What Even is Orange?

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your host, well, outside of their comfort zone. This episode is sponsored by Ina Reader. I'm Christopher Lawley, and every week I am joined by two incredible and lovely co-hosts. As always, joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Oh, Chris, it's been a week, but I am feeling resilient. Okay, I like it. I like it. I appreciate it. And we are also joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing?

Hello. I am high on my COVID booster shot that I got this morning. So it's all right. Niléane is going to be bringing a different kind of energy to the show this week. I also got a flu shot. So maybe that's going to kick in at some point as well. I don't know about you, but whenever I get those, I'm always incredibly sick the next day. So I always have to just make sure I don't have anything planned because I'm diabetic, compromised immune system.

It's just going to take me down for a day. So I always have to make sure the next day is open. So I'm hoping you have a much better reaction than I do to those. Yeah, we'll see. But yeah, people should do those shots if you can. Those are still out there. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. All right, Niléane, you put something in the follow-up section in our document. What do you got for us? Yeah. So was it last week or the week before we talked about how we abandoned Fantastical?

Yes. All of us. Yes. And went back to the calendar app, in my case anyway. And at that point, I mentioned that I was struggling with how to use the calendar from my menu bar on the Mac because I really loved Fantastical's menu bar applet, I guess. But now it's gone. So I had to find something else.

And I've been poking around. Like I mentioned, Dato is fine, but I find it a bit clunky. something else that I tried was Itzical which is quite old but it's still around and still works fine but it's a bit too basic and I wanted specifically something that would show me my up next event right in the menu bar like written in the menu bar directly so I don't have to click on anything to see what's coming up next on my calendar and i found out about a newish menu bar

app that's called calendar uh so without a voil before the the last r calendar um and it's pretty good uh you can customize it uh customize the appearance so it has a has a bunch of settings and it has this feature where it can show you your next event directly in the menu bar and that's pretty nice and it looks it looks good it looks nice i see literally yesterday they pushed a

update with french translation oh they did okay i don't use any of my devices in french anymore but that's good well it's there yeah so yeah i have a question for the two of you because you're mac people and and i have not used this feature at all but why not just use the calendar widget on the desktop of your mac i know that's a very good question um i was about to mention so the the calendar widgets and we talked about this they are very good uh on the mac you either have to put them

on your desktop okay uh where i i don't find i don't find that practical because it's always hidden by windows and you have to fling your windows around to see your widgets on the desktop or you can put them in notification center and i didn't like this but actually that's what i've been doing actually so i have a combination of calendar in the menu bar to show me what's coming up next and if i want just to look glance at my um at my calendar for the day i just swipe over notification center and

I can see the widget there. And that works pretty well. I think it's a good combination. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. One thing that I think Mac and iPad users can agree on is Apple has a bunch of wasted space when it comes to their notification center. Like on the iPad, I swipe down to get to my notification center and there's this strip in the center of notifications, but there's so much extra wasted space in there that I'm like, combine it with control center or something like that. but I don't know.

I think this could be a much better layout, but I'm glad you found an app that works for you. Yeah, and it works. It works. And I've got a second item that will make Matt happy. I saw this, and I didn't click on it because I was very curious what this is, but I wanted to save it for the show. A few weeks back, Matt enraged you, Chris, because he told us that he was using a T-shirt to wrap his Vision Pro when he was traveling. And he didn't want to buy your thing that you suggested, which was a Waterfield case.

Yes. Which is more compact than the Apple one. Well, yesterday, I think, Belkin introduced their own compact case. And it seems to be a lot cheaper than the Waterfield one. So I thought, hey, Matt will be happy about this. Not a lot cheaper. It's about $60 cheaper. So the Belkin one looks like it's $100. The Waterfield one is $160. But it does look very nice. It looks a lot more compact than the Apple one, but not as compact as the Waterfield one because the Waterfield one,

you have to take off the head strap. You take it apart so you get this nice little cube. But this is really cool. Matt, are you going to get one? I think you know the answer. Because we know you take your vision prayer everywhere with you. You don't leave home without it, right? So there's two reasons why I will not be getting this. Reason number one is that it's more than $5, which is the cost of my current carrying case. And two, I traveled last month.

I'm going to travel in a couple weeks again. I just don't really bring the vision pro with me anymore outside the house. So it's an irrelevant thing. Sadly. Sad. Sad. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But this is cool for those that want it. It's there. Yeah. Nice. And it's sold at Apple stores. So if you're just at an Apple store, you can just pick it up. So that's nice. Nice. Oh, they also are selling Belkin also now has the strap. A lot of the very first people that got demos of Vision Pro before was actually out.

Belkin made a version of it where you use the solo knit band as the back piece. but now they have a separate top piece that works alongside the solo knit band. And it looks like a much more elegant solution than the solo top strap thing that a lot of us bought where you're using two solo bands because that was... Solo band itself is a hundred bucks, which is ridiculous. But yeah, that's there for you, the five Vision Pro users we have listening to this show.

Last piece of follow-up, I was on App Stories. It's not while we're recording. It's not out. But by the time this episode comes out, that episode will already be out. Timelines. Whatever. And in this episode, I had to defend myself. You know, Neelian started this whole series of Mac Stories people being on App Stories. And she slandered me. And then Jonathan went on and kind of, you know, he tried the Dr. Pepper with cream soda, but he didn't quite understand the power.

So I went on there. I defended Dr. Pepper. I went on and defended a little bit of my Mustang habits. And I also gave the backstory as to why I don't like Daft Punk. There is an actual legitimate reason behind it, but you're going to have to go listen to our stories to find out. Sure. Did you talk about tech at all? Or was it just the roast of Christopher Lawley? Well, it was Federico and I, so I think we briefly mentioned the iPad. We actually talked about Stage Manager and some improvements that could be made to it.

We also talked about my iPad usage and the apps I use and kind of my workflow and stuff like that as well. It's a packed episode. App Stories is becoming Chris Stories. Honestly, yeah. I was telling John and Federico that if I knew this is what was going to happen, I would have shipped everyone on the MacStories team a can of Dr. Pepper, Zero Sugar with cream soda just for them to try it on air. But I did make a promise to the listeners that next WWDC, whoever's there, whether it's John, Federico, both of them,

whoever else on the MacStories team, I'm going to hunt you all down. I'm going to make you try the Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar with cream soda on camera, filming it, and we'll put together a little video for the MacStories YouTube channel. Or maybe just for, like, the club. It doesn't make sense as a public video, but it might make sense as something, like, just as a MacStories post or something like that. I don't know. I'll talk to John and Federico about that. I kind of volunteered them for that. Amazing content. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got to get all that hot content out.

But anyways, we have some stuff to talk about. Neil, you're first up in the show document. What do you got for us this week? Yeah, I've got a brand new app that's coming out this week. It should be out by the time you're listening to this. It's the second version of a content blocker that's called Wiper. It's been around for a while. It's a content blocker for Safari on iOS and iPadOS and macOS.

It's a pretty basic one. Basically, the idea is you set it up and you forget about it. And you just use Safari's built-in controls to disable it temporarily on webpages or permanently on some websites as you want. And that's it. And I want to shout it out because so this new version has improved lists, block lists that are up to date.

And it can support a lot more block lists at once. It ships with many more at once. And yeah, it's very good. And the pricing is very decent. I believe it's five euros or something. So I don't know what's the price in dollars. The pre-order option, it says $5 on the American App Store. So it's about the same, yeah. And yeah, it's replaced something else that I've been using, which was OneBlocker.

I've been using OneBlocker for years. The problem with OneBlocker is it does a bit too much. It's very customizable. You can set your own rules and you can go pretty deep into it to customize it. So, yeah, I recommend Wiper. And unlike OneBlocker, it's not a subscription. You can just buy it and you've got it. And you can set up a recurring tip for the developer.

The developer is Kylie Calderola. Am I pronouncing that right? Yeah, Kylie Calderola. Yeah, they're pretty good. That's a pretty good app. Yeah, that's it. Just quick recommendations coming out this week. Nice. I like this. Matt, do you use a content blocker regularly? That's a good question. I had to double check now to see if I did.

And I do have one blocker installed on my iPad. And I do tend to use it to block. ads and nags and cookie pop-ups and all those things. I do sometimes have issues where, like, if you block the cookie pop-up, you can't, like, interact with the rest of the site, like my grocery stores app. Like, I kept thinking, or the website, I kept thinking it was broken, and then I turned off content blockers and was like, just please accept the cookies. And then once I did, everything worked. So I do run into issues occasionally, but...

For what it's worth, that issue I've had a lot with one blocker, and it's not shown up as much with Wiper. Oh, okay. So I think maybe the rules are a little better at this. Gotcha. Yeah, it's only $5 too, which is a good deal. Apparently, I'm on the Legacy One Blocker $5 a year plan, which is basically nothing, so that's good. But yeah, this is definitely worth a shot. So I'll be checking this out. Yeah, I'll check it out. I have very mixed feelings about ad blockers as somebody that makes their living, you know, is able to pay their bills

because of ads and stuff like that. But then there are certain websites that take it way too far. And if you're like on an iPhone, you can see two or three lines of text and everything else is ad blockers. So I've gone through different phases where like I will go through and I will put all the websites that I regularly visit and I like and read all the time. I make sure they are on the allowed list. So I still see ads for them and they're still getting paid. But, you know, certain sites that are just way too aggressive that make it nearly impossible to read an article or something on an iPhone, those will get blocked and stuff like that.

So I try and give everyone a shot at like, OK, hey, you know, don't be too terrible about this and I'll leave it. But, you know, then sometimes, you know, they just get blocked. But then there are things like the pop-up blockers and the cookie blockers and things like that. Those things I definitely enable that because, you know, I don't need the cookie notification every time I open your website. Like, I don't really want that. So, yeah, I like this.

This is a good one. I will definitely check it out when it's officially out. Yeah, it should be out by the time you're listening to this. Today's episode of Comfort Zone is sponsored by InnoReader, an awesome service that lets you follow your favorite websites and content creators in your own personalized space. If I'm being totally honest, I was actually really excited when InnoReader reached out because I've been using them for years, close to a decade at this point, and they're just an essential part of how I personally keep up to date with all the things I care about online. I use them to follow a bunch of blogs and news sites that I really love.

I follow some YouTubers on there, and I have a few newsletters delivering straight to InnoReader so I can read in their delightful reading experience rather than in my email app. And that's truly just scratching the surface of what you can follow with InnoReader. You can follow Reddit accounts, Telegram, Facebook stuff. If there are specific topics from around the web in general that you're interested in keeping up with, InnoReader can help you. I also really love InnoReader's rules and filters, which give me just much control, more control than I think I've seen anywhere else on how I curate the feeds I'm following exactly to my own liking. So for example, if there's a topic that you never care about or

that you never want to see, even if the sites you're following talk about them, you're easily able to filter those out and you'll never be bothered by them again. On the opposite end, if there's something you really want to know about immediately, as soon as it happens, you can set up push notifications in their mobile apps, email notifications, or whatever works for you. You can know about that immediately. InnerReader also recently pushed out a major redesign to their website, and I genuinely think it's great. I'm a big fan of RSS readers myself, and InnerReader works great with basically every single one you've ever heard of, but if you want to use their native apps or their web interface, you're not getting a second-class

experience. You're getting something that's really fantastic and clearly made by people who care about the experience they're delivering. And finally, near and dear to my heart is text-to-speech, and inner reader has this built in so if it's more convenient for you to listen to an article right now than to read it just hit the button and you're listening right away if you want to check out inner reader yourself go to inner reader.com that's i n o r e a d e r.com there's a link in the show notes as well and we think you're going to love it i know i personally do i also have a uh app uh as well an app update for you that at the time of recording is not out yet but uh will be out

by the time this episode is out. In fact, we will probably be the first Apple podcast, like Apple-related podcast, to cover it, just because of when all the embargo stuff drops and when this episode comes out. So that's kind of exciting. But yeah, this week I have Final Cut 2.1, the new version of Final Cut Camera, and Final Cut Pro 11 to talk about. Whoa. Yes, they are all getting a big update.

And Final Cut Pro 10 is going to 11. It goes up to 11 now. That's a reference for you. So obviously the one that I've spent the most amount of time with is Final Cut Pro for the iPad. And this is version 2.1 now. And this is probably the update that I've been the most excited about since the release of Final Cut. Because a lot of the previous updates have been focused on capture. uh like capturing voiceover stuff that was a big part of the first update um like stabilization to the built-in camera feature in final cut pro for the ipad a lot a lot of stuff focused on the

capture then there was multi-cam stuff then they brought final cut uh camera out and you could do live multi-cam stuff recording but this one is focused around editing i'm very excited about what i'm seeing in these that what you're going to talk about because i'm a final cut user on the mac I was hoping it would come to the iPad for a long time and they finally did and it's not an app for me and the reason is mostly because it seems like they're solving for like you said the like the filming side of it and like yeah it's very they're like things they've done are very iPad specific

and iPad are specific to use cases that I just don't have and so I've been waiting for it to get more generally usable in the ways that i use the the app on uh on my mac so i'm very excited to see them moving away at least for this update from uh a lot of those now you can use five iphones at a time to film something i'm like that's great but i'll never yeah but yeah that like that those updates were like okay that's cool but i don't care because i don't i don't use that stuff i i I wanted Final Cut Pro on the iPad,

so I had an editing app, not a capturing app. Yes. So I have a list of everything that's new here, and we can kind of go through it. Sorry, Chris, that list is long. It is. It is a very long list. There is a lot of features in here, especially for a.1 update for the iPad version. There's a lot of stuff in here that I'm really excited about. And the very first thing that I'm, like right off the bat, the thing I'm the most excited about is there is now the auto color correct button

is on the iPad. This is a feature that got added to the Mac a couple of releases ago, I believe. It's very good. And basically what this does is it looks at SDR footage, HDR footage, raw footage, log footage, whatever. You just click that button and it will auto color grade it for you automatically. And this is built on a bunch of different machine learning models and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It works pretty well. I tested it on a bunch of different footage. I tested it on some iPhone footage, my Canon R5, outdoor, indoor, I tested on a bunch of stuff. And I would say for the most part, it gets you 90% of the way there.

For example, like my talking headshots that you see in all my videos where I'm sitting at this desk right here if you're watching the video version um it got it to the point where it was basically perfectly color graded the only thing i needed to do was bump up the contrast because it was a little washed out a bit uh for like my personal taste so i just bumped up the contrast a little bit and it was there it it just worked so if you're somebody that doesn't like color grading or like you're doing you have a bunch of different clips from a bunch of different things this can really be this could be really nice for you i can see this being really helpful for like um that

interview style wwdc video i did a couple of years ago uh that would have been really nice for that kind of thing but uh yeah this this is a really interesting feature i'm excited about that yeah i i use this all the time on the mac uh version of it it is wonderful and just like you said it doesn't it almost never gets me perfectly there but it's usually just a minor tweak to one or two of the usable um i used to shoot in log and now i just shoot in non-log whatever that is and every once

in a while it i just the raw footage is just really not pleasant and this gets me so close you didn't notice chris you didn't notice so it's working but uh yeah this uh this feature is great i i don't like the way you're looking at me i don't know why it's so bad but i love chris's face I don't think I can continue this podcast. This will be the last episode I'm a part of. Use log footage, Matt. Can you do more dynamic range?

No log in 30 FPS. On to the challenge then. Okay. Okay. All righty then. I'm just going to move right along. I just can't even with you, Matt. I can't even. Can't even. One of my favorite features about Final Cut Pro for the iPad is the live drawing features. And I've been using this a little bit more. I'm somebody that's not exactly the most artistic person, so it takes me forever when I do use this feature to draw something just right.

But basically what this is, is you can use the Apple Pencil to draw on top of your video, so that way it animates in automatically. This is something I used to do in After Effects when I was in film school, and it would take a couple of days to get right. And now you can do it in 30 seconds. So with this update, they've added a couple of new brushes. There is the watercolor brush, the crown brush, fountain pen, and monoline inks. And these will just kind of... I'm actually genuinely really excited about all these.

Maybe not the crown one so much, but crayon, crayon. I always have a hard time saying that word for some reason. Oh, do you want to learn? Sure. Crayon. Crayon, whatever. I don't know. I can't say it. I don't care. Sounds better with a French accent. Yeah, right. But the watercolor ones, when I saw the demo of this, they did some really cool things where they had footage of a rally car, and what they did is they used the watercolor brush, I believe,

to kind of highlight the dirt blowing out from the back of the rally car. It was really cool. It was really interesting the way they did it. and I thought that was pretty impressive. So I think this is an interesting feature just in Final Cut Pro for the iPad. I know a couple of creators that literally, they edit on the Mac, but they will take clips and put it in Final Cut Pro for the iPad just to use this feature, export them out, and then move it over to Final Cut Pro for the iPad. Or maybe they just move their project over.

I'm not entirely sure. But yeah. Then there's a couple of new effects. There's a picture-in-picture style effect, so you can have, like, two clips on screen at the same time, and you don't have to manually go in and deal with scaling and position and all that stuff. The effect will handle it for you. There's this call-out effect that highlights certain things. New built-in color grades, and new built-in music tracks, which I actually mentioned this on the last episode. but the music tracks in Final Cut Pro for the iPad are like the most underrated feature a part of this what's really cool about every single music track that is in Final Cut Pro for the iPad that's

that's built into the app say it's two minutes and 30 seconds long but you have a three minute clip or four minute clip you can just drag that music clip and it'll recompile that music to be four minutes long and you will never be able to hear the difference or you can go the opposite way say you just have a one minute clip you could shrink that clip down to one minute and it will end it perfectly at one minute you don't have to do the thing where it just like fades off into the background it's unsung hero of that uh app then if you're somebody that edits using the apple pencil there's now haptic feedback while using the apple pencil and it is really cool so like when you're

scrolling through the timeline you feel the haptics when you're dragging effects or clips or something to the timeline it it's it's there you're adjusting sliders and stuff like that it's it's you get haptic feedback there's certain things like button presses and stuff like that that doesn't do anything but mostly like when you're sliding or dragging something that's when you'll start to feel some haptics and that's pretty cool so it means the pencil vibrates yes okay yeah yeah it's pretty cool That is an unsung hero.

I forget when the M4 iPad Pros came out and the Apple Pencil Pro became a thing, but that is an unsung hero, I think, of that update. The subtle haptics you sometimes get are just really nice. Yeah, it feels really good to have those haptic feedbacks when you're using the Apple Pencil and stuff like that, and now it's built into Final Cut. And then lastly, there are some workflow improvements. None of these are huge, but they will be, to certain people, they will be massive features to certain people.

So there is now the ability to expand the timeline vertically so you can make your clips super tall. So if you're looking at the audio wave, you know, wavelength file bits that are on the clips, that's really handy. The thumbnail previews for that clip are a lot bigger. You can also shrink it down as well, too, to add more space. The picture-in-picture window, so when you're editing your footage, if you want to put the editor window, like the preview window of what you're seeing,

you can put that in picture-in-picture. Now it dynamically scales. You can make it really big, make it really small, nice little touch. You can edit high frame rate time. You can edit high frame rate timelines. Say that five times fast. That includes 90 frames per second, 100, and 120 frames per second. Especially nice if you have an iPhone 16 Pro that can shoot up to 120. But realistically, just a little pro tip, I wouldn't export.

Like if I'm capturing 120 frames per second video, it's so I can slow it down and make nice, smooth, slow motion video. I wouldn't export 120 frames per second. I wouldn't work in 120 frames per second. I wouldn't even work in a 30 frames per second timeline because you shouldn't do that. 24 frames per second gives you nice motion blur, nice natural motion blur. It looks cinematic. It looks good. Matt, take notes. I'll tell you what. 120 FPS screen shares would be very nice.

I just can't. Ugh. Ugh. I don't actually, I don't think YouTube supports that. I think YouTube tops out of 60. Yeah, it doesn't support high frame rate. And as far as I know, there's no screen recorders that can do 120 either. They all cap out at 60 as well. Oh, interesting. Because the MacBook Pro screens do 120 frames, or 120 hertz. Yeah, my desktop monitor is 144, and I can still only do 60 anywhere. so yeah well you should only you should only be uploading 24 frames per second video oh screen share is a 24 fps look rough my friend i used to do it when i had a mac that's that everything was

uh there was a trick to it and i don't remember what i did but it kind of smoothed out anyways moving on it doesn't matter and then the last feature is there are some new keyboard shortcuts a couple of them are like be able to delete uh clips right from the project like just completely delete it right out of Final Cut and set up a background render of the whole timeline, not just what you have selected, but the whole timeline. I found out this is the most diverse feature in Final Cut. Some people claim it doesn't do anything.

Some people love this feature because if you have a slower machine or something like that that can't render everything in real time, you can do a background render and everything plays back a lot more smoothly. So I don't know. Okay. This isn't rendering as an exporting the project. This is rendering the previews as you want. Yes. So this is, yeah, rendering the previews. So on the Mac, this does it automatically. Like when you pause and like you kind of aren't touching anything in Final Cut, it will by default render in the background automatically.

You can turn this feature off. Some people say turn it off because it takes up processing power. Some people are like, well, I've got a powerful computer. Takes up space too. Yeah. It does take up a lot of space. It absolutely takes up a lot of space. But it makes your final export times quicker. There's a lot of pros and cons to this feature. On the iPad, it doesn't do it automatically in the background. You have to go in and select it. Before, you had to hit, like, if you wanted to do the whole timeline, you had to hit Command-A. And then right-click on it and do Render Selection or the keyboard shortcut for Render Selection.

But now there's just a keyboard shortcut for Render the whole timeline. I will say I have had to do it a couple of times with Comfort Zone when I edit the video for that, even on an M4 iPad Pro, where, like, it just, everything starts to slow down. I'll render the whole timeline, and everything is really speedy and plays back instantly. So, you know. So, Chris, I have, I can't not notice custom keyboard shortcuts aren't mentioned here. So you still have to use whatever they have decided the shortcut should be?

Yes. Yes. I am so there. Okay, I'm going to pull back the curtain a little bit about exactly a year ago, I was asked by Apple to speak at the Final Cut Summit conference about Final Cut Pro for the iPad, which I was super excited about. It's probably one of the biggest honors of my career, like up there with hitting 100,000 subscribers and just getting a few videos past a million views and stuff like that.

It's up there as one of the big honors of my career. And one of the nice things is I got to meet a bunch of the people that work on Final Cut. Final Cut for the Mac and Final Cut for the iPad. And I gave them my wish list. So there is a bunch of things on my wish list that I'm just like, okay, we really need this. I'm kind of like, okay, if we're never going to get this stuff, I might just go and get a Mac for editing. Because working around a few of these features has been killer. for example post-production stabilization uh stabilization is in final cut pro for the ipad but it's just if you're capturing using the camera there is no check box for like okay added this clip

to the timeline now stabilize it uh the other big thing that kind of kills me is there is no way to copy an effect using keyboard shortcuts using keyboard shortcuts copy an effect from a timeline and then paste it to another clip just using keyboard shortcuts. You have to go into the inspector page, the effects tab, hit the menu button, and hit paste. And I have to do that for every single clip in my timeline when I'm doing B-roll and stuff like that for the color grade. It kills me.

There's no way to apply effects to multiple clips at once, denoise, three-way color collector. There's a bunch of stuff that Final Cut Pro for the iPad really needs in order to hit, not even to be on par with the Mac, but just to hit like a, like, okay, this is a comfortable place to edit. I know a couple of the ones that other people really want are like third-party LUT support. That I don't really care about so much because I basically just made my own look.

But the issue with that is there's no way to save user-created preset effects in Final Cut Pro for the iPad, which is something you could do on the Mac super easily. And then you can copy those over to other Macs, give them to other people, whatever. But on the iPad, there's no way to say, like, okay, here's my color grade for my talking headshot that I do in every single one of those videos. Save that so I can just apply it to other videos. What I've had to do is actually I went in and created a note in Obsidian with all of the settings that I change in order to get my look, the color grade look that I have in my videos.

And that is just something that I'm like, okay, this shouldn't have to be like this. This absolutely should not have to be like that. So I'm hoping that we see more updates like this one that are focused on the editing side. Yeah, I agree. A week ago, I wrote an article on my blog called The Unsexy Aspects of Professional Tools. And Final Cut is pro is very much a pro tool. And yeah, a lot of the stuff you list here, I think, kind of falls into those categories.

The categories I put were reliability, predictability, and flexibility. And the flexibility is the thing that I think is, which usually revolves around let me work how I want to work. Don't force me to work a certain way. and so like the keyboard shortcuts is one of those things i have a set of keyboard shortcuts i always set in every editing app except for final cut pro because i can't customize them there um and yeah some of these other tools just uh i think kind of fall into that um so i hope they do kind of cut away at these were any of the things they added this time on your list previously that you were hoping they would add um not really a bummer okay i'm a little bummed but the stuff they added is

good stuff. Like I've not, I've not, it's not like the iPad mini update where it's like, okay, you put out an update, but did you really put out an update? It's okay. Yeah. You put out an update and there's some good stuff. Is it the stuff that was at the top of my list? No, but I'm hoping they're working on that kind of thing. I'm going to have a video about final cut pro for the iPad. And I'm going to go through my list of like, Hey, here's everything that, you know, as an editor, As somebody that lives out of, I don't edit on the Mac. I don't edit on anything else.

I edit specifically from Final Cut Pro for the iPad. And to kind of go back to your blog, the reason why I do that, Matt, sorry, man, I cannot talk today. To go back to your blog post, Matt, the reason why I edit from Final Cut Pro for the iPad is reliability. It's so reliable. I've never had any issues. People that have been following my channel for a long time know I used to edit everything in LumaFusion.

LumaFusion had some massive bugs in it that prevented me from being able to export video. And that was why I had to buy a MacBook Pro. And I left editing video from the iPad for a little over a year. Maybe it was like two years, something like that. It was right around the time the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros came out, and I bought an M1 Max MacBook Pro, edited for a while from Final Cut there. And then, yeah, it was a tough time.

But Final Cut Pro for the iPad, reliability-wise, solid. Never have had an issue with it. And that's pretty nice. But there was a couple of other updates as well, and I'll go through these pretty quickly because I haven't played with these as much. I've definitely been focused on Final Cut Pro for the iPad. But Final Cut Pro camera got LUT previewing support while filming, but it's not custom LUTs. It's just specific to the Apple Log LUT.

So you can basically see what your footage will look like once you, even though you're filming in Log, Once you move it to Final Cut Pro and, you know, it applies the LUT, the Apple Log LUT, you'll see what it's looking like. So, yes, that's a nice feature. I'm very surprised Apple hasn't brought in custom LUTs because other than external storage support, which was a big thing editing-wise, but it's not something I really use, third-party LUT support is the thing that people have been asking the most for.

And I should probably explain what a LUT is. It stands for a lookup table. And basically what it is, is it's a bunch of like commands on how to make your footage look a certain way. So it basically says like shift reds here, shift oranges here, shift yellows here, kind of things like that. That may not be the most technical answer, but or correct answer. But it's important for people that film because if you're filming in log, you're getting the most dynamic range out of your camera.

and that gives you the ability to color grade your footage and make it look the way you want it to. Whereas if you're filming in a regular mode without that, the look is baked into the footage and there's very, very little you can do to adjust it. In Final Cut Camera, a couple other things. You can record log footage in HEVC now. No need to do ProRes log. You can do just normal HEVC log footage, which is great. That's actually what I record all my footage on on my Canon camera.

There are new level tools that handle roll and tilt. So that'd be great for locking off your camera and making sure everything is level, along with a top down level as well. And you can film 4k up to 120 frames per second on the 16 Pro line. So that's the Final Cut Pro camera update. That's pretty cool. But the thing I have a feeling Matt is chomping at the bit to talk about is Final Cut 11. Yes. Yes. So Final Cut Pro 10 is now Final Cut Pro 11.

And just right off the bat, I'll just pull this band-aid right off. There's no pricing changes. There's no upgrade price. It's not moving to a subscription. Wow. If you paid the $300 for Final Cut Pro 10 however many years ago it came out, it was a long while ago. It was a long time ago. Seven or eight years, maybe even more than that. It was a long time ago that it was announced. So I have a question before you proceed. Is it Final Cut Pro 11 or Final Cut Pro XI?

It is no longer X at the end of it. It does say the number 11. They took the X away a while ago for what it's worth. That X was... People hated that X. The era of the X at Apple is gone. Yeah. Yep. I was just thinking I bought Final Cut Pro in 2016. And I haven't paid for an update since. That's a good value. Something else happened in 2016.

Moving on. Good things happened. Cut that. Nope. Not talking about it. Can't do it right now. Sorry. I cannot talk about it. Cannot do it. Can't talk about Final Cut Pro. Yep. Can't talk about Final Cut Pro. But no, the Final Cut Pro X has been a great value, especially if you look at like other professional video editing apps like Premiere. Resolve is probably the other one that I would throw in the same camp as Final Cut Pro, where Resolve is free if you just need the basic stuff.

But if you're going to move up, it's just a flat fee you pay and you just move right on up. But yeah, like Premiere, Avid, all those things, they're quite expensive and not worth it. But yeah, Final Cut Pro 11 got a couple of features. Weirdly, Final Cut, if you're counting the number of features, Final Cut Pro for the iPad got more stuff than Final Cut for the Mac. But Final Cut for the Mac has got a couple of cool things. Exactly. That's what I wanted to point out as I went. So the first thing is Final Cut Pro 11 has this new feature called Magnetic Mask.

So if you're watching the video version right now, you'll see me. You'll also see the background, my desk, some other stuff in the studio. With magnetic mask, what I would be able to do is select just me and then hit the Analyze button. And it'll go through that whole clip of me and it'll put a mask around me. And now what you can do with that mask is you can apply effects to just what's inside the mask. Or you can invert it and do what's outside of the mask. So I could put a retro TV effect on the background of me.

So it's like all staticky and stuff. Or I could just color grade me to like, maybe the highlights are a little too high for me, but I don't want to affect the background. This is something I do in Lightroom with photos all the time, but it's really complex to do in video because you have not just one photo, you have, well, 24 photos in a second and however many seconds you have in that clip. So this is something that is going to be huge for people. And it's fast too. The demo I saw of it, obviously, I mean, I have a beta of it, but I haven't installed it on my Mac Mini

because I'm not too worried about Final Cut Pro for the Mac. But the demo I saw of it was insanely fast. It was so good. It ripped through those clips just adding that mask. And like I said, you can add any effects or color grader you want. So is it like a replacement for a green screen? No, this is more of a post-production thing. So like if you're interviewing somebody and they're standing underneath a tree in the shadow, you could bring, you know, you can bring the color of them, the brightness of them without affecting the background and stuff like that.

No, this isn't really a replacement for a green screen or anything like that. But the other thing, and this was kind of in the Mac mini announcement that a lot of like keen people saw, is there's automatic closed captions now. So what this does is you can go through and you can select the dialogue track in Final Cut. So you can label your audio tracks different things. So you can do sound effects and soundtrack and your dialogue track. This will go through the dialogue track, do automatic captions, and apply them to the video.

The thing I didn't get to see is if it exports a separate SRT file. I believe that's the file type for captions. I'm not too sure exactly how this works, but I will say it works incredibly fast. It was wild how quickly it ripped through it. The first time you do it, it takes a minute because it downloads the language model for the closed caption system. But then after that, it's just there on your Mac. It handles it offline. So you have to be connected to the internet the first time you use it.

But after that, it's all on device after that. So it works really nice. So it's using a large language model? From what I understand, yes. Okay. That makes sense. So do you know, is it just for creating the subtitles for the video, or can you turn those into like visual captions on the screen? I believe it's just for creating subtitles in like a closed caption system. I don't think there, like you can, I'm not even sure you can edit like the font or anything like that.

I think it's just kind of there. like what the standard closed caption system stuff is. Okay. Well, that's still good. I do that for every one of my YouTube videos. So I'll edit a video, export it, and then as I'm uploading to YouTube, I'll have the transcription being generated with Mac Whisperer, and I have to upload it separately. But this would be great to just have it there from the start when I export a video. That's awesome. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you turned me on to Mac Whisperer, and I've been using it for my videos as well as we've been using it for the video version of Comfort Zone as well.

and it works really well. I really like it. And then the last feature in Final Cut Pro 11 for the Mac, these names, is spatial video editing support for Vision Pro spatial video and stuff like that. So if you have a bunch of spatial video and you want to edit it all together, you can do it right there in the Mac. You can also take, and I wasn't entirely sure how all this works, but you can take other like stereoscopic 3D video and now convert it to spatial video in Final Cut.

So you can edit it there with all that stuff. And there's a bunch of tools built in for this because obviously this is capturing two separate videos from the left and the right eye and doing that thing where it pulls it apart. So you makes it 3D and stuff like that. So you can view it in the viewer just like that. and it's very confusing and very hard to understand because, you know, brains can't process two-dimensional 3D video like that. It's weird. If you've ever seen a timeline like that, you'll know what I'm talking about.

But you can also just flip it to be like, oh, the right eye is the primary or the left eye is the primary. So you're just focusing on one of those and you know the other. We'll just match up automatically. But yeah, so that's kind of all the new stuff and the new versions of Final Cut. Any questions? My question is for Canon, actually. oh okay so chris you and i shoot on canon cameras love them because we're happy with them i think i'm smart because i use 24 frames per second but yeah the intelligent but canon sells a lens that

you can use to create spatial videos but it it only works with one of their cameras it works with their r7 camera yeah that's weird especially considering the r5 mark ii is the newer one and R6 Mark II. Well, R6s are great. R6s are great. Team R5. Team R5. Yeah, I don't know why Canon's doing that. I mean, that's a very typical Canon. Like, let's just put, like, literally, it's a meme on the internet whenever a Canon camera comes out.

It's how did they hit it with the cripple hammer? Like, what did they do to, like, hold it back a little bit? But the R5 Mark II just came out, and everyone was super excited about it, except it doesn't have support for high-quality 4K frame rate recording, which is like, what? Why? Which the R5C, which has been out for years now, does have that. So, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to set you off on Canon. Yeah. Yeah, Canon, Canon, Canon. I'm in the middle of trying to figure out what my next camera is going to be.

And I saw it's, this is kind of like a source of frustration for me right now. Gotcha. But in theory, you can shoot on your iPhone, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Spatial video. So you could edit there. Yep. Absolutely. In fact, that was the demo was, uh, it wasn't spatial video shot on the vision pro. It was spatial video shot on the iPhone, brought over to the Mac and then edited. And then, uh, you can send it right to the photos library. So that way it syncs to your vision pro. Gotcha. And there's no chance the new iPad version of Final Cut works on the Vision Pro, does it?

No, I don't think so. I will double check, but I don't think so. So that's Final Cut Pro. I'm pretty excited about this. You know, it's not the stuff I personally want that are at the top of my wish list, but I will keep reminding the people that I know about my wish list. all right is it challenge time i believe it is challenge time and matt it was your challenge what do you got for us this week it was so my challenges tend to have us

neilian i feel like your challenges have us learn a new skill and better ourselves mine is go to the app store and find something cool and so i challenged us to find the best app the best app on the App Store that has an orange icon. So there can be other colors, but orange should be, I think, either prominent or primary. And it must be the official icon they have on their App Store listing, not just a custom one you can set. So relatively straightforward.

Yeah. Some contenders came to mind. I hope you guys found... How confident are you guys in the ones you found? I'm... Oh, no. I'm pretty confident. I like mine. I spent some time. It is an app I've used before, but I spent some time looking around on the App Store. But when you told us about this challenge, this was the app that immediately came to mind because it is a very good app. Okay. And we haven't seen what each other have picked yet. I don't think. I probably didn't pick what Chris picked because I did want to pick the obvious pick.

I don't think mine's the obvious pick. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. Matt, you want to lead us off? Yeah. So I went with something I've talked about on this show before. And as soon as I saw it, I was reminded yes is obviously my pick. And that is Synology Photos. Which is so niche and probably won't win. But I love this app so much.

I love this service so much. I guess just for context of what it is, Synology is a network attached storage that I have in my house, and it backs up a bunch of files for me, and it's just kind of secure, redundant storage for things, including my photo library. What? Is that not orange? That is orange. It's not great. It's orange, but... I mean, I'm a little disappointed by the icon.

It's great. Well, we're not rating the icon, we're rating the app. And the app is wonderful because I just have it installed on my iPad. I almost never open it on my iPad, but it's constantly just in the background. It's syncing my Apple Photos collection to a hard drive in my home that's just image files that I can access anywhere. I don't need to keep subscribing to anything to keep those files. I don't need to worry about losing my account and losing those files. Photos are irreplaceable. I don't want to ever lose my photos.

And so having them in multiple places is great. And having them like just locally in my house is even better. So I love this app. It's so great. And it even does some nice things with like person recognition. So you can search by people. And it does some of those nice things that you would get with Apple Photos or Google Photos. But it's just something that is self-hosted. And self-hosted files are awesome. So I think this is a great app. I love this. I use this app. Same reasons you do. backs up to my Synology NAS.

Absolutely love this app. It's great. Good peace of mind to making sure your photo library is in another location that isn't in a cloud service or something like that. It's locally. I can pull it right from those hard drives. Love it. Nice pick. Chris, what do you have? So, I want to start with a question. What even is orange? Oh my god. Okay. I'm worried. I'm worried. I'm worried. No, I'm just totally kidding.

I'm going to look at the color blindness test. I'm totally just kidding. No, my app absolutely has orange in it. You can click on it in the doc, but my app that I picked is Home Widget. I absolutely love this app. So, as you all know, the Apple's Home app does have a widget. You can control lights, toggle certain things, but it is very limited. It doesn't have camera support or thermostat support. You can't customize it that much.

Home widget is here to save the day. Not only can you view your thermostat and cameras, you can tap on them and change them and stuff like that, or view them right from the widget, which is really nice. You can jump right into the camera, essentially, or you can jump in and change your thermostat. But it's also extremely customizable. different color backgrounds. If you would like an orange background, you can do orange backgrounds. You can do clear backgrounds. You can do dark mode stuff.

You can put all your HomeKit stuff in there. It is what the Home app widget should be. At least first, just support for different home devices. But yeah, I love this. I've been using it for like a year now or something like that. Really good. Works really well. Highly recommended. And while the app icon does suffer from the thing of like, oh, white background with an icon on top of it, I think it's a decent icon.

Yeah. And this one's all about the widgets anyway. So as long as the widgets are good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's like widgets myth, but specifically designed around HomeKit stuff. I've tried HomeWidget once, And like, I don't want to be mean, sorry, but I think it's great. And it works great, like you said. But I think the widgets, aesthetically speaking, I don't like them at all.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. I don't mind them, but you know what? I don't have them on the, like, so the home widgets I use, they're in a stack, but they're not the top widget in the stack. So I don't look at them all the time. So it's more just like flip over, toggle the thing, flip back. Okay. Is it the dark backgrounds on all the tiles that you don't like? That's probably it. And I don't know. The sizing is weird.

Yeah, something is off about those. I don't mind it, but to each everyone's own? To each your own? Of course, of course. I will say I don't use this now. I do use the Apple Home widgets a little bit. But I have used this in the past. The one thing that was challenging for me was setting it up is a little confusing. Yeah. You kind of have to figure out their UI and exactly what you're doing. But once you do, it is awesome to be able to kind of configure it more than, like you said, thermostats especially.

Like, I have my thermostats hooked up to Apple HomeKit. But in the widget, I can just tap it. And that will take me to the app. And then I can do everything there. but there's no way to change the temperature or anything from the widget. Oh, did they add thermostat support for the widget? I swear, a few years ago, you weren't able to add your thermostat to the home widget. I was able to now, so either I'm hallucinating. No, I think they probably added support for it in the last release, or maybe the release before that, and I didn't notice it.

Interesting. Because I swear, I know garages were never in there. Garages, locks, and I didn't think thermostats were in there as well. But they added all that stuff. But with Home Widget, you can add all that stuff. And the nice thing about Home Widget is, from what I understand, if you have like a lock or something, a smart lock, and I don't have a smart lock, so I'm not able to test this. But from what I understand is it's locked behind Face ID. So if you put Home Widget in the Today view and swipe over, and like somebody was to steal your phone or something like that,

they couldn't just unlock your house or something like that or open your garage door. It's locked behind Face ID. Nice. This is a good pick. Nice. All right, Niléane, what do you have for us? All right. So I want you to help me. I have two picks, and I can't decide which one to enter in the competition. But I like them both. So the first one is home paper. so we're in the same theme here nice Home Paper is an app which has an orange icon and I like the so unlike you guys

I'm going to comment on the icon first and foremost so the icon has a nice gradient that goes from orange yellow to real orange and I like that gradient it's the same one, almost the same one that Apple uses for the Pages app and for the Books app the books app was almost my pick today so but I wanted to pick something third party yeah the icon is good so what the app does home paper it lets you create a wallpaper for your home app which is

very specific but I love it so the idea is you pick a photo from your library any photo and it will try to make it look nice it will fade it into a gradient of your choosing you can choose any colors any combination of two colors and it you can export that image and you can set it as the background for the home app on ios or on the mac as well it works on the mac and the ipad um so the idea here uh what i've done for

example is that i've done i've taken a photo of each of my rooms in our apartment and i've run those through the HomePaper app and exported them. So now in the Home app on iOS, I've got a different wallpaper for each room inside the app. And it's pretty cool. And it looks nice. So that's my first pick. And I have a second pick. And this one is a different kind of orange regarding the icon.

It's called Comet. And it's a Reddit client. I didn't think those existed anymore Yeah, you're not far off I'll come to this but the icon it's a little comment an abstract comment on a gradient once more this time it's a flashy kind of orange I think it looks nice the app is really good, it used to be one of my favorite Reddit clients and it's still installed on my phone.

I still use it sometimes. Last update, three years ago. Exactly. It wasn't. It hasn't been updated in the past three years. So obviously we know the reasons. The Reddit API is no more. So they probably can't do anything with it anymore. And maybe you can't even use it if you've never used it before. So maybe I can still use it because I already had an account.

I already logged in in the app. And so maybe there's still an active API key or whatever for my account. I don't know. But the app is still there and it still works if you can use it. And it's still really good. Despite not being updated anymore. So yeah, I want you to decide which one should I pick. I think it should be home paper because that's like an app that's like, you know, still being updated, still active.

You know, people can go and download and use it. But that's just my thought. I kind of like Comet, although I am concerned about the lack of updates and inability to potentially update it. Yeah, I will not recommend anyone like adopt this app. But I really like the icon, and I'm sensitive to pretty icons. You do you. Okay, I'm going to pick Home Paper.

Okay. All right. I like Home Paper. I've used it before in the past for the same reason you did. When we moved into the new place, I haven't been bothered to update all the HomeKit stuff. I've had so many weird HomeKit issues in this new house. I actually need to go through and delete everything and re-add everything. I've just been a little too lazy and I've only done my office and studio. But yeah, it's been a nightmare. Yeah, I have a slight tangent. I have a recommendation. Now in iOS 18, you can customize the two controls on your lock screen on your iPhone.

And what I've done is the one in the bottom right hand corner, where there used to be the camera control to open the camera from your lock screen, I've changed it to the home app control the one that opens the home app and what this does is you can quickly open the home app from your lock screen and it's very fast to get to the home app and I've been using it instead of control center instead of having a bunch of home controls inside control center now I just go into the home app from the lock screen using this shortcut

nice and you should do the same It's the best tip. It's the winning tip. Nice. Well, I don't know about winning tip. We will let democracy decide. All right. Well, I like it. I like your guys' apps. You guys ready for your challenge next week? Yes. Sure. All right. So it is my challenge this next week, and I want you guys to automate something that annoys you. We all have something in our lives that annoys us, and I guarantee you guys are just like me.

He's like, I'll get to it eventually. I'll automate that so I don't have to deal with it anymore. I want you to take the time this week and automate that thing that annoys you. I think I'm going to have to invent a problem to automate. Is your life perfectly automated? My life is perfect. Okay, all right. Whenever I've got an annoyance like this, I go right ahead and fix it. I don't know. Maybe, okay. I used to be like that and then I got busy with other stuff and now it's like, oh yeah, I'll just put in my task manager.

I'll get to it eventually. So I've got a list of things. Okay. I have an idea. It's tricky. Nice. All righty. Well, that just about does it for this week. Thank you all so much for listening. But before we wrap up, I have a question for you too. I was very proud of coming up with this question, but you're going to have to bear with me a little bit. Okay. So if you were to take your co-hosts, So both your co-hosts on a first date in some kind of weird thruple situation.

I don't know. Don't be creepy. It's just surface-level stuff. What would you do? I can go first because I thought of my answer before I actually thought of the question. I'd want to take you guys go-kart racing because I know I can beat you. Oh, no. I have so many hours in the simulator. I'd be able to smoke you. No, I know I can beat you. I've got so many hours on your truck simulator I've got so many hours in an actual race car sure it's the same thing

yeah yeah yeah okay I'm going to take you both into the National Assembly in France where you can see a bunch of deputies shouting at each other see what it's like to be in a function in democracy Yeah, let's do this. Ooh, you're definitely getting a second date after that. Trip to France is good. Yeah, I know, right? Because I'm assuming Neelion's paying for our trip to France there. So, you know, we're good there, right?

Anyways, Matt, what do you got? Well, I would take you guys to a movie, of course. Oh, boo. No, no, no, you haven't heard the movie. We're going to watch only the new Star Wars movies. Oh, no. You are horrible. You are horrible. I like that. I like it. Between that and 30 frames per second, you are horrible. Fine, fine, fine. We'll watch the Hobbit movies at 48 frames per second, and then we'll all be happy.

Why 48? What's the joke? I thought it was 60. Those were 48. Oh, Gemini Man was 60? We don't need to get into what movies do weird frame rates. I didn't know that. All right. Well, Matt ruined my beloved question that I was very excited about. No, it's ruined. It's ruined. I don't support the throuple, and we shut it down. I've got so many things to say about both of those trilogies. I think it could be fun.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe we'll do, like, bonus movie episodes or something, because that could be fun. I don't know. We'll talk about that offline. move along. Anyways, thank you all so much for listening. Matt, Nelian, do you guys have anything you want to promote this week? No, but thank you to our sponsor I know Reader for sponsoring this episode. Nelian, you got anything you want to promote? Yeah, this week on MacStories I've reviewed a very weird browser. I'm not going to say it, just go to the site and read this review about a weird browser. I love it yeah and something else i want to say is protect your trans folks as much as you can uh special

thanks to mac stories for hosting us we are a mac stories podcast after all um thank you all so much for listening goodbye goodbye bye Bye.