind of a... It is a grid system, but you print out these like plates and then there's all sorts of... This is just a screenshot of one. I should have put a link to it in there. But this is just like one example of like a... This one's supposed to go over an electrical box.

But there's like smaller ones, there's bigger ones, and you basically can print out each individual tile in whatever size with whatever hook or pocket or like little there's like a headphone holder in one of them key holders uh those sorts of things and you do them in different colors and they look like this modern art uh sort of uh sort of thing and you can make it your own so i thought this would be pretty cool i did a big one here but like it seems like most people do like just a square that you just like put on your wall and it's like the size of uh

kind of like the like it's like four small squares wide and tall yeah okay this is interesting it looks like the um that famous artwork i don't know what it's called um not jackson pollock um i think it's called squares it's gonna bother me is it uh yeah No, it's absolutely not. Okay. Okay. Putting it around the electrical box is a choice. It is a choice. I wouldn't necessarily do that myself, but...

Yeah. Yeah. You could put it everywhere. It's a nice way to hide it if you got an ugly electrical box. I guess so. Like, ours is in a closet. Like, I don't have to worry about like that. Yeah. Like, at my old place, it was just like in the hallway. Yeah, let me leave my keys and sunglasses in the laundry room in the basement. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Or like, I don't know, if you have like a mural of Elon Musk and you want to cover it most of the time, but you want to be able to see it, then this would work for that, for example. Hmm. Interesting. And it's called the Warby. Is that an acronym? Warby? I don't think so.

Maybe the artwork is called Warby. Oh. I'll look into it. Oh, here it is. Wall Organizer with Red, Blue, and Yellow. Oh, I see. Warby. On Maker World. Okay. Okay. Interesting. This, you know, you're right that I don't gravitate towards organizing things. At least IRL. Like, I'm very specific about organizing things on my computers. But anyway, this scratches the same itch that the IKEA, what's that called? The Kallax? No. The pegboard thing?

The pegboards. The IKEA pegboards. Which I'm looking at right now. Yorbi? Yeah, I have one as well. Yeah. Anyway, this scratch is the same edge. Like, I really like those things like this that lets you display in an aesthetic way. Bunch of stuff on your wall. Yeah. You can put a plant on there. Okay, okay, okay. Chris. So, you know, I really thought a lot about this challenge this week. In fact, it was the only thing I did.

The only thing I did this week was think about this challenge. I put on my Neelion hat. You know, I wore some yellow clothes, some orange pants. Really just like kind of I played with Danielle's cat. Really got in my Neelion headspace. And I was like, what does Neelion's life look like right now? And I was like, you know, she's not going to want an organization system. I'm not going to be like Matt Burch. I'm bringing an organization system. I was like, but you know what I know about Neelyan? Is Neelyan just moved into a new house. New for her, but it is an older house. And she needs to organize all her stuff.

Well, I know that there's going to be a lot of things that probably need fixing or a lot of things she just needs around the house that scratches those like, you know, I could just order this from Amazon or Ikea for 20, 30 bucks. But instead of like ordering, you know, a bunch of things for 20, 30 bucks, she could just buy a 3D printer and make this stuff herself. So I brought more of an idea, a concept. Oh, my God. So I brought right here a 3D printed doorstop. But it's not just a doorstop. Okay. It's the idea of being able to print things to fix around your house.

So, like, the door to my office doesn't stay open all the time, and I need to fix it. I could fix it myself, but I just don't take the 15 minutes to fix it. So I printed a doorstop. So when I need it open, I just put it under there. Door stays open. I have hangers in my closet for hanging backpacks up. I 3D printed a little dinosaur here, and I just dropped it. But I've 3D printed all sorts of different things to just fix little things around the house that have been really helpful.

And I think that's where Neelion would really benefit from a 3D printer. I think you could really use a 3D printer to just fix little things here and there that just seem like a little object. Huh. Chris, you're cheating. But besides that, you are actually right. The experience of getting a 3D printer, as far as I can tell, is the first few weeks you are like, I want to be constantly printing. I wish I had five of these to not slow me down. And then you kind of run out of things. And then it just sits there a lot of the time.

But every once in a while, you're like, this is a stupid, annoying little thing. And you can just print it. And in like an hour, you have the thing sorted. No shipping, no waiting, no shopping, no money spent. It's just there. And that is very nice. So exactly. So the other day, my brother texts me. He's like, hey, can you print this thing? He's diabetic. He travels a lot. He needs a case to put insulin and like the stuff that he is, his diabetes stuff in. I just 3D printed that for him. It was no big deal.

Like when you just have these little things that pop up here and there, and you're just like, I could probably 3D print something. And nine times out of 10, somebody's already made a model and put it online for free for you just to literally hit the print button. Like you don't have to do too much to do it. There's every once in a while, I've made things bigger. I've made things smaller. I 3D printed Danielle a business card holder because she's an optometrist. That's a glasses case. it's glasses but a business card holder and it was way too big so i shrunk it down uh to like 70

and it was perfect i 3d printed a bunch of them she gave them out to her colleagues too so like it's like these little things here and there that's where i think neilion would love a 3d printer okay so what did you bring again a doorstop okay thank you at one of my former jobs uh we were it was it was in like a shop setting like an automotive like sort of manufacturing sort of setting. And one person got, and like, so we, we bought like an early 3d printer. This was like 10, 12 years ago or so. One person like bought a 3d printer and he was really excited.

Like, Oh yeah, we're going to, we're going to use this to like make tool shelves and all kinds of things. And he spent like, and like my boss was really skeptical, but he's like, okay, sure, whatever. Try it out. He spent all day like designing a tool shelf that like would, uh, you know, he could like hang hammers and like tools and stuff like that on. He spent all day like printing one out. And then my boss took one look at it, got a hammer and then just like put it down forcefully and just like snapped it into like 10 different tiny little pieces. I will say it's come a long way. I know there are like different plastics and everything,

but like my impression of 3D printing has never advanced beyond that. So I've done something similar. I have a place where some of my tools hang up. I also have a drawer system put my tools in, but I have a place where my hammer hangs and it's fine. 3D printing has come a long way in a very short amount of time. It's very durable now. Especially if you get the right filament. Yeah, there's quite a few materials out there too. If you get the bamboo ones, they are truly so simple to use. It's not as complicated as it used to be.

Matt and I both have the bamboo. I have the A1, you have the A1 Mini. For a while, I thought I was going to upgrade, but I'm pretty happy. I'm just going to stay where I'm at for now until this thing breaks. I printed everything. I thought about it for a second. I was like, you know, you can just print full Iron Man armor if you want. But I was like, ah, Neil Leon probably wouldn't go for the idea of dressing up like a billionaire and beating up people. You know, taking justice. You do this every day. Oh, you dress up as a billionaire? Do you dress up like Elon Musk?

Yeah. You know what else I've 3D printed that Neil would like? I've 3D printed headphone stands. There you go. Why'd you bring a doorstop? He officially brought a doorstop on the record. That's what he brought. This doesn't count. There you go. Headphone stand right here. Headphone stand. You know what else I've 3D printed? I'm talking just to bring out a headphone stand. I 3D printed an ergonomic magic trackpad stand.

So that way it tilts a little bit to the side. And you can just, you know, it's a little more ergonomic and nicer to use. It's this little stuff right here that makes 3D printing worth it. So I have a twist to this challenge. She's already bought it. No. I bought something off of Etsy. okay here's the link to what i bought this is and you remember how i reviewed ikea buttons

a while ago those things where's the camera those things um they are great except um these like and you know why they are great because they are thread and so far they've been the most reliable like HomeKit compatible buttons I've ever had. They just work. They're extremely annoying to set up. Like this is where most of the technical pain comes in is when you have to set them up

and they have a bad reputation already because of this. But once they are set up, they just work. They never stop working. It's great. And they take AAA batteries, which means they don't expire. You just replace the batteries. But the issue is those were clearly designed for people who rent their homes and don't want to drill holes. Because on the back, there's nothing. And they just give you a metal plate like this that slots in and that's magnetized.

So that you stick the metal plate on the wall and you can just put the button on the wall. But this is annoying. Ours, they keep falling. I think it's because of the temperature changes it's just like something with the adhesive they just keep falling off the wall all the time so I found these on Etsy somebody 3D prints wall mounts specifically for these buttons this is great so is this the secret answer

that you're hoping one of us would bring to you no they are 15 euros a piece and we need about 10 of them. For me to be satisfied, I wouldn't need 10 of them. But that's getting very expensive. Yeah, at that price, you could just buy a 3D printer. Exactly. The twist is I'm already convinced you didn't have to do anything. I would offer just to print them for you and ship them to you, but I think the shipping would probably cost you

about half the price of a 3D printer. yeah but thank you for your contributions i think okay i will still like judge a little bit i think my two favorite ones are the fidget things i always love me some fidget toys i i think i would need more of them in my life and being able to print them is just it's just my dream honestly and the second one is obviously the doorstop. Why would I not want a doorstop? Neil, let me ask.

Do you have to have a door in your house that doesn't stay open all the way? Yes, I have a million of those metal weights that serve as doorstop behind some of my doors. My very door right here just will stay open if I don't have a doorstop. Can I give you a bonus to the doorstop, Daniel? else cat loves to play with this thing. Eh, that's not... Okay. Maybe your cat might like playing with it. Nah, I don't want that. Well, not when it's like holding the door open, when it's just kind of off to the side. That's when she plays with it. You can probably find like bespoke

3D printable cat toys. Oh, yeah. No, there's a ton of... Oh, what I almost brought to the show was there is a 3D printable Batman helmet for cats. I'm not sure I want to risk my cat's life for this. That's not risky. I mean, your cat's going to hate it. I mean, I don't know what cat would like having that on their head. That's the only reason why I haven't printed it for Danielle's cat is because I know there's no way I'd be able to get it on her. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, boys. This is great.

I think I will keep you up to date. This is not a now purchase. This is a soon purchase. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. I like this. All right. Well, it's time for the new challenge. And for the first time ever, we have an outside party offering a challenge. Griffin, what do you got for us? I think John submitted a challenge once. Did John submit a challenge once? I think so. Oh, I forgot about that. I guess I'm not a special boy after all. Sorry. You're up there with John Voorhees.

So we've all got our read later pile, whether it's Safari reading list, NetNewsWire. Let me check really quick. I'm really behind on my YouTube. Stickies. I have 380 unwatched videos in NetNewsWire via RSS feeds. Readwise, GoodLinks, Keep, Folio, Reader, the classic strategy of just keeping a bunch of tabs open in a window that you don't close. I always have the thought that like all of these special like read it later apps.

I mean, you can install those, but it's just like the equivalent of having an additional cabinet installed in your kitchen to have extra junk drawers. You know, hundreds of items. I disagree. But so my challenge to you is over the next week, clear out as much of your read later list as you can. Can any of you hit zero? The mythical, can you be all caught up? I don't think so. My favorite part about this challenge is that I won't be accountable to do it myself. I can just inflict that on everybody else

and things will just keep building up for me. My favorite part of this is one of us makes a read it later app and probably can't clear out everything for development purposes. I totally could clear everything out because my app is optimized for doing that. That's easy for me. Maybe I'll convince you to download it. So I have some good news. I signed up for a read later app yesterday and have exactly two items in there right now. I think I have a good head start. The job is clear. Yeah. Hit E twice and they're gone. That's it. E twice?

Let me do that. Oh, my God. That's all you got to do? I actually didn't know that. Oh, the animation is pretty nice when it says you all caught up. Hey, Matt, when's the tags coming to the left side panel for the Mac app? The iPad app? The Mac app. What Mac app? I'm looking at a Mac app. No, you're not. For quick reads. Yes, I am. It's literally in my dock. Nope. You're lying. Oh, is it an iPad app that's just allowed on the Mac? You're running the iPad app in whatever the mode is. Compatibility mode? Use the web. My God. No, I don't want you.

Give me a native app or give me death. I swear to God, I will go back to raindrop.io. And that's how he died. No. Matt, I'm trying to make you a billion dollars. Okay, out of all of us, who here has had the number one productivity app on the App Store and the number four app overall? I'm just saying. I'm trying to make you guys billionaires. If there's no Mac app, I'm not downloading it. Oh, my God. The web is better than any Mac app. See, there you go. Go to Safari, right-click, and say save to desktop.

Chris, are you really using... I'm looking at the screenshots right now. This looks like a great iPad app. Are you using this on your Mac? I am using it on the Mac. Are you doing this to yourself? Because I want a native app. I want an app. I want an app for my reader later. I don't want to have to go to a web page. I'm not a monster. No, it's just a web app. I want a real native Mac app The buttons You're missing out on the buttons He can bring the buttons to the Mac app It's much harder to do the buttons He's a big business boy

Have you ever dealt with SwiftUI? Yes I have I've actually spent my week pulling my hair out Trying to figure out a SwiftUI bug That's why I'm wearing a hat right now Because CSS is wonderful Why do you think I'm wearing a hat? I don't have any hair left Anyway, this challenge is doing great. This is going to go great. This is going to go fantastic. Okay. Thank you so much, Griffin, for this challenge. I'm excited to dive into this one. But that brings us to the end of the show. And, you know, before we get to the end of the show, a question, because I don't want to forget.

Griffin, do you have anything you would like to promote, send people a certain way? I've got a website with a blog called Extraordinary. You can find it at dgriffinjones.com, RSS, Mastodon, and a new email newsletter option. Because I realized recently that there are people who don't have an RSS client and can't figure out how to sign up for Mastodon. So you can just sign up there. It's extremely simple. It's sort of like a roll-your-own email newsletter service. You just add your name into a Google Doc, and I'll just email you new articles that I write. Oh, wow. Okay. Nice.

Nice, nice, nice. All right. Well, this brings us to the end of the show question then. And we got a question from Bradley in the feedback form. I've just brought a Nintendo Switch 2, or rather I bought my wife one for her birthday, so I can play it. Nice, nice. Totally get it. What games are you currently playing on your Switch 2? Timely, because we just did a Cozy Zone episode on this, and we talked about a couple of Switch 2 games, but I figure we might all have some recommendations. Griffin, would you like to go first? First off, do you have a Switch 2? Do you have some recommendations for Bradley?

I do have a Switch, too. And my favorite game that I've played over the last year is called Amori, O-M-O-R-I. It's on the Nintendo Switch store. It's also on PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam for PC and Mac. It's only $30. I would describe it as a, I mean, that's how they describe it as well. It's like a cutesy little RPG, that's how it hooks you in, slash psychological horror game. It takes a while for that shoe to drop, you know, but it's got some weird vibes to it.

I wrote a spoiler-free review on my website if you're curious. I suggest just going in as blind as you can, but it stays with you. I finished playing it like six months ago. I'm still thinking about it. The soundtrack is all I've been listening to the entire year so far. My Apple Music replay is going to be so messed up. Nice. It's a lot of fun. I really love it. okay Neilian what do you got okay I I'm not playing on the Switch 2 these days but so I have two things that come to mind

the last two things I played is Mario Kart World we played last night actually and before that I played a bit of Power Wars Simulator simulator did you play the Star Wars update? No, no, no. That was a while ago. And I was, I remember being disappointed that Power Simulator on the Switch did not support the mouse mode with the Joy-Cons, which you would think would be a great fit for Power Simulator on the Switch, right? It can do the mouse, and you want to be able to aim stuff? Anyway.

I would play it again, but on PC. Matt what about you I have been playing Xenoblade Chronicles which is a huge RPG that I was hoping to finish by the day this episode comes out the Switch 2 edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is out and I was hoping to be done by then but I'm not gonna be anywhere close They're huge games.

I'm looking at Xenoblade Chronicles on how long to beat. Main story, 56 hours. Completionist, 142. Oh, but don't worry. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is 62 hours and 255 to complete everything. Oh, my gosh. Damn. This is going to be my next year, I think. Oof. Dang, that's rough. Okay, so for me, I've been playing the Star Fox 64 remake, which is pretty great. I've been really, really happy with that. I have in my queue to play next the Adventures of Elliot.

But the Switch 2 game I want to recommend is Donkey Kong Bonanza. I think that is the Switch 2 game. That, I think, was my game of the year last year. So much fun. I was running around the house knowing Danielle yelling, oh, banana. And if you play the game, you get it. It's so much fun. It is a great game. And it's not crazy long like Matt's Xenoblade game. It's actually manageable as an adult. So that's my recommendation.

All right. That brings us to the end of the show. If you have an end of the show question for us, please submit it in the feedback form. Ask whatever you want. Ask, you know, what my favorite flavor of Mustang is. You know, what the best Mustang is, if you want to know. Thank you so much to Max Stories for having us. We are a Max Stories podcast. Be sure to go check out all the other writings and podcasts and stuff on the website. Thank you, Griffin, for joining us and showing off the Newton. That was a lot of fun. And thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Griffin's about to hit the corner. Oh!