Matt is a Mean Guy

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and every week I'm joined by two incredible co-hosts, one of which is still in her pajamas. As always, we are joined by Matt Berchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm so exhausted, but very happy to be back recording with you guys. Yeah, you've been bouncing all over the place traveling, Mr. Important Business Person. so yeah over here yeah i know right and we are also joined by neilion neilion how are you hello i'm fine my so i say this about once every month i feel my sleep schedule is messed up again

when is your sleep schedule not messed up because matt we'll be in our group chat and it'll be like four o'clock in the afternoon my time which is like yeah 2 a.m your time or whatever and you're just like yeah i'm up playing video games or something it's not messed up like just like a clock is always right twice a day you know okay fair enough let's uh let's get into the show um we did democracy and uh well democracy's overrated anyways you want to tell us what happened because I don't.

Democracy, what is that again? So Ghost, last week's challenge, what was it? Pick an open source app and Matt chose something that's not an app. Yeah. Oh my God. Well, what did democracy say? Put us out of our misery. Okay, so democracy says, Ghost, your pick, Matt, has 29% of the votes and arrives last. Wait, no. No. Second to last.

Yeah. Last is Cody. Which, come on, people. Without Cody and XBMC, see, this is where I think it got messed up. A lot of people know it as XBMC. Not a lot of people know it as Cody. So, I think. So, that's the issue. Yeah, I think that's the issue. So, I think there was a rigged poll. It was rigged against me. Especially since the ball mentions both names. Oh, I forgot it does. Okay, all right. It just doesn't say in our show notes. Anyways, oh my gosh.

A measly 23%, but those people that voted for me, you're my favorite people. And as I predicted, my pick is a pick of the people for the people. Ice, the menu bar management app, won at 48%. So there you go. No. one of the things I like about my pick is that mine is being actively developed. You know, that's very mean. Same, mine is actively developed as well. This is extremely mean, especially regarding

the developer. So, yeah, this is my... We're going into follow-up, yeah. So, this is my follow-up item. The developer who makes ICE, the open source app. Which one? Last week, again, let's say that again. Unfortunately, he posted that he will be slowing down the development of the app. And this is why Matt is extremely mean. He's a mean guy. Basically, he doesn't have enough money to keep it going at the rate that he was keeping it going until now.

He says it's still in development. It's not going away. he's not going to stop updating it. It's just going to be slower from now on. Yeah. So that's, yeah, I just wanted to mention that. It's the reality of things. When you make an open source app, especially when it starts as a passion project, you got to pay your bills still. Yeah. And I mean, it sounds like a relatively okay situation.

It sounds like they just got a day job, a full-time job that they'll be doing. Exactly. Which makes total sense. And in fairness, this is an app that once it has a core set of features, I mean, how many more things do you need it to get? I feel like it does the job. It does it pretty well and has a nice UI. I did install it on my computer, so it is quite nice. I respect the 48% of the people who voted for it. Yeah, but the 23 that voted for Kodi are my favorite.

The 29% that voted for me are the best. Chris, you made it sound like there are exactly 23 people who voted for Cody. Although that would be a significant chunk. There were 90 votes or something like that? Yeah. I don't remember. Yeah. It is funny how some of our polls will do like massive numbers and then others are just like, okay, a few people here and there will vote for it. So I'm not sure why that is, but whatever. It doesn't really matter.

The other thing I put in follow-up that I wanted to mention is today, the day of recording, which is Monday the 9th, the MacStory Select Awards came out today. We are a MacStory's podcast, so I figured I would mention. And our very own Neil Leon was a part of the editorial team that picked the awards. And you wrote about the Lifetime Achievement Award. Do you have anything you want to add to that? Yeah, I did. As you can see on the site, a bunch of winners.

It's a great selection of apps that I've won this year. And I had the chance to write about a few of them, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, which is this year, Transip, the app Transip on the iPhone. I've been using this app for the past decade and more. And the app itself has been around for 12 years now. Launched in 2012. Yes. And I remember using it in 2014, 10 years ago, when I arrived in France and had my first experience with a large public transit network in Paris.

And I was feeling lost. And this app helped me. And ever since it's been on my home screen, it's great. It's a great app. That's awesome. Yeah. No, it's a great app. The other thing I want to mention is the app of the year went to uh delta which totally makes sense like 100 and the MacStories team commissioned uh a few delta uh artwork or um skins delta skins so that like and they look really really good uh we'll put links to those in the description um i i literally have the tab open because i i ran out of time i was

gonna buy them and then needed to jump on this call so i'll do it afterwards but uh yeah looks really good all right well let's get in the show matt you're you're first up in the document what What have you got for us this week? So I am... It's getting to the end of the year here, and I start to feel retrospective at the end of the year. I'm a list guy. I like to make lists of my favorite things throughout the year. And while I didn't necessarily want to do my top 10 apps of the year or anything like that, especially since MacStory Select is better at that in every way,

I wanted to do this Mount Rushmore thing. I don't know if you guys have seen other people do this Mount Rushmore of thing where you say, this is my Mount Rushmore of movies or actors or food or whatever. I wanted to do it with Mac apps for myself. Okay, so, sorry, what does this mean? Yeah, that was pretty American of you, Matt. It is very American. Well, I said something about libraries and specifically how American libraries work, and then I got a lot of flack for not recognizing other people have libraries. So, I don't know. Maybe France has its own Mount Rushmore.

yeah hopefully we don't um although i would be i would like to know who goes on that mount rushmore of france um basically just five times five five faces of macron yeah um basically it's a uh we've carved the faces of four uh i think they're all presidents yes Yes, four presidents into a mountain in one of the Dakotas. And it's a massive thing.

But yeah, it's basically just four of the most iconic, most important whatever. And so that's Mount Rushmore. It's four iconic presidents. Wait, do you not know who's on Mount Rushmore? Well, it's obviously Washington. Okay. Lincoln. I want to guess the fifth one. There's only four, so that's going to be tough. Oh, sure. Okay. Emmanuel Mechel. So, Chris, I saw you typing there, which was clearly searching. Who were the four?

Okay. Isn't it Jefferson? I knew three out of the four, and it was Jefferson is the one I couldn't remember. Jefferson. Is Roosevelt the other one? Yeah, Roosevelt's the other one. Okay, so I knew it was Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, but I couldn't remember the fourth one. And I think Roosevelt's on there because he did all the National Park stuff. Potentially. Yeah. Well, I know he did all the National Park stuff, but I don't know if that's the reason he's on there. But I kind of assume it because whatever. It doesn't work. Anyways. Okay. Yeah. I definitely was just busted for typing because I couldn't remember the fourth.

Please note that I knew about Jefferson. Yeah. The French person knew about Jefferson over us. Right. Yeah. So I was like, I want to do my Mount Rushmore of Mac apps. Okay. Because I've done this like thought experiment before where like, if I was forced to stop using all of Apple's platforms except for one, I can only keep one. What would I keep? And for me, it's the Mac. I'd give my iPhone away. I'd give my iPad away, my watch away.

I'd keep the Mac because that would hurt me the most going to Windows. Chris disagrees. I mean, you could just do everything on an iPad. I mean, that's what I do. Oh, man. I wouldn't have to touch Windows. That's true. So, Mount Rushmore of Mac apps. And I think all of these apps had good 2024s as well. So, it does kind of tune into the end of the year. So, the first one that I know Neil Ian loves as well is Raycast.

Yeah. Which is an incredible app. It's really grown up over the last like three years or so since it's been around. Like it's an app launcher, but it's also a million other things, but not obnoxiously so. Like you can very easily just do the things that you want to do with it and ignore everything you don't use. It is app of the year runner up in the select awards. The highest compliment you can get. So, yeah. So a couple of things I really like about it are it's an app launcher.

It's very fast. uh it also does text expansion so they have a feature called snippets so if you don't want to pay for like text expander or keyboard maestro or something like that you can use raycast to do that and they've done a lot with they have a window manager in there as well and they do a ton with ai stuff so they're not all wonderful but they have some cool stuff like emoji suggestions so if you like search for an emoji in their emoji picker and it doesn't come up with any results from the predefined list you can have it suggest emoji that you might have meant which is really really

cool when you don't get a result neilian is there anything in raycast that you particularly love well you may yeah you you've said it all but you mentioned ai and i think if there's a good way to use ai on the mac like raycast does it right and on many things the emoji thing and the fact that you can integrate it with your text selection anywhere on your OS. That's really powerful. And it's weird that Apple isn't doing this, like in some way, with Spotlight or something like that.

Like done specifically in this way, integrated into an app launcher, that works really well. Yeah, because it can like see your screen and like they have a browser extension for Chromium and Safari that just like lets you ask a question about the website you're on or do something with that information. So yeah, it really feels integrated into the system, I think, in a cool way. It also does a really cool thing with meetings. So if you hook up your calendar to it and you have like a Google Meet or a Riverside link in a meeting that you're about to join, if you like pull up the launcher with whatever

keyboard shortcut you have set up, the very first option will be join that video call, which I use like five times a day at work, which is lovely. And it's just a bunch of little things that I think add up to just a really nice experience. And one that pulled me away from Alfred, which I'd been using for like 10 years before that. And so I used Quicksilver for like five years before that. So like I don't change my launcher very often on the Mac, but I really don't see myself moving away from Raycast anytime soon.

It's been a couple years now, and I think it'll be very challenging to do something better than what they're doing right now. I think, Chris, they're working on an iPad app is a rumor I've heard. They have been working on an iPad app for years, and I signed up for the test flight when that was announced, and I've not heard anything. I don't know how they would do an iPad app when their whole thing is like, hey, we're a spotlight replacement.

And there's no way to be a spotlight replacement on the iPad. So I'm assuming it would probably be more like, like kind of, I guess like a chat GPT kind of app kind of thing where like you just open it up. There's a text box and you type in it and it gives you results. Yeah. But I couldn't imagine it being much more than that. What if Apple is about to acquire it? And this is wild. It's about to acquire it.

And it's going to roll out as part of something new that makes it possible to run on iPadOS. Don't tease me like this. Don't give me hope. That's not happening, is it? No. Honestly, that would be really cool. And like we have talked about in the past, I am shocked Apple Intelligence isn't rolled into Spotlight and typed a series, its own separate text box, and stuff like that. I'm shocked about that, because Spotlight seems like the perfect hub for all things AI-ish, Apple Intelligence, but it's not.

So, I don't know, but yeah, don't give me hope, because I would love, love it if Raycast was the default search box on the iPad and Mac and iPhone and stuff. yeah it would be rad this gets into a general idea is that i think a common trait and some of my favorite mac apps are mac apps that do things that you can only do on a mac um and that is in replacing system functionality so spot you don't like spotlight you wish spotlight worked differently

no problem there's multiple apps to do that and that's where my second app comes in which is clean shot x which might not be for everybody on their mount rushmore of mac apps but it absolutely is for me um for those who don't know clean shot x is a screenshotting tool screen recording tool that's meant to replace the built-in uh screenshots that you can do on the mac with like command shift three four five uh are the shortcuts and it basically does the same things but then like a lot more so i take probably a dozen to a hundred

screenshots a day for my work and for personal stuff um it's just a big part of what i do so this adds up quickly and it's like 30 bucks for a lifetime license like it's very very cheap i should double check that um but i think it's very very cheap and so yeah 29 bucks um and so It has great annotation tools. It has great ways to put like backgrounds on your screenshots. So sometimes a plain screenshot is boring and you can do like a gradient background or an image background or you can use your desktop background.

But there's just like a ton of things that it does and it makes the Mac significantly more powerful in my opinion. And I just don't see anything else in the Windows world that does this with a UI that's as clean and delightful as this. so yeah clean shot yeah clean shot is what i used when when i was doing uh a few years ago when i was doing like mac app videos and stuff like that that's what i was using for all my screen recordings and stuff and it works really well with a 24 frame per second timeline i don't know why you do that to yourself because but yeah i'm not a monster oh my god um but yeah

For that situation, it also lets you like show like keyboard strokes that you do where it shows like animations where you click, which is just like super helpful for explaining things to people. Yeah. It's almost like the app Clack, but visual. But visual. Yeah. I'm so disappointed. Listen to last week's episode. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. It's great. Clack. Clack. a link once more in the show notes.

No, we will not. No, we will not. Matt puts together the show notes and I handle all the YouTube video stuff. We will not have a link to clock in the show. Oh boy. Chris, let me get you back on board with my third Mount Rushmore app for the Mac. Give it to me. Final Cut Pro. Woo! Yeah, okay. Yes. You got me. What a great app. This app is just, it's so freaking awesome.

The performance you get out of Final Cut, I know it's not the most advanced video editor out there. Premiere has interesting features. DaVinci Resolve has better color grading tools and better features. And then you have Avid for people in Hollywood and stuff like that. But my, if you are just a sole creator that kind of does stuff like what Matt and I do, you will not find an app with better performance, especially if you aren't buying a maxed-out Mac Studio or something like that.

If you're buying an entry-level MacBook Pro or even MacBook Air, you're going to get great performance with Final Cut Pro. Yeah. I don't know if they did this on purpose or on accident, but on the very low end of video editing, you can use the built-in tools to TikTok or Instagram or whatever, or you can use CapCut or something like that. and on the other end is like the hollywood stuff and the like the like tv quality stuff which is like again avid premiere uh resolve those sorts of things but there's this big chunky bit in the

middle where you want the powerful tools you want the flexibility you want the customization but you don't need all that crazy elaborate stuff and final cut is just like so perfect for that like i'm it's so fast to work with i think the magnetic timeline is a genius creation i i truly truly adore it and i say this as someone who grew up editing in final cut pro 7 yep same and avid again

in my earlier tv production days um and premiere and resolve i don't use them all actually basically at this point um and i'm you i definitely respect and understand the traditional non-linear timeline but there's something so delightful about how it all sticks together and I can have a full project and I can go into a single clip and just like trim that clip and everything follows and I don't have to re like select all and drag everything to match like it's wonderful so I was somebody that complained about the magnetic timeline when Final Cut Pro 10 was originally announced uh and

because I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I was a big Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro 7 editor, and I was like, why are they doing this? I take it all back. It's so good. It makes it so easy. If you have a segment and you're like, okay, it's at the 5 minute and 30 mark, but this would work better a little later in the video, so let's move it to the 7 minute and 42 second mark or something like that. It's just so easy to drag clips. I love it so much. yeah i it just it works like other things do like it works like text editing works right like if you want to move a paragraph of text from here to here from the like top of your document to the bottom

you just cut it and paste it and like all the white space takes care of itself you don't have to worry about that but like that's how it works with the video video as well and it's not how it works with traditional uh non-linear non-linear timelines and uh yeah i just i just think it's wonderful it's great to work with it's fast export times are obviously one of its specialties but it's very good there yeah it's it's unbelievable and Final Cut Pro works the Mac version works best like if

you have a Mac with a ton of extra hard drive space like Matt was saying its export times are amazing you can leave the background render features on if you have all this extra hard drive space and when you go to export your project it will just fly through you will get great you'll you can do high quality previews of like full resolution of your video in the timeline just hitting the space bar it automatically plays back there's no buffering back when i started doing video editing when you wanted to preview something you had to do uh in premiere you had

to select all the clips do a background render and then you could preview it back and then if you made any changes you would have to do that background render again and keep doing that and then like to cut together things you would do sequences because if you had like a really long video like a half hour video or something like that you wouldn't want that all in the same timeline it's just it's really nice to see how far video editing has truly come in the last what 15 years 20 years something like that yeah it's pretty magical yeah yeah it's pretty great okay i have one more okay and this is the controversial one oh no this is the one that

mike had raised eyebrows but i is it gonna be clock it's gonna be clock it's gonna be clock it's clack everybody i i hope you're joking yeah i wasn't sure i have no idea what's happening so my fourth on the Mount Rushmore, and this maybe isn't as personal as the other ones, but I do think it belongs there, is Google Chrome. What? No, I'm just kidding.

Explain yourself. So I think there is an argument to be made. I don't know if I 100% believe this, but I think there's an argument to be made that Google Chrome saved the Mac. What? So I think the reason the Mac became so successful over the past 15 years or so is because web apps have taken over what people do on their computers.

And the fact that Google Chrome is very reliable, is very popular. It is, as far as I can tell, the only app, maybe Google Maps gets close. It's the only like default app that most people don't. I'm not wording this well. Most people use the default app. We all kind of like understand that whatever's pre-installed on your device, you're gonna use that most likely. People choose to use Chrome. More Mac users use Chrome than Safari, way more use Chrome than Edge on Windows.

Like people love Chrome and Chrome has been very good at adopting web standards quickly and making web apps first-class citizens as well as they can. And I think the rise of web apps, powered in a large part by Google Chrome's popularity, has made the Mac a place where we can have more people using it. People can buy it without wondering if their apps work on it or not. I think it's very, very important in the history of the Mac.

I know this is a spicy, it's slightly intentionally spicy, but... I don't know where to begin. Yeah. I mean, okay, so on the Windows side of things, people used Chrome because Internet Explorer was terrible. Sure. Before Edge. Internet Explorer was terrible. Back in my IT days, whenever I set up a computer, I always installed Chrome. Chrome was the default browser. No matter what company I was doing IT work for, Chrome was always the default one. I can see Chrome being the default on the Mac for a lot of people because, like you said, web apps.

And Chrome adopts web standards way faster than, especially Safari, but just about any other web browser. But I struggle to see your point about it saving the Mac. Because I think what really saves the Mac are creative people. Like, creative people like the Mac. Creative people go to the Mac because this is where all the creative apps are. That's why I, yeah, that's where I struggled to see your point there. So I think creative people kept the Mac alive in the 90s and early 2000s.

And I think what made it go mainstream so that my wife is able to buy a Mac and not worry about anything. Like, my wife alternates. She buys a Mac, she buys a Windows computer, Mac, Windows computer. And earlier this year, she was due for an upgrade. So she was debating, do I buy a Windows computer or a Mac? At zero point did we talk about, will her apps work? Because that wasn't a question. They're all on the web. Of course they're going to work. So I do think that changed how people shop for computers.

And the fact that everything is online is a big deal. And I would contend that if Chrome wasn't there, relentlessly pushing web standards to people so that they could do new things on the web and web apps could get more powerful and apps like Figma, which do power creatives, right? Like that's like a huge app that powers creatives. Visual Studio Code is technically a web app in a way that developers use. I think without that, I don't think you have Safari being pushed as hard or as aggressively to adopt those standards as well.

And I think if you look at iOS and iPadOS, where they don't have that power, or where they do have the power to control what web browsers can do, they're not as aggressive with supporting things and doing things as much. So maybe it would have happened if it was only Safari, but yeah. The other thing I would just add is I've never, I don't know if, I cannot recall a time someone outside of tech Twitter, if you will, has said they like Safari.

- Hmm. - I'm on video, like I said, I'm on video calls constantly with people who are, some people who are technical, some people who are normal, people in my life, everybody uses Chrome. No one's forced, none of these people are forced to use Chrome. They can use it every browser they want. They use Chrome and on the very rare occasion, somebody uses Safari in like a work call. it will get comments like, what is that? Like, I think it's incredible how many people choose to use Chrome and genuinely like the experience. It's not like Internet Explorer, which was popular, despite people generally not being happy with it.

Now, permission to play devil's advocate. Of course. Okay. I'm going to take the flip side of this coin. Chrome is the reason we don't have good native apps anymore. Because everything can just be a web app now. You see where I'm kind of going with that? That, like, instead of developers making really nice, high-quality native apps, oh, well, we'll just make a web app and it'll just work everywhere, one and done thing.

Now, yes, that's going to enable some people to make things that they weren't able to make. Like, they wouldn't be able to afford to bring to, you know, Windows and the Mac and the iPad and Android and the iPhone and all that stuff. But could we, because there's definitely, like, if you go back 10, 15 years, there is definitely more native high quality apps than there is today. There's definitely been a trend that's going down of like, hey, we'll either just make a web app or we'll make an app and put it in like an electron wrapper kind of thing.

So I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm just saying I think Chrome is probably the big reason why we don't have high-quality native apps anymore. Or a lot of them, at least. Yeah. Nelian, I feel like you're itching to go. My turn. Okay, two things. Okay, so I wrote something on my iPad to link up to the challenge later. So there you go. Video viewers will know that I disagree.

that's what I wrote on the screen I disagree when you said like people actively choose to install Chrome is that really true I think it may have been true for like a couple of years I don't know how many times how many years ago that was like 10 years ago or more and that was when the thing was and people were just trying to look for something new.

And then it took off. But why did it take off? It took off because I distinctively remember the Paris Metro being invaded by Chrome ads. Like when I say invaded, like it was invaded. The walls were covered in Chrome logos. the Paris Metro, inside the train cars, in the station, outside in the city, on huge billboards covering buildings.

It was pretty insane at the time to see a campaign this large for a tech product, like for software. It was very, very, very strange. And I think, so Google has had a dominant position and has abused it for Chrome in a way that doesn't validate the take that I hear that people are just choosing to install it. Like, they're just installing it because they've heard of it and they've been harassed with it.

At some point, when you were using Firefox and you went on Google to just search for things as you do, Google would just spam your pop-ups, tell you, hey, install Chrome. Same if you were using Internet Explorer or anything else. Maybe Safari got hit. I don't know. I remember Firefox users being hit with this. And today, of course, there are legal challenges. And I think I'm right on this.

The second point is, and that's, I think, maybe something that Chris said. People are true. What did you say? Oh, yeah. The reason we don't have good native apps today is because of Chrome. Yeah. This is corny, but my reply to this is, no, the real answer is because capitalism. And we've got an increasing number of layoffs every year in companies of all sizes, especially the big ones, where basically there's not enough resources anymore

being dedicated to creating good, actual good native products, software products. And web apps and their derivatives are a very good way for those companies to increase revenue and not spend as much into creating good products that work everywhere on native platforms. And I think today it's maybe less true than it used to be, but I think it's just a huge trend that tech companies have been into for the past decade and more, which explains fundamentally why we don't get as many native apps today.

It's become maybe the cool thing to do, maybe, but I don't think that's Chrome's fault. I think it's larger than that. And also Google should give up Chrome, like, for real. They very well might have to in five to ten years. Who knows how long that's going to take. The one thing I'll say to that, because, again, I knew this was not going to be greeted with thunderous applause by everybody.

Star Wars reference. Yes. But I think on the, this is where I put on my old person hat and say, I've been through a lot of the browser transitions. Netscape was like the browser I was raised on. And it was okay until it sucked. And people were hungry for something else. And there were things like Opera came up in that time. Internet Explorer, if you can even believe it, was a breath of fresh air way back when.

And then Internet Explorer sucked. And Firefox came to the rescue. And people chose Firefox because it was a better experience. It was cleaner. It was easier to use. It was better in every way. And then Firefox kind of got bloated and wasn't keeping up to date with things like people wanted. And Chrome was a breath of fresh air. Well, do you remember the big thing about Chrome, like why everyone wanted to use it? It was fast. Well, it was fast, but when you opened it, you weren't constantly being prompted to install an update.

The very first thing the Chrome team built, even before they built the browser, was they built a background updater tool. Because that was the annoying thing about Firefox, at least for me, was every time, or not every time, but a large chunk of time, I was going to open it and just try and get something really quickly. I was greeted with a, hey, install this update pop-up. so chrome never had that pop-up of install this update it was always handled in the background yeah so we're going long on my topic i'm mindful of this what are you doing yeah i i i stand by it

i think chrome um has done quite a bit of good and there are reasons for the other things that uh I'm not 100% confident with this. I might say there are more great native apps than there ever have been on the Mac. And even if there aren't, I think there'd be fewer apps in general if they had to be native and we couldn't do these more universal things, which can be great in some cases. So anyway, I cede the rest of my time.

All right. Well, I like it. I like this whole Mount Rushmore thing. I might have to think through like my Mount Rushmore of iPad apps are. Yeah, maybe we might bring it back. Maybe we might bring it back. Niléane, what do you have for us this week? Okay, so fortunately, my topics are going to be very short. I have two very small topics, which is why I have two, because I didn't have one big thing to talk about. So let's bring two little things that have been on my mind this week.

The first thing is Stickies. Do you know what I mean by that? Stickies. The Mac app, right? Exactly, the Mac app. There's a Mac app that's called Stickies, and it's built into macOS. And, like, I knew about it. Like, I knew that it existed. I never opened it once. I never clicked the icon in Launchpad. So I didn't know what it did, for real. Just no, yeah, it's just Stickie Notes, sure. Why? And I don't know why, but I started to write things down in sticky notes on my Mac.

You have a task manager. No, it's stickies. You don't get it. It's stickies. You could put like one task on every note and then organize them in columns and move them across. No, this is where you would lose me. See? No, I was about to say what I've been liking with stickies on the Mac is that the windows are very small. you can make them different colors just like real life sticky notes and i like that i can just place them anywhere on my desktop and what i do is that i i virtually in my head pin them to windows on my

mac i'm the kind of person on my mac who leaves all the windows open i never like sometimes i i hide apps but i never minimize apps and most of the time i don't close apps like i always have the same set of apps that are always open across three virtual spaces. Three virtual desktops. So yeah, Stickies is a great addition. On top of that, I just leave Stickies notes on my windows across the three virtual desktops and it's nice. It's just like when

I go to my mail client, there's a Sticky note right on top of it that says yeah, I gotta send that email to that person with the email address right under. It's Stickies. You have a task manager. It's sticky notes. You don't get it. Don't scare her away. Fair, fair. Can I tell you a quick story about sticky notes? Yeah. So back in 2006, 2007, I was doing a film school program, and I had an iMac assigned to me. It was the first Mac I, first, no, second Mac I ever used.

First Mac I ever used was an iMac G3. But this was first Mac I ever used for, like, video production. Fell in love with it, and I was like, okay, I want a Mac. So I started saving my money. But in the meantime, I had a Windows computer. But one of the things I absolutely loved about the Mac was Sticky Notes. So I downloaded a – I did the whole thing where, like, you basically themed Windows to make it look like Mac OS, where you installed, like, a third-party dock and all that stuff. But I installed a Sticky Notes app that kind of acted like the Mac OS stickies, and it actually had malware in it.

It was the first time I actively installed malware on my computer. Yeah, I was a dumb teenager. But yep, that's my sticky note story, and I'm sticking to it. Yay, okay. So there you go. If you're watching the video version, you just got a great stupid bit. Great move. Okay, so that's my first thing. The second small thing, I posted about it on Mastodon, and I've got some responses to this because apparently it's very smart. So I've been kind of sick on and off for the past few weeks.

I guess winter and people and flu, all of that. I'm doing better now. But the issue that I have all the time when I get sick is that I tend to plug one of my ears. they get um how do you say that obstrued obstruited obstructed obstructed yeah they get obstructed and you know what that means like when you've blown your nose too much uh and it takes takes a while to get back to normal um and i've had this especially the past two weeks where i've been sick

like it goes from left to right right to left like sometimes i hear most out of my left ear sometimes out of my right ear and it drives me insane like and i deal with this is usually in life but the problem now is that i have just been too uh obsessed with it and i can't uh ignore it and i remember that you can just adjust the audio balance on your devices on the mac on the iphone whatever going to the sound settings and you've got a balance light on i just add alluring for French. While on iOS and iPadOS, it's pretty deep into accessibility settings, which is very annoying.

On the Mac, it's just right under the sound tab, which is nice. So just adjust the slider. And that's just my tip. For the past couple of days, I can't hear as well in my left ear. So I've just moved the audio balance slider to the left just to recenter the music. And I noticed today that it wasn't as bad, so I had to move it again a little bit to the right. I guess I'll be micromanaging now from now on my audio balance, but I like this better than just dealing with the fact

that all my music sounds off-center. Yeah, this is... This sounds made up, but I swear to God, it's true. I was on a plane. I came home Friday night last week. And for whatever reason, my ears are very sensitive to takeoffs and landings. And they'll pop really significantly. And my right ears, particularly. And this time, I usually I'll chew gum or something to reduce it.

That helps, but I didn't have it with me for whatever reason. So it just kind of like popped significantly more than normal. And when I got home, it was still like cloudy on that side. And your post was one of the first things I saw on social media when I got back on the ground. And I used it immediately to shift the audio slightly to the right to even it out a little bit. It has gone back to normal. It took like 24 hours, which was a little worrying. But I think that's normal. It can take a few days sometimes.

It has never happened to me. So it did not feel normal. That has absolutely happened to me before where it took like a day for my hearing to adjust again. It sucks. I feel bad. 100% happened to me. Yeah, for me, like it goes back to normal after a day. But because I'm sick on and off, I have to blow my nose again every day and it just comes back. Oh, no. Yeah. So there you go. I'm done. That's a very good tip. All right.

We ready for the challenge? Challenge. Yeah. Yes. All right. So it was my challenge this week, and my challenge was pretty open-ended. It was just do something with the iPad. My intention was, like, do a project, do something that you haven't done with your iPad before in the past. I really should have thought this through because it was very difficult for me because, well, I do everything with my iPad. I was going to say, you've done it all. It was actually, like, kind of annoying. So I can go first. I did a few things.

So I was like thinking through like, oh, what project stuff could I do? But I didn't really want to start a whole new project this week. I was kind of busy. It's Christmas time. We've got a lot going on. I was like, I can't handle another project. I originally downloaded SketchUp. And I was like, oh, you know what I'll do is I'll scan my studio and my office. And then I can rearrange furniture. But I was like, what would be the point of that? I'm not going to redo my studio and office this quickly. I love it. So I tried a few different apps and features and stuff in iPadOS.

The first one, and this really wasn't related to the challenge, but I figured I would just include it. I'm back on time tracking. I actually quit time tracking at the beginning of the year because I found it to be kind of stressful. And I was just like, it was like one more thing I was managing and I was never doing anything with the reports. But the other day, I was struggling just writing in general. I was distracting myself with anything and everything I could. So I redownloaded Timery, got it all set up, and put a big old Timery widget right on the home screen of my iPad.

And I was sitting at my desk, so I had my iPad plugged into my monitor. So usually when that's the case, I have my iPad off to the right side in a stand, and I just leave the home screen up so I can see the widget. So I could see the big Timery clock counting right there. And I just work from the external monitor in this case. And that was actually really helpful. It helped me stay on task. And I liked it. I think I'm going to keep going with it. But with the point of I'm not, I don't care about the reports.

So I just boiled down the time tracking to general categories. So maybe if I do do something with the reports, I have a general idea. But for the most part, I'm not going to do it. But I kind of reconfigured my mode cut shortcut, which is one that I use to kind of jump between different focus modes to include time tracking, but also an app called Focused OS. And I don't, have you guys heard of this app, Focused OS? No. No. So the way this app works is you can set it up.

So it has basically two functions, background noises and the ability to block apps. I just ignore the background noises because I've been using the Nintendo online app. It's amazing. It's perfect. It's everything I could ask for. But you're able to set this up so you can create basically environments. So you can block certain apps. So I set up an environment called Work, and I blocked apps like Ivory, Mastodon, whatever, Discord, Blue Sky, Threads, basically any of the apps that can be a little distracting on my work.

So I added this into my Mode Cut shortcut. So now whenever I start this shortcut, it gives me a menu of what kind of work I want to do. And let's just say like writing. It'll start my video projects time tracking. It will put on my work focus mode. And then it starts focus OS. So that way, Ivory, Discord, Threads, Blue Sky, those kinds of apps, they're blocked. So if you open them, you actually get this overlay over the app. And I have no idea how the developer did it. It must be an API. But you get an overlay over the app, even in Stage Manager, and those apps, you just can't do anything with them.

Now, you can go into Focus OS and set an allow time or turn it off or whatever, but it's actually really nice. This has been really helpful to me just staying on task. So that was kind of the first thing I did with my iPad this week. Any questions on that? I'd never heard of this. Would you agree with the statement, this is a killer new iPad app to check out? I mean, I would definitely check it out. I don't think it'll kill you. I don't think Apple has put that API into iPadOS just yet.

Okay. I'm quoting you from their website. They linked your video. Oh, okay. Well, then yes, I would 100% agree with that. Yeah, I covered this a while ago. And then I stopped using it when I stopped doing time tracking and all that stuff. Like, I cut all that stuff out. I was like, this is just getting in the way, but I'm back on it. I like it. I totally forgot. I didn't realize I was quoted there. But yeah, sure. Cool. That's awesome. I like being quoted.

I'm going to quote you now. Yeah. Random posts on mastodon. Please do. That should be a thing. Whatever randomly. You could just be like, hey, Danielle, can you grab me a diet, Dr. Pepper? That could be a quote. Okay. Anyways, moving on. That wasn't funny. Sure. we don't want to encourage the diet Dr. Pepper Doc yes we do Dr. Pepper please sponsor us please Dr. Pepper seriously I've been trying to get them to sponsor me forever and at least with Ford Ford told me to go away essentially

so where are we now did you do something else with you yes let's get back on track so I did other stuff I have had the Obsidian Web Clipper installed on my iPad for a while. I just never really set it up. This is a new app by the Obsidian team. It's just a Safari plugin. And I think they have like a Chrome one and stuff like that. But I'm on the iPad. So plugins only kind of work in Safari. This works extremely well. You can select this and it will take a web page and create an Obsidian note out of it. Add metadata like author titles, dates, web links. It'll add like if it's an article, it'll add the full text in the note

extremely well. If you want to just get a piece of the text from the article, you could just highlight a paragraph or two or five, however much you want. And it'll just add the stuff that you highlighted right into Obsidian. You can tag it, do all the stuff that you would normally do in Obsidian. Works really well. I've been using this as part of my research process lately. Really like it. When you save notes, it puts it in its own separate clipped folder, but you can obviously move that stuff anywhere. Really like it. Have either of you used the Obsidian Web Clipper?

No, I use Stickies. Oh, Stickies. Yeah, Stickies. Yeah. Which is a task manager. Matt, have you? You know, I used it for a moment when I saw what it was. I think it's awesome for people who are not me. I don't really use my Obsidian as a knowledge garden or anything like that. So it would be great. But yeah, not for how I use Obsidian, but seems super cool. I'm working on another Obsidian video. I've been playing around with a bunch of stuff. My current challenge with Obsidian, and I would love to hear from our audience if anyone has a solution.

I know Federico's kind of been talking about this on Connected, where he's been uploading his iOS reviews into Google Notebook and having that AI handle that and he can ask questions and stuff like that. But it sounds like it's limited to 50 documents. I would love something that can do that. But let me upload as many, basically my whole Obsidian Vault and let me ask questions to it because I would love something

that was basically advanced search is what I'm getting at. It's like, hey, let me ask about what apps I covered this year. Oh, you covered Focus OS and all this other stuff. That's what I would love. Anyways, if anyone has something, please get in touch. I don't think there's anything like that that exists currently. I think everything is kind of limited, though. Okay, so the final thing that I've been doing with my iPad is related to 18.2. Currently, the release candidate is out, but by the time this episode is out, I'm assuming the final version will be out.

And this brings the chat GPT support to Siri. So I have been using Type to Siri a lot more lately, especially now that you can have both the voice version and the type version, and there's a keyboard shortcut on the iPad, which is Globass. But now if you ask Siri a question and doesn't know how to answer it, it'll go out to ChatGPT. But if you want to avoid typing the question and then having it go out to ChatGPT and asking you if it's okay, you can just type in the bar,

ask chat GPT. But instead of spelling that out every single time, I set up a text replacement option. So that way I can type in a GPT and that autofills to ask chat GPT, then I can just hit enter, and it'll go ahead and go out to chat GPT. And I can type in whatever query I want. And I've been using this as kind of my replacement for Google search lately. I just feel it gets me better results with better um kind of um uh arbitrate not arbitration but um like sources like it's giving me the sources and stuff like that it's doing a much better job than what google search

does and uh i kind of like this uh but the trick is definitely to set up that shortcut so you're not having to type out ask g ask chat gpt every single time a gpt is a lot a lot quicker to type uh yeah those are the things that i successfully did i did try to set up build like a backup shortcut this is something i've done in the past uh but with shortcuts and how buggy it is it breaks all the time i basically what i was trying to do was build an advanced one that let me back up video projects and photos and all this different stuff to my nas uh without having to do too many

interactions with the shortcut i was just basically going to set it up to run uh you know as a timed automation but i couldn't get the move file action to work it was just bugging out on me i don't know if it's an 18.2 thing or what but i i gave up on that oh bummer i i was gonna say that um on one of our earliest episodes i brought perplexity search to uh the show and gave it a real hard time because I hated it.

I think the ChatGPT web search is actually pretty good as well. Yeah. I'm surprised how much use I actually do get out of it. So maybe for another episode. Yeah. Look, I'm pretty hard on AI. Not the biggest fan, but it works better than Google Search is currently working. So I take that for what it is. I don't understand. How do you use ChatGPT to search? for me i just type in whatever query i would normally type into google but with the added benefit of chat gpt is you can follow up with it so say i'm like hey i'm looking for a french blogger

okay here's a bunch of french bloggers oh no i want ones that talk about the mac app mac apps and then you know it could filter down even more yep and on their web interface they have a new search option that will search the web first and then give you an answer with citations nicely in line oh they do okay they do i don't know if it's for plus only or whatever but yeah oh yeah i'm not paying so maybe i don't have it the other thing i did was i pinned chat gpt in safari so it is always

open and no matter what profile i'm using and stuff like that it's just always open it's always there I can jump to it because the thing you can't do is you can't replace like the safari web search feature where you just in the url bar just type in your web search you can't replace that with chat gpt so you have to have like that tab open or something like that cool you went above and beyond more than one so yeah that's what I did I you know the spirit of the challenge was do a project but I was like I kind of do all my projects already on here so is what it is um those are what I did

those are some tips in there hopefully people get some stuff out of there uh neilion what'd you do uh something uh less impressive for sure um okay so like i said last time my ipad is dormant at best most of the time um but these days i am very busy working on multiple projects at once including design projects which like it's not my job it's not my main job to work on designing stuff I've had to for the past couple of months

I've had to design like a logo and all that goes with that for a client and also for a work project most of the time I work in Figma and in Affinity Designer that's like my two big apps for working on things like that mostly Figma and the issue on the

iPad is like you can't use Figma for real Figma has an app on the iPad but that's it's reserved for previewing your prototypes. And yeah, and for FigJam, which is their whiteboard kind of software, collaborative whiteboard kind of software, which I don't use. I work alone in Figma. I don't have any use for any of their team features, but team features, except when you need to just share a link,

which I do sometimes. So anyway, so I wanted to do that. I wanted to like work on this specifically on the design stuff on the iPad. So I had to think outside of the box on this one. And I went back to something that I'm really not good at, which is sketching, hand sketching. When working on designs, I'm not the kind of designer who spends time just marking stuff up on paper or using a stylus or whatever and just later prototype it and turn it into vectorial shapes and forms, etc. to make it work.

I just, most of the time, I just get right into the vectorial step first and then I figure it out. But here, yeah, I wanted to just open Procreate, which is very famous on the iPad, and try to use it. It's been a while since I last used Procreate. But the problem is I can't draw. Like, I'm really bad at this. And this is why vectorial work is really nice for me because it allows me to draw stuff by starting with basic shapes

and figuring angles out. And that tickles my brain. I like that. Whereas using my hand and a stylus is a nightmare and I can't do this. So it's been a challenge to do that. I wish I could show you some of these sketches. And should I? No, I think it's going to leak stuff. So I should not. Okay, no. Yeah, don't leak stuff. Yeah, don't leak anything. We'll take your word for it. I was thinking maybe there's one, but I don't think so. So yeah. But actually, I'm here to say that it's helped a little bit.

Nice. Especially on one project in particular where I was a bit... I'm still, honestly, I'm still in a creative block, so I'm still like throwing ideas at the wall and trying many different things at once to see where it can go. So I've just added a branch to that tree thought. What's that? Thought tree? That's not an expression in English, is it?

I've never heard of this. Okay, whatever. So just add one. Yeah, no, never mind. Just one way, one more way to think about this. And that's been in Figma using the Apple Pencil and just using a brush that's just like a very rough pencil that you use for sketches. And yeah, that's been really nice. It just made me realize that I can't draw. So that's been disappointing.

But it still helped. I'm in the same boat. Same boat. I can't draw to save my life. Yeah, and it's sad because I've got an Apple Pencil. So it's the second generation Apple Pencil. I got it as a gift, a Christmas gift. a few years ago. And I really like, like, it's very nice to use. But if you don't have any use for it, it's sad. It's just sad. It's got my name engraved on it, so I can't sell it. Well, you can sell it, but there's a very small number of people.

Okay, yeah. No, I want to keep it. But that's what I've done. And there's a lot of things you can do with the Apple Pencil outside of drawing. too like i use it as a navigation tool quite a bit just to kind of like select things select ui items and stuff like that i can't draw either i will use the final cut apple pencil feature where you can like animate stuff on the timeline occasionally but for the most part i i yeah i can't try to save my life either yeah what what do you think matt i know you're a designer yeah so

I feel very similar to you in that I feel more comfortable knocking things up quickly in Figma with a mouse and keyboard rather than sketching it out by hand. I've tried sketching, and that doesn't really work for me. The one thing that does work for me is this thing called Crazy 8s. I don't know if you've come across this idea, but it's basically this idea that you give yourself one minute, you have an idea for the thing you want to solve or you want to implement, and you give yourself one minute to draw it,

and then at a minute, you have to move on, you have to start drawing it again, and then you iterate on it or you make another idea. And you do this eight times, and in theory, it should get you just working so fast and finding ideas that there will be something useful in there. And that, I don't think, would work as well. I like this. I'm going to try this. Okay, let me bring up stickies so I can write this down. Do it. That's a task. Maybe set a reminder on that sticky or something for tomorrow. What did you say it was? Crazy 8s?

Crazy 8s, I think it's called. That's fun. It's possible it has an official name, but that's what I've always heard it referred to as. And I'm moving the sticky on top of the Figma window. There you go. You can't do this with reminders. No, you cannot. Can you? Yeah, there you go. That's spatial computing. That's great. There you go. Okay. Nice. Yeah, that's very cool. I know a lot of people would put Procreate on their Mount Rushmore of iPad apps. It's always one that people love.

That's one of those apps I'm just like, I really wish I could make videos about it, but I, no, can't do it. Yeah. I'm sure you could make your whole channel about it if you wanted. There are channels that are all about that. I mean, there are some really great channels, iPad channels out there about just day planning and stuff with your iPad and stuff like that. There's some really good stuff out there that's not just general iPad stuff like I do. Matt, what did you do with your iPad this week?

So I, as referenced earlier, went on a trip. I was in Dallas for the week, and it was a work thing. So typically I will bring my work computer, because I have to, and a personal computer. And I can choose between my MacBook Pro or my iPad. And I typically bring the MacBook Pro because I just like the Mac. But this time, I was like, let me bring the iPad. And it should be fine, right? It should be great.

And it was 99% great. Oh. Which is good. Which actually kind of sums up my iPad experience very well. 99% of the time it's awesome. And 1% I'm frustrated. So the great thing about it is it took up a lot less space in my bag, a lot less weight. If I was carrying one laptop, it's not a big deal, but I'm carrying two laptops. So a laptop and an iPad is a lot lighter than a laptop and another laptop that's even thicker.

And so it was great to have the extra space and the extra or less lessened weight. I was able to load my entertainment onto it. So I loaded a couple TV shows and movies onto it since I wasn't trusting the hotel Wi-Fi would be okay. That worked wonderfully. I was able to move some files in the files app as well just onto a local storage. And they were just always there. I didn't have to worry about iCloud booting them out. I was able to continue writing on my blog with Ulysses because Ulysses is a great app that runs on the iPad and Mac and is basically the exact same app on both and is lovely.

So that was not a hit. And the big thing, the big project was this podcast. So I am responsible for adding the chapters to the podcast, to formatting the MP3 file just right. And I was worried because I always do that on the Mac. And I use Forecast, which is an app Marco Arment made many years ago. I don't think it's touched in many years, but it just works to add the chapters.

And I use Fission, which is another Mac app from Rogamiba that converts audio files. And so I converted, Chris, you output an M4A. I converted to an MP3, and then MP3, I add the chapters to an Forecast. If anyone from Apple is listening, please tap somebody on the Final Cut team's shoulder. Honestly, I could probably do this, but have them add the option for when you're exporting the audio to MP3.

There is no option from Final Cut Pro for the iPad. You can't export as MP3, and it causes headaches. So that's a little mid-break interruption PSA. Yes, that would be great. So it would save a step, but it was fine. So the M4A, what I did this time is it was in an iCloud folder where we share all the files. I dragged it into Ferrite as a new project, and it generated the project with just one audio stream.

They have a really nice ability in there to add chapters to your project. So I was able to just listen in Ferrite and add the chapters. That's one of the benefits, actually. One of the things the iPad made better is when I listen or when I add the chapters on the Mac, I open the file in QuickTime and listen to it there and scrub through it there. And then I switch back to forecast to add the time codes for the chapters. Don't have to do that in FairWrite. It's all showing me the waveform. I'm listening as it goes. I can see where there's breaks in the conversation. So I kind of have an idea.

That's where the chapter is going to go. Really, really nice. FairWrite lets you also set everything to a keyboard shortcut. So I set up keyboard shortcuts. So once I got to the chapter marker, I just hit a shortcut and added the chapter, gave it a name. And then at the end, I just exported that project. I chose MP3, so I didn't have to do a separate conversion step. And it added the chapters and worked great. I uploaded it and had no issues. So this is the one thing that I think is actually, not the one thing. This is a thing that I think is actually better on the iPad.

And I might start doing it here. Nice. Because it is a little easier to kind of do it all in one place rather than have like multiple apps and multiple steps I have to do. Fairite is such a killer app. That's where my old podcast is Slab of Glass. I edited every episode of that in there because it was audio only. And it's so nice because you could do strip silence and pull everything together, which is not something you can do in Final Cut Pro where I edit this podcast because we have a video component.

And that used to speed up so much of my time. I would love to be able to. Man, if FairRite added video support, oh, that would be killer. But, yeah, I love it. And now since I stopped using it, they've since added 2X playback, which that's the only way I'm able to edit this podcast. When we first started doing this show, it took me like four or five hours to do the edit for this show. And since then, I've picked up, like, I've got my process down.

Like, now it's like two and a half to three hours. But it's still a long time to edit this show every week. So I would love it if Fairright added video support, which I don't know if they ever would, because that's a whole can of worms. Yeah, for real. Fairright feels like it's made for podcast editors. Yeah. Brutally optimized to make their lives easier. I love that. Yep. Yep, absolutely. And it has custom, like you said, it has custom keyboard shortcuts, which very few iPad apps have that.

The only two I can think of are Obsidian and Ferrite. I'm sure there might be a couple others out there, but those are the only two I can think of. And, oh boy, do I miss having the ability to set up custom keyboard shortcuts. I was looking at the Mac App Store if maybe Ferrite, you could install the iPad app on the Mac, but you can't. You used to be able to. And now you can't. I think they let you do it for a while and then they took it away. I think it just didn't work perfectly, but it was pretty good.

Yeah. And also, like, they do... I didn't play around with this much, but, like, you can change what happens when you touch something with your finger versus when you touch it with an Apple Pencil. Yep. I was just going to say that. Yeah. That's such a killer feature because what I used to do is I would have it set up to where like if I touched it with the Apple pencil it would cut and then if I touched it with my finger it would delete or something like that it's been a long time since I've used it but it was some combination like that so that way I can literally just speed through my workflow it was fantastic

yeah it's really great so yeah that's what I did I like this worked wonderfully I think all of us did really good work both of you guys kind of did more of the spirit of the challenge where you guys did like a project and stuff and I appreciate that. There's some good stuff in here. I think we all did great. Yeah. We all get a pat on the back. All right. So, Matt, it is your challenge for us this week. What are you going to have for us? Oh.

I wish I had known that you two would have brought up all the Chrome complaints before I made this challenge, but here we are. Okay, I can't install Chrome. I guess I have the Mac. You don't have to. You don't have to. You don't have to do anything with Chrome. But what I'm hoping we can all do is I'd like us to look for a web app that you can add to your home screen or add to your doc on the Mac that you think is still a quite good experience. So you

might use this instead of a native app if they had one. If they don't have one, then awesome. But the Chrome equivalent is. Yeah, okay. Okay. Find a nice web app you can install locally. I can think of a couple. Actually, I have a couple on my iPad already. Like, I have a few that I use their web app over their native app, or in a couple cases, they don't actually have a native app because it wouldn't be allowed on the app store. So, interesting. I like it.

Cool, cool, cool. I like this. Yeah, that's it. All right. Well, that just about does it for the show. But as always, we have an end of the show question for you. And last week, I said I was going to start a series on categories of apps and stuff like that. And I want to hear from you all. What is your email app of choice right now? MimeStream. Okay. What about on your iPhone and iPad? Because MimeStream isn't there, unfortunately.

Okay, on the iPad, whatever. Like, I don't go on that device. It's a dagger in the heart, man. But on the iPhone, I use Gmail app right now reluctantly because it's not good. But Apple's mail app is not good either. So, yeah, I'm just waiting for my stream on the iPhone. Matt, what about you?

superhuman so neilion put a dagger in my heart and went this way matt put a dagger in my back and went that way um okay so once no you don't know no you don't get to talk about it no no no i'm not letting you put people into a cult no cutting you off right there the only thing that's going to save me is my stream on the iPhone. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. There you go.

See, my problem is I don't have Google email. I have my own thing separate from Google because I didn't want Google to have my, my work email and stuff like that. So I can't even use my stream. I need them to add IMAP support. Well, I, I need them to add IMAP support and an iPad app and an iPhone app, which are all things they say are on their roadmap, but I don't think it's coming anytime soon. I can see the iPad and iPhone app coming before the IMAP support because their whole thing is it's built around the Google custom email stuff.

I think you're right. So I just use Mail, the Mail app, because it's the best of all my options, which doesn't mean it's good. It's just the best of all the bad options. And I think the thing I'm most disappointed about is the categories feature that is coming thanks to Apple intelligence and all that stuff, is only on the iPhone. The categories are not on the iPad, and they're not on the Mac either. What? Yeah.

Yeah, so when 18.2 ships, because that's going to add all that category features, you know what I'm talking about. They announced with iOS 18 where there's going to be promotions and receipts and all these different categories, just on the iPhone, and there's no custom categories either. and there's no, like, block categories. There's just the default block sender option. Just be glad, guys. The feature doesn't work anyways. Yeah. I'll tell you what app solves all those problems for you.

No, don't you dare say it. It's a cult. It's a cult. I mean, they literally make you give them money every month. I mean, it's the definition of a cult. Anyways, moving on. Yeah, so I don't know. I would love a good email app on the iPhone and iPad, but I kind of have a feeling it's just not going to come. It is. It's coming. I don't know. We'll see. But all right. Well, that just about does it for the show. Thank you all so much for listening.

Big thank you to MacStories. We are a MacStories podcast after all. Go check out the MacStories Select Awards. Do either of you have something you want to promote this week? Yeah, I've also got a review of iOS 18.2. Just Like Time, it's a review of everything new besides Apple Intelligence. Federico has a dedicated story about the new features, the new AI features. Oh, nice. Nice, nice, nice. I'm going to try and have an Apple Intelligence video out as well, but it may be next week.

It probably won't be this week. Matt, what about you? You got anything you want to promote? No. Everyone just have a lovely December and holiday season. Oh, that's nice. thank you all for watching or listening or whatever version you do I went into video mode there for a second have a good day like and subscribe smash that subscribe button or smash the like button it's tough to get the YouTuber out of you goodbye Bye.