I'm the Pepper Daddy Now

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. This week, we are sponsored by Jelly. As always, I am joined by not Matt Bursler. He has broken that streak, but I am joined by Niléane. Niléane, how are you doing? Hello, I'm extra well because he's not here. So, which means... Oh, poor Matt. No, I mean, I like him. he's a good guy but we're going to have fun without him yes we are we are gonna have fun i think this

is we finally completed the uh the host duo of like we've had like every duo combination possible between the three of us just because of like timing and people being sick and stuff like that like we're actually recording this episode late because i was sick but because of that matt couldn't join because he's traveling. It's a whole big thing. So it's going to be kind of a weird episode, but I think it's going to be a fun one. It's going to be okay.

Yeah, I think so. We have a couple of, I guess we should say, we're renaming the follow-up section in our show to Tiny Topics because a lot of times it's not really following up to previous episodes. is just kind of a place where we have something small and we'll just shove it in here. So we have a couple of tiny topics. And the first one is Matt was on AppStories. I actually haven't listened to the episode yet. It just came out.

Yeah, I was going to ask you if you listened to it. I listened to it last night. Almost fell asleep to it. But I did not. I listened carefully. There was no mean comments about us. That's what I'm going to report. Okay. Yeah. I think there was a Dr. Pepper joke. I don't remember, honestly. Maybe there was. Sounds about right. Yeah.

But I have to report that Matt is still using three browsers at the same time on his three machines. And that's wild to me. I thought that was a phase. A phase? Yeah, a phase. But it's not passing. I think that's his personality now. He just uses three web browsers at once. It's probably part of the cult he's in. He has to use Superhuman. He has to use three web browsers.

He has to give 20% of his income. That kind of thing, yeah. I'm excited to listen to that episode. I've really been enjoying the series that AppStories has been doing They've been having the different people that are part of MacStories on. It's been really fun. And several of them have made jokes at my expense, but I appreciate it. Do we need to tell people about my new Mastodon nickname? Oh, what is it? Oh, you don't remember? Oh, wait.

Wait, am I going to remember Pepper Daddy? Daddy Pepper? I'm the Pepper Daddy now. Pepper Daddy. I will only be referred to as Pepper Daddy going forward. Okay, okay. I don't even remember how this happened. Oh, it was Alex Cox. That's what it was. Of course it was Alex. Yes. Yeah, it was Alex's fault. It's always Alex's fault. I'm worried that sponsors are going to pull out now. Too late. Time to deal. Too late. Okay.

Yeah. No, no. The politics were fine, but the line is being drawn at Pepper Daddy. Yep. I will only respond to the name Pepper Daddy from here on out. All right. So we've got a couple other things in our tiny topics. I think you put this next one in here, right? Yeah. I put in as a tiny topic, a silly thing that I noticed and that stood out to me in MKBHD's first look at the new Samsung Galaxy's.

The S25, I guess. Yes, that's just the year, right? The name. Yeah, I think they switched to the year because, well, there was the whole like in 2020, they switched to the year, but the thought process was is they wanted to make it seem more advanced than the iPhone because it was a higher number. That's your theory, at least. That was an internet theory. I don't know if I buy it or not, but I could totally see Samsung, especially Samsung, being petty enough to be like, let's make our number higher than the iPhones, and then it'll seem

like we're more advanced. But I don't know. I do think, I like the move. I think maybe Apple should do it, maybe, at some point. Maybe we should rebrand Comfort Zone to Comfort Zone 25, so that way we're like the most advanced Comfort Zone. Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. So the thing I noticed in MKBHD's video is at some point, he highlights some of the new features on those phones, which are mostly like AI features.

They are branded Galaxy AI. And there's a bunch of them. Some of them, like most of them are not surprising at all. They remind us of what Google has been doing on the Pixel phones and Apple is where it's just looking at something on your screen and allowing you to do a bunch of actions based on what's on your screen, basically. Thanks to AI, I guess. But one of those things is, and I posted a clip of this on Mastermind, a clip of the moment in Marcus Brown's video.

One of those AI features is you can screen record and make it into a GIF. And like... You mean GIF? GIF. You mean GIF. Sure. Okay, what's the... No, let's not get... What's the animal that has a long neck? Yeah, okay. It's a graph, of course. So, yeah. One of those AI features is you can screen record and turn it into a GIF.

And I was so mad because most of those little things in life now just make me mad whenever there's AI and it's not actually AI. Yeah. Everything has to be labeled AI for investors, even if it has literally nothing to do with a large language model or any of that stuff. It could be a post-it note on your Mac desktop. And that's AI is now on your Mac desktop via post-it notes.

But you know what makes me mad, especially here, is the fact that Marcus Brownlee, he doesn't pick up on that. He just lists AI features. And one of them is you can make a GIF out of a screen recording. And he doesn't say anything about it. He just sounds a bit bored about this feature. But he doesn't say anything. He just lists it as one of the AI features as if it's a real AI feature.

That kind of made me mad. So I could totally see where this came from. Usually, not usually, pretty much 99.99999% of the time when you get a device to review, especially a new device to review a company sends along like a reviewer's guide and essentially what these are is hey these these are all the new things that are in this device uh here's you know um oh screen resolution change great or uh the camera changes or whatever like like all the new

things in there and it's just meant to be like a quick and easy like way of like okay i'm writing my reviewer's guide okay what was that really technical specification meant to be that or what like what's the um f-stop on this camera lens i can't remember what they said in the their keynote i can go into this reviewer's guide and i can get that technical piece of data that's how i've always used them that's how a lot of people i know and that are in our like core apple circle that's how they use them as well it's like it's kind of just like a reference guide to quickly grab something

um yeah but uh i also know um with i'm not trying to put anyone down here but i also know things get busy and people get tired and sometimes people use those as kind of a cheat sheet to make their whole review based off those and uh i i'm kind of wondering if that's kind of what happened here i don't i don't know for sure i mean samsung has literally never talked to me so i i don't know

what their reviewer guides look like but i wouldn't be surprised if it was like hey here's a list of all the ai features and it just got thrown into a script and he just read it in the moment kind of thing um but yeah yeah i could see that screen recordings not an ai feature i completely agree yeah yeah maybe it is we don't know um so i i mentioned something a little bit ago about post-it notes and i'm kind of curious how is your task management i mean post-it note system going on on mac os are you still using that is that you're still your go-to task management i mean

uh just note noting system so you're talking about stickies stickies stickies post-its whatever Stickies. No, but I mean the app on macOS is called Stickies. No, I'm not using it anymore. Of course not. Why is that? What happened there? So, I kind of forgot about, like, it's the same story every time. I have sticky notes on my desktops, on my desktops.

Yeah, plural, because I have three of them, virtual desktops. And I forget about them. And sometimes I'll just go into machine control. I see a post-it, like a sticky. I click on it. And I'm like, yeah, that's outdated. What do I do about it? And then I think about something else and I leave it there. And stay there for another week. So you're back to zero task management system whatsoever. There was an intermediary phase where I tried Freeform.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, because I was like, okay, so what I liked about Sticky is the spatial aspect of it. Because I can put things in relation to each other. So I can put a Sticky on my desktop in relation to an app. Because usually I place apps in the same places on my desktop. So I thought, okay, maybe I can replicate some of that inside Freeform, where you can place Sticky as well. There's a sticky button inside the Freeform app, which makes it easy to create sticky notes.

And I thought, maybe I can just place stickies on this whiteboard and make sense of it spatially. And I don't know what I thought. That doesn't work at all. I just like the idea of it. No, I totally get it. I would love the idea of something. I don't even know how to explain it. One of these days, we should sit down as a topic and build our ideal task management app.

I know for you, you'd want something kind of spatial. For me, I'd want something that's like a Kanban system that has start dates and due dates. And Matt, he would just need something that's a part of a cult. Matt, you would need to cost $100 a month. Yep, exactly. Exactly. And you need to sign over like your first child. And if you don't have a child, the deed of your home or something like that. Like, yeah, that would be Matt's version. Jelly is a shared email inbox service that you can use with your team without needing to share logins. Customer conversations are the lifeblood of small companies. And Jelly keeps those conversations

in the forefront. Now, Jelly is perfect for small teams because it was built by a small team. But be used for conference organizers, non-profits, community groups, etc. In Jelly, it makes it perfectly clear who is replying to the conversation so no one is stepping on each other's toes. You can discuss emails privately with your team right in that thread. No more lost context, side emails, or even worse, phone calls. Jelly is priced by teams and not by users. This means you

can sign up your whole team and you don't have to worry about additional costs. Jelly has a simple interface that's as comfortable as your email software, but there's no bloated or complicated features that are meant for large teams. Jelly is designed to work for a small group, and it's incredibly easy to follow along with the team conversation that you care about. Don't just survive in an email, thrive in it. Bring a quiet and focused intention to your team email. Jelly, a better way to share an inbox. Go to letjelly.com forward slash comfortzone and use the code comfortzone15 to get 15% off your first year of Jelly.

Our thanks to Jelly for sponsoring this episode of Comfort Zone. All right, well, I'm first up in the document, and I'm working on kind of a series of videos right now because the iPad Pro, the M4 iPad Pro, has been out for about eight months, a little more than eight months now. um i've been using that m4 pro mac mini uh so i've been kind of like really re-evaluating my workflow and like where i want to be because i don't like having multiple main computers i'm not

somebody that like even when i was like a mac person before the my ipad days i didn't have a desktop and a laptop i just had a laptop that i would plug into a monitor i don't like the whole like oh well i have this this super powerful desktop when i'm home but also this really portable machine for when i'm traveling i i just i've never liked that because your stuff is never synced apps are never kept up to date that's what i do yeah exactly um but i have been really rethinking like okay what is my workflow like what is what is my main computer what is my um

kind of like when I sit down to work, what is the go-to machine I grab? And I've been like kind of struggling with that because I love the iPad. The iPad is amazing. iPadOS has been very boring the last couple of years, and I'm worried that it's going to continue to be boring. Whereas on the Mac, you have a very flexible machine, but the hardware isn't something I love using like when i sit down to use my ipad i get very excited when i sit down to use the mac it's

like okay i'm i'm just here to work uh so i was kind of wanted to kind of break down the two workflows with you kind of and and get your input like i i really want to hear your input because i know you used to be big on the ipad and then you kind of walked away from that and you're you're big on the Mac now, right? Exactly. So for me, the iPad is a much more focused device. We've talked, both of us have ADHD, but we have both very different flavors of ADHD. To me, I could sit down on the iPad and I can, you know, because of the limitations of multitasking, I can have one or

two things up and I can really focus on my work. I can block out everything else around me. But the Mac, you have like 20,000 things opened and it's just like, okay, so much stuff is happening. I can easily distract myself. So I'm kind of curious, like, how do you, like, like I said, we have two different flavors of ADHD. How do you handle like sitting down at the Mac and actually getting stuff done? Yeah, I think the thing for me is rather than being able to focus on one thing at a time, what's important for me to focus on something is if there's consistency.

And by that, I mean, I need my stuff to be in the same place always and not having to fiddle around with windows, for example. So having a ton of stuff on screen, it's not an issue for me. And I actually remember that when I was using the iPad only, I kind of hated that I could only have one app on screen at a time.

And I was maybe before Stage Manager was a thing. When Stage Manager became a thing, I was using it like crazy. But I kind of always hated the lack of multitasking on the iPad. Yeah. So for me, like I, you know, I use multitasking a lot. In fact, I've, I quite often ask for the fact to get rid of the four window limit when it comes to stage manager. But I think for me, it's, it's so, it's more like when you open an app on the Mac and then you move to another app that the previous app stays open.

It's there. Yes. On the iPad, when I open an app and then move to another app, it's technically that previous app is still open, but it's hidden. Like, it's not, there's nothing, like, if it was Discord, like, I don't see a chat box moving or anything like that in the background. Or if it's mail, I don't see new mail coming in or something like that. Those are the kind of distractions that I'm talking about. And, yes, I could easily get around those by, like, hiding the previous app than opening something. But I just never get, I just don't do it.

I just click and move. I do use spaces on the Mac, which I do find interesting. I typically have three spaces. So I have like a general space where like iMessage, Discord, social stuff, reminders, calendar, like kind of like your general apps live. Then I have a second space that's like productivity work stuff, which is like Obsidian, Mail, like, okay, I'm sitting down. I'm going to take care of this task. That's where I do it.

And then the third space is my creative space where I'll have like Final Cut, Lightroom, Photoshop, that stuff. And that helps a bit. But for the most part, I still like I can still distract myself really easily. And then like the thing that always trips me up is like I'll go to get Finder and Finder will be in a different space. So I'll click the Finder button and it whips me to another space. And I'm like, I didn't want that. I wanted it to open a new Finder window in this space.

And yeah, I don't know. I feel like Spaces would work really well on the iPad, but they just need to be tweaked a little bit. Yeah, and I love Spaces, which comes back to my thing about consistency. I think it's very easy to have a fixed setup, just like you mentioned. You have your three Spaces where you always open the same apps in each space. That's what I love about spaces. I agree there are some frictions about them.

But on the other hand, Stage Manager is like the opposite of that. Things fling around everywhere and nothing's consistent. Yeah. Nothing's ever consistent with Stage Manager. The recent apps on the left of the screen, they're always in a different order. and yeah that kind of x me so i think for me and i know stage manager is different on the mac than it is on the ipad for me i i turn off the recent apps so on my ipad the recent apps strip that is

on the left side i turn that off on my ipad screen if i'm on an external monitor that's on on the external monitor because there's that extra space but there just isn't enough screen real estate on the iPad to justify having that left side strip. But I think for me, the big difference between using spaces and stage manager, and especially stage manager on the iPad is you have the ability to shift click something and open it up in that space. And that is a big deal for me. So I know I can shift click from the doc from the app library from spotlight, whatever, and it'll open that app

in my current space, which is that that right there was probably the biggest single improvement that they've made to Stage Manager to make it more usable. I have zero idea why that didn't get added to the Mac. Doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. But that right there saved me a lot of headache. That solved a lot of problems for me. Yeah. Do you use, for spaces on the Mac, do you use the ability to, in the dark, set an app to always open in the same space automatically?

I think so. I think right now it's whatever is defaulted. So I think if like, if an app is like, say Final Cut is in my creative space and I'm in my productivity space and I click the Final Cut, it'll whip it over to the creativity space because I don't want those apps moving. The only app I ever really wish that would, I kind of wish there was like a sub setting of like, allow these apps to move between spaces is Finder. Finder is the one that I want to like jump, have jump between the different spaces and not it whip me to the space that Finder's in.

Does that make sense? It does. I have maybe a tip that could help. It's not exactly what you want, but maybe it could help. There's a setting on the Mac where you can right-click an icon. So you can right-click the Finder icon and you can click Options and then assign to all desktops. so this is not exactly what you want because what this does is when there's a finder window open this finder window will be on all spaces

at the same time it will be visible wherever you are but it does mean that you never have to switch bases to get to a finder window I like that I actually think that is exactly what I would want specifically for finder finder it's not you know i don't want um i don't want final cut or photoshop or obsidian or something jumping but jumping between these spaces but finder is is kind of been the big one for me so i like that um i'll have to give that a shot i i think the other thing i want to do is i want to

start trying and hiding windows on the mac when i'm done with them so hiding ivory or hiding uh discord or messages or something like that when i'm done with them because those are the things that i see like oh new content has popped up and i don't use badges so it's i the only app that gets badges is messages for me and yeah messages that's the only one that gets badges for me so like if new messages come in in discord and stuff like that i don't see a badge but i will see it like in the background and I'll want to go check that out and that distracts me but um I do have some apps and

some tips that I've been using for each platform that have kind of helped me uh stay focused and helped me kind of keep my um kind of kind of enhanced each platform essentially so like I said the iPad is kind of my focus platform like if I'm going to sit down and write I definitely prefer the iPad because I can just move everything away. No distractions. I can sit down and write, but I still have access to all my apps. I still have access to all my data. So if I need to reference something, say like I'm writing about reminders, I'm working on my reminders video right now. I got delayed because I was sick, but that video is still coming. I've mentioned in the past.

I can have Obsidian open, but then I can also reference reminders and stuff like that, which is really important but um for me i've been a big user of focus modes uh they have absolutely been killer to me uh in december i want to say december um i kind of rethought a lot of my focus modes and i had a ton of different focus modes for really specific stuff but i actually paired them down quite a bit to be like a general personal focus mode that's on when i'm not working like i always have

a focus mode enabled. And that one kind of lets everything through. I have a work one, which is pretty much my focus mode for anything that I'm whenever I'm working, doesn't matter if I'm writing doesn't matter if I'm editing, whatever, this is the focus mode I'm on, except when I'm filming, I have a specific focus mode for filming, because that one actually triggers some background automations, like setting the screen brightness to my iPad to 60% because I film my iPad quite a bit and 60% seems to be about like the perfect brightness level for filming it uh it

also turns on my my previous challenge uh submission the on-air sign and things like that but uh yeah I actually I I love focus modes I think they are probably like if you're somebody that struggles focusing or has ADHD or anything like that it's probably the biggest thing you could use in iOS and iPadOS and I guess macOS too, they're there. I don't use different home screens or anything like that. But what I do do is I have different wallpapers. So that way, like, it kind of triggers my brain of like, I have this really dark mode wallpaper for like, okay,

now you're working. And then I have kind of a lighter wallpaper for when I'm just like, kind of like, okay, you're not working. You're not doing anything too special. So like, yeah, but focus modes are nice. A couple of apps I use, I use an app called FocusedOS. I think I mentioned it on the show recently. But what this app does is it allows you to block apps while it's enabled. So I, and it has shortcut support. So I tie it in with focus modes as well. So when I enable my work focus mode it blocks stuff like ivory it blocks discord you if you open those apps it actually

has like a pop-up overlay on them of like hey you can't use this app right now because you have focused os enabled you can turn off focused os if you want or you know whatever you you just get back to work essentially it's a funny name it is it is a funny name um but it actually works really well for me there's a few other apps like this out there on the app store as well uh i guess there was a new screen time api that allowed these apps to kind of pop up and essentially it just like you just put in you put in apps and uh urls so what's nice about this is if you go to like

reddit.com uh and you've set that up to be blocked it'll just block that but it won't block all of Safari which is nice uh I've talked about like Nintendo music as my background music app while I love it it has gotten a little distracting for me I don't know why all of a sudden it's I I just I'm not focusing as much it's it's like I'm having too much fun listening to Animal Crossing or Zelda music like I need it to I need it I I don't know it's just something about it like it's it's being a bit distracting. So I've gone back to using Dark Noise, which is just a noise app that I

absolutely love. Friend of the show, Charlie Chapman, nicest guy you can meet. He makes that app. I guess I should disclose, former sponsor of YouTube videos, but I've been using that app long before I even actually knew Charlie. But it's a great app. And one of the things I love about it is you're able to set up scenes so you can take the built-in sounds and make a mix of them. So you can do like rain sounds, thunder, a campfire, rain on a tent.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, and like you can combine all this stuff to make these scenes and it just sounds amazing. And it's not just the same generic rain sounds over and over and over again. He even put in like spaceship sounds from like that sound very similar to star trek but are probably technically different enough to where he doesn't get in trouble um and then the other thing that i've been doing a little bit more and i don't do this all the time but i've been turning off uh stage manager and using split view

um yeah that's the move yeah for the most part like when i really need to buckle down and focus on something, that has been great because it's just two windows. You can't resize stuff. So you don't see stuff in the background. You don't see your doc. Um, it's pretty nice, but there are a lot of times that I need more than two windows. I, I, you know, so that's where it kind of falls down. I kind of hope, uh, I'm almost afraid to say this out loud. I kind of hope Apple takes away stage manager and just improves upon split view uh i kind of hope too i i think they could do

but at the same time stage manager is the way you can get windowing it's the way that like iphone apps actually work on the ipad and there's several iphone apps i use on my ipad the way they could get around this and i've said this before and it drives me nuts that they don't do this is if you're in split view you know you how you have slide over yeah what if they just took the iphone only apps the apps that run that are like nintendo music or instagram or whatever all those apps that don't

have an ipad version just have them automatically open up and slide over yeah totally don't do don't try and make them full screen just have them open up and slide over they could be in the bottom right hand corner like a line to the bottom along the bottom of other slide over windows Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I don't know. I think slide over makes the most sense on the iPad, especially when you're just using the iPad in a tablet mode without a keyboard and mouse attached.

But yeah, I don't know. I keep going back. Like there's things I like about stage manager. There's things I like about split view. I'm very split on the decision. I'm so funny. You know what? I wish I had SlideOver on the Mac. SlideOver is nice. I really like SlideOver, especially for like just quick things. Like I put Apple Music in there for like just quickly like skipping a song or seeing what's playing or like, oh, hey, I really like this song.

Let me jump over to it. You know, hit the little heart icon or star icon, whatever it is. And, you know, favorite kind of thing. On the Mac, the problem is Mac apps don't work well when they're really small. Yeah. So maybe, yeah, it could work with the iPad versions of those apps. I don't know. Yeah, like I've installed a few iPhone-only apps on the Mac, and they are very, very small, like by default, and they are hard to see.

Now, there's this open source project, and I don't remember the name of it. I know the name. You know the name? Okay, yeah, where it rescales iPhone-only apps. What's it called? I don't know. Should I say? Oh, is it not good? I do know it's not signed by Apple, so you have to go in and do all the scary prompt things that Apple doesn't want you to do. I'm just teasing you. It's great. It's called Pixel Perfect. That's what it is. Yeah. And the name is actually localized.

The name of the app is localized. So on my Mac, back when my Mac was in French, it was called Pixel Parfait. Oh, that's so much better. That is so much better. Oh, everything in French just sounds better. Recently, I updated it. And because now my Mac is in English, it was called Pixel Perfect again. But it did not replace the older version, which was called Pixel Parfait. So for a while, I had both versions at the same time on my Mac because they did not have the same name, which was weird.

But yeah, it works really well. It does. It absolutely does. Like, that's the only way I'm able to run, like, these iPhone and iPad apps on the Mac because I'm using the studio display at the native 5K resolution. Or, no, no, I'm sorry. No, because it's Retina. It runs at half the... I don't even remember. Whatever it is. Whatever the studio display is set up by default. Yeah, I know. I've been sick this last week. My brain's not functioning completely. So I don't remember exactly what it is.

Yeah, but same. I've got a 30-inch, whatever it is, 4K display. And iPad apps on the Mac look extremely small if you don't use that app to blow them up, basically. Exactly. Yeah, it makes such a huge difference. So if you are working on a Mac and you're using the iPhone and iPad apps, go install this. Yes, you have to go through a bunch of scary prompts, but I think it's just because it's an open source app that's not signed by Apple.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah. That's it. And yeah, this is probably a person's hobby project and they don't want to spend the money to notarize it and all of that stuff. Yeah, which I totally don't blame them. And that's a perfect segue into one of the things I like about the Mac is the Mac is much more flexible than the iPad because you can install all these utility apps without going through the Mac App Store. And I know you, being in Europe, you get access to all the other fancy app stores on the iPhone and iPad.

But I'm stuck here in America where on the iPhone and iPad, the only app store we get is Apple's app store. So the app, the Mac being more flexible, and there's utilities like HyperKey. HyperKey is one of my absolute favorite Mac utilities. And all it does is it turns the caps lock button into a combination of command, option, control, shift. So that way when you hit that, the Mac is thinking you're hitting those four keys at once, which makes setting up custom keyboard shortcuts amazing.

So like I've set up a ton of custom keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut. I've set some stuff up system wide. Like I have been using better snap tool as kind of like the way to tile windows and stuff like that. So what I have is I hit caps lock, but really it's hyperkey. And I can use the arrow keys to shift a window to the left side, the left 50%, the right 50%. I can go down or hyperkey down arrow, and it will basically center the window. It won't make it full screen, but it just like centers the window.

And then I can go hyperkey up arrow and that makes it full screen. And it's just like that utility right there is so killer that like I can set up my own custom multitasking system that the iPad's never going to get that. Like, let's be completely honest. The iPad's never going to get the ability to customize the multitasking system using third party apps, which is a bummer. It is a bummer. And then there's apps like one of I know one of your all time favorite Mac apps is Raycast.

And I'm getting back into Raycast. I used it a ton back in my M1 Max MacBook Pro days. I'm kind of just scratching the surface of it again. But like there's so much you can do with Raycast from not just searching for files and apps on your Mac, but you can you can do it for that. You can run shortcuts, which I know Spotlight can kind of do, but it doesn't it can be kind of buggy also. But it can be things like a clipboard manager. It can be a snippet manager. It even has built-in AI stuff, so you can use it as a search engine with ChatGPT if you wanted, right?

Yeah, but there's a free way to do so with an extension, or you can use the built-in subscription, the Raycast AI subscription. Gotcha. Yeah. And like the iPad, again, is never going to get the ability to replace Spotlight. Like that is something that is Mac specific and something that I think is a really cool utility and a really nice ability to be able to do is like, hey, yes, there's these core features like Spotlight, like multitasking.

But let me install these third-party apps and tweak them even further so that, you know, me as a power user, I can get the most out of them. Yeah. Raycast on the iPad. They're going to come out with an iOS version. Yeah, but it's not going to replace Spotlight. It's going to be a companion thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. There's no way they can replace Spotlight. It's not going to be a system-wide thing. It's going to be an app you have to open.

I have a feeling it'll be more like a chatbot kind of thing than anything else. I don't expect it to be... I could see it being a kind of a toolbox where developers can start making extensions for that app on iOS as well. Or as a way to access your synced stuff. For example, I use the Raycast for the clipboard manager on a Mac.

And maybe I could access that clipboard history on the iOS version as well. And other things like that. Maybe, like, just a companion thing to the Mac version. Yeah. As a companion app, that would make sense. It would suck for people that are, like, iPad only. Like, they work because it wouldn't do anything for them, essentially. And I do worry about, like, the idea of, like, oh, third-party apps can adopt their private API. Because if you look at the Stream Deck, I know of exactly one app now that supports the third-party API Stream Deck.

So technically, you can plug a Stream Deck into your iPad now, and apps can donate support to it. But the issue is those apps have to be open. It's not like the Stream Deck on the Mac where it can trigger stuff in the background. The apps have to be open. And the one app that I know supports it is Working Copy because that's an amazing app and it works. I love Working Copy so much. In fact, I would prefer using Working Copy on my iPad than any other Git version on the Mac, like any other Git app or whatever.

Oh, really? Oh, my God. I love Working Copy so much because of its excellent shortcut support. nearly on i have shortcuts that literally public that i have a shortcut i i this shortcut is like i i think it's my pride and joy of all the shortcuts i built and unfortunately it's like really specific to me but it watches the rss feed of my youtube channel uh and i have like this whole like zapier push cut system that like it when a new item comes to my youtube channel so a new video gets published, I get a notification. I can tap on that and it runs this shortcut. It pulls the

latest video. It pulls the description. It formats it into a blog post. It takes the description of the video, uses regular expressions to grab just that description because if you were just to, you know, grab everything from the RSS feed, it would actually grab the last 15 items, but it just grabs the stuff from the latest video, formats it into a blog post, publishes it using working copy, and I don't ever have to do anything. Literally, the only thing I have to do when it comes to publishing this video onto my website is hitting the notification that comes in through Pushcut.

And I could technically sidestep that, but what I found is the YouTube RSS feed is delayed a little bit. So if you had it run immediately after you publish a video, it might pull the older video. So that's why I just do this push notification system. But yeah, working copy, amazing, great app. It sounds indeed extremely specific. It is, it is. I think I shared it with Matt and he might be the only other person that used it.

I think it was Matt. But a couple other things that I love about the flexibility of the Mac is screenshot stuff. Yes, there's a screenshot system built right into iPadOS, but it's not very flexible. Again, you can install third-party apps on the Mac like TextSniper and CleanShotX that allow you to kind of push the screenshot system even further. Like TextSniper, I have set up to Command Shift 2, and this allows me to take a screenshot of some text

and it copies that text to my clipboard. So it OCRs it and copies it to my clipboard. I use this all the time when I'm in Final Cut and with the chapter system, so I'm not having to manually type out the chapters. I just set markers as I go, name the markers as I'm editing, and then at the end of the day, I can just command shift two, copy the text, paste it right into the description of the video, and I have my chapter support right there. So unbelievably nice. I thought it was text sniper, and I was like, okay, is it too American and trying to make it into a weapon?

And I looked it up, and it's indeed text sniper. Yeah, it is text sniper. It is kind of an American name. Sorry. I mean, how else are you going to 360 no scope your text? Screenshots. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And then CleanShot X. I know Matt's talked about it a ton. I think you've talked about it too. It's just such a good utility, especially if you take a lot of screenshots or even screen recordings. Honestly, I use it more for screen recordings.

I use it a ton for screen recordings. It's really good at that, I think. Like it even has the option to turn your screen recordings automatically into a GIF. Yeah. And like the tiny editor that they have when you export them, when you export the screen recording, it's really useful. Like it can very easily adjust the video quality, the export size, the resolution, even the frames per second, all of that stuff. It's really nice. It's so unbelievably good.

And, like, yes, the iPad does technically have screen recording built into it, but it is very limited. It is not very flexible. It is getting more flexible with 18.3, though. Did you see that? It's getting HDR support, stereo audio recording, which I don't know why anyone would want that for screen recordings, but okay. And then... Why HDR for screen recordings? The displays. Everything is going, all of Apple's stuff is going HDR, which is a bummer.

Like, I haven't looked into this because I don't use the built-in screen recording system very often because I have this whole top-down rig here for me to film my iPad. But I hope there is the ability to turn that off because HDR record. Apple seems to be the only one that's like, yes, everyone records stuff in HDR. and every professional videographer person is like no thank you like it's just such a hassle it's such a pain and less like the only the i have exactly one video on my youtube channel

that is an hdr and it it's the one that actually got completely screwed over by luma fusion uh but it was the iphone 13 pro max in yosemite where it's i took the i took the iphone 13 pro max filmed a bunch of clips at like the highest possible resolution in hdr with that and it was just kind of to show off what the video camera could do it actually is a very good looking video but like uploading hdr video to youtube for example uh at that time it took it took almost a week to process the hdr video so like from the time i uploaded to the time i could release it

was almost a week uh now i think they've got it down to a couple of days but that's still not great like that's that's not good especially if you have a tight turnaround um so i'm not really interested in hdr stuff but yeah but yeah that's that's kind of where i've kind of come out i i'm i'm you know i I don't know where I'm going to end up. I'm still one of the iPad people on the internet. Like, I love the iPad. I'm not wanting to give up the iPad. But at the same time, I don't want multiple computers.

And the flexibility of the Mac has me kind of going like, hmm, that looks nice. But also, I... It is very nice. I know. But also, I'm like looking at my iPad. I'm like, oh, it's so nice to have a tablet and a computer all built into one. It's like, come on. Like, just enhance iPadOS, Apple. Just please don't make iPadOS 19 boring. Please don't make iPadOS 19 boring. But also, if they have to choose, if they don't, I understand.

They're just getting started. It's a small company. You have to choose. Focus on one OS this year. Yeah, please choose macOS. Don't listen to Chris. Wow. MacOS needs some love. Honestly, macOS has gotten cooler features in the last few years than iPadOS. I agree. I just want them to do something with stage manager. Honestly, that's the big thing to me is that they need to bring iPadOS and macOS closer in a lockstep. So the fact that iPadOS has some stage manager features that macOS doesn't is weird.

But also the fact that macOS got these snapping window features. So like you can drag a window to the side and it snaps to 50% or you can drag it to the top and it goes to 100% full screen. The fact that they didn't bring that to the iPad as well is really weird to me. You would like that on the iPad, you think? Yes, I would. I would love that. Absolutely. I absolutely love that. As part of stage manager. As a part of stage manager, yes. Yeah, that would go a long way to fixing Stage Manager for me because I'm constantly resizing Windows in Stage Manager.

The other thing that would work really well, and I swear this was in a beta for a version of iPadOS, is kind of remembering the scaling of Windows when plugging an iPad into an external monitor. So right now, like it, if you are using an iPad with an external monitor and you have all your windows set up, right. And you unplug it, goes back to the iPad screen. This, the windows, the window positions get all thrown off. So you fix it again. And then if you plug it back into the external monitor, they're thrown off again.

So if they're, they had a way to remember the windows positions based on like, oh, is this an external screen or an iPad screen? the iPad screen, that would also go a long way because I'm constantly fixing windows screen sizes. And I'm just like, Oh, this is so annoying. Yeah. But anyways, that's kind of, that's kind of my, I don't know. That's kind of where I'm at right now. A lot of like what the future of what I do on my computers is going to boil down to WWDC this year.

I, I think, I think that's going to be a big part of it. Nice. yeah we'll see yeah all right well what do you what do you got for us this week um i've got two small topics um i figured matt isn't here so i've got two nice two two points if that's all right with you absolutely i just realized how long i went i apologize i think people will accept your apology.

So, first off, I recently rediscovered the joy of a pair of headphones that I own and I have owned for a while. And those are open back headphones. Yeah, so if people don't know what those are, so if you just imagine a pair of headphones, typical headphones. You've got your two ear cups. Inside the ear cups, you've got your drivers

and they point into your ears just like Chris is pointing at his head right now and mine. Exactly. Most headphones that we use in general, they have a closed back on the cups. The cups have a closed back yeah which means sound doesn't escape it's all towards your ear and there's little to no bleed like little to no sound bleed to people around you for good headphones at least for good isolating headphones at least open back headphones are like the opposite of that

they look very similar but the ear cups are like sometimes you can see through them like they are that open and but most of them they just have holes and air can pass through from the outside to the inside of your ear through the cup through and around the driver inside the ear cup my pair camera is a pair of Samsung so the brand is Samsung you might know them from they

make microphones a bunch of types of audio gear microphones and headphones and what speakers I believe anyway so Samsung S-A-M-S-O-N-S-R 850 I've changed so I'm I'm going to talk about the earcups in a bit. I've changed them. These are not the earcups that they ship with. But as you can see on the back, they've got holes. You can, and if you look, sometimes if you've got a light inside, maybe you can see a bit of light coming through.

So yeah, the back is really open. Have you had an experience with open-back headphones before? I have worn them before. I've never owned a pair. Oh, okay. So, yeah, like I said, I've owned those for a while. And where I discovered them is a little funny because it's from the YouTube channel Dank Pods. Do you know that YouTube channel? I do not, but that is a great name. You do not? Okay.

He's an Australian guy. I love that YouTube channel. That YouTuber is really good at what he does. And he does something very specific, which is he's very into audio in general. He started off by reviewing old iPods and repairing them and hacking them. And then his channel evolved into reviewing all sorts of audio gear, weird audio gear, sort of audio gear.

He likes to review bootleg stuff and etc. sure one at one point he compared headphones and he mentioned these and he was really adamant that they were extremely good for their price and i believe they are pretty affordable can i ask a question here what do you open ear what okay so obviously open ear headphones people can hear what you're playing around you are they supposed to sound better than regular closed off headphones like because they can let more air in or is it what like is there an audio quality difference between those and say what i'm wearing that are completely closed off yeah so yeah thank you for

keeping me on track i think that the what's really interesting about open back headphones is the sound the difference in sound that you get they sound very different i think i think compared to like the AirPods Max or any kind of closed back headphones where it feels like if you're listening to music, for example, the music is happening inside your head, right? With open back headphones, it still feels like that.

Like I'm not going to say anything like hyperbolic, like the sound is in front of you and around, you know. It's nothing like that. The sound is still like centered inside your head, but it's wider. Like it feels wider. Like it feels like it's coming from further, from either side of your head. Like it's coming from further. And it makes quite a big difference in comfort.

Like I find that you can wear these for a longer period of time before it starts to feel like too cramped inside your head. I've got this feeling sometimes when I listen to music with headphones on for hours and hours at a time. At some point, I feel like some sort of fatigue, but like not like a physical fatigue, but a fatigue like I need to hear open air. So you don't get that with these, if that makes sense at all.

Yeah, so I would recommend these because these are very cheap. And I'm going to look it up actually because I didn't write down the price. I think they were really cheap. And that's why I got them. Let me look it up on Amazon right now, for example. On Amazon France, they are 40 euros. Oh, wow. Yeah. These sound extremely cool, extremely nice. Their sound signature is very flat. They're meant for studio workers.

Okay. People who work in the studios monitoring for purpose. They're really flat, although I feel like there's a bit of a peak toward the bass, which sounds nice. I'm all right with that. all of that to say i rediscovered these i haven't used them in a while and they've been nice like feels nice just wear open back headphones and i would recommend them and it's interesting to

use wired headphones for once oh yeah yeah i forgot about having to plug in headphones um yeah yeah i i just got these new headphones they are let me let me take them off so i remember exactly what they are yeah you've got bea dynamics something these are the dt 770 pro x they they were recommended to me by john vorhees after we started comfort zone because i mentioned he made

a comment about uh how apple in the podcast center at wwdc makes you wear airpods max and i was like Well, that's what I'm wearing for comfort zone. You and I both were doing that. The thing, I actually didn't mind wearing AirPods Max for podcasting. The thing that I don't like about them, though, is when you plug them into the computer, they still use the internal battery. So you still have to charge them up ahead of time. And there were several times where I forgot to plug them in before we recorded. And I was like, oh, please have enough battery life to get through the recording.

I like these headphones quite a bit for podcasting. Like you said, they're meant for studio monitoring. They don't have that kind of like, you know how like Beats headphones, like they have a lot more low end. Yeah, they're very extreme with that. Yeah, exactly. They don't do any of that. It's very much a flat sound profile. So like you're just monitoring what's coming in. So I can hear me. I can hear you. The other interesting thing is that the cable that goes into the headphones is a mini XLR cable.

It's not just a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack cable. It's a mini XLR cable. So it's fancy. But these weren't actually that expensive. I think these regularly retail for like $150. And for studio monitor headphones, that's really not that bad. So yeah, that's kind of been my headphone. Oh, I will say, I did listen to our Comfort Zone's favorite album that got you to come back to Dolby Atmos.

I did listen to Dark Side of Moon Remastered. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With these. And via Lossless, because these are plugged into my audio interface, which supports Lossless via Apple Music and all that stuff. Sounded amazing. Sounded absolutely stunning. Nice. Really, really enjoyed that. But yeah, these were my headphone upgrades just fairly recently. Very nice. Yeah, I cannot use those when I'm recording.

Yeah, please don't. That would make my job so unbelievably hard. You would hear yourself, Chris. You would not like it. No, I would not be a happy camper. My partner enjoys when I'm wearing those because when they enter the room and start talking to me, I don't have to click a button to disable noise cancelling and switch to transparency to hear them. With this, I can hear them perfectly fine. Just have to pause the music maybe or lower it because maybe it's too loud.

All right. My second thing is I've been to IKEA this weekend. Yeah, most horrible IKEA experience in a while because we were in Lyon in France. And apparently in Lyon, they have one of the biggest IKEA's in Europe or something like that. There's one start like that. And it's huge.

And it was on Saturday evening. So it was packed full of people. And my regrets were up to the ceiling being in there. Anyway, this made me think of, do you know this Cordis line of product that IKEA has? I do not. I made a confession to you and Matt recently. I've actually never stepped foot inside of an IKEA. Right.

They have them all over Northern California. They have them all over Southern California. But Central California, where I live, not a one. There is the closest IKEA technically to me is the IKEA in Bakersfield. They have the distribution site there. So you can order stuff online and have it delivered, which I have done. But I've never been inside an IKEA. Yeah, this is so weird to me. It's like a staple. I don't know. Yeah.

Anyway, so their line's cord is, I know like people listening to this show, particularly our audience, I know we have a ton of people listening to us who know exactly what this is. So it's spelled S-K-A-D-I-S. Okay, I just looked this up. I do know of this mostly from YouTube desk setup videos. Exactly. Exactly why. This is a returning feature of so many desk setups on YouTube from people who just like to make their setup pretty.

So what it is, it is a board that you can attach to the wall near a desk space or inside a desk space. It's actually pretty smart because you can also use it if you don't want to drill holes into your wall. Oh, interesting. Yeah, in case you're just renting and you don't want to drill holes, you can attach the board, the SCARDIS board, to your desk using clamps at the back of your desk.

Interesting. So I have a pegboard system like this, but you have to drill into the wall. It's where I hang all my mechanical keyboards from. That's interesting you don't have to do that. Yeah. And yeah, just like a pegboard system, like it's a whole system here as well. You can purchase from IKEA all a ton of different stuff, like little baskets that you can hang on the board, little, I don't know, elastics.

So you can hang your paper, tiny bins, all sorts of hooks. And you can make it yours. And I know people like to print, like 3D print their own attachments for the Squadis system specifically. And it's so popular that actually a ton of people like to buy this because there's a third-party community of accessories.

And you can get on my Etsy. If you type just score this on Etsy, you will find a ton of original, like third-party made attachments for this board. Yeah, and I saw this in Ikea the other day. And I was like, I want one. I want one. So maybe I will have one. My partner has one attached to their desk. And it's really nice. It's really nice. So yeah. That's pretty cool.

I wanted to mention this. Yeah. Yeah. I like these. Like I love the pegboard system I have behind my desk. I think it's probably in the last couple of years, it's probably my favorite upgrade that I've made to my office setup. Just like hanging up my keyboards because I can just like, oh, new day. I can just grab a new keyboard. set it up but i also have like a few other things hanging from there like some knickknacks and stuff like that and uh the ones i have they are they're solid metal so like if you have magnetic pins or something like that you can attach it to them like uh one year apple did magnetic pins instead of push pins for

their wwdc pins and stuff like that so i have those on there um yeah i i i really like this this is this is pretty cool yeah i like that it attaches to the desk and you don't have to drill holes in the wall because my condo... You can do both, by the way. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah. I would say if you're going to put something heavy on them, probably drill them into the walls, specifically some studs. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I wanted to mention that and two small things that I've been thinking about about my desk setup specifically.

I've added a scented candle. Ooh. Ooh, okay. What's the scent? And what's it look like? Okay, so it's vanilla. And right now it looks like crap because it's almost empty. Vanilla? Vanilla is my favorite candle or favorite smell of candle. Love it. Yeah, it's really nice. So that's it. Next up, I've got a HomePod mini that I've had for a while on my desk. It's a yellow HomePod mini, of course, because yellow is my accent color of choice.

Oh, okay. Yeah. What do you mean? I thought you would have an orange one. I also have an orange one in the kitchen. Oh, okay, okay. Yellow works too. It's a color palette with orange and yellow. Anyway, but I've only got one on my desk. And I need your advice, Chris. This is why this is... I'm mentioning this now. I need your advice. I'm thinking of getting a second one.

Okay. specifically for my desk so I can have a stereo pair. However, we know that the rumor mill about HomePods is like turning rapidly right now. And should I wait? Considering that anything with a screen doesn't fit into this use case at all. I think the HomePod mini is pretty safe. I don't think the HomePod mini line is going to go anywhere.

So I would say wait, because every time they do, like they don't do HomePod updates very often. In fact, remember they killed off the first gen HomePod before they actually had the second gen HomePod ready? And there was like a year with like no big HomePod. I would say wait, because especially if Siri is supposed to get an overhaul, we know that the current HomePods, all the HomePods you can buy right now, don't have enough RAM.

They're not powerful enough to run whatever next version of Siri is going to be. So if you're interested with all the stuff with like App Intense and actually using the Siri part, I would wait. That being said, if you don't care about any of that stuff and you just want like nice looking speakers for your desk, then go for it. You could probably even get some refurbished ones and save like a couple bucks. Yeah. I honestly, I just want the stereo pair. Yeah. Then the other thing too is they always change the colors when they update the HomePod minis.

So if you wait, one, the colors might be a mismatch. Two, who knows if they will let you put the new one and the old one in a stereo pair together. Maybe they won't work. So you might have to buy two. That being said, if you do wait, you can probably get the previous generation HomePod mini for dirt cheap. But, I mean, they're $100 as it is. You can probably get it. I'm sure Apple has them on their refurbished site for, what, $80?

Something like that. I don't think they would get too much cheaper than that. Oh, are they on their refurbished site? I didn't know. Fairly sure. Let's look this up. I'm fairly sure they are on their refurbished site. because I have looked at that in the past for a couple of people. Let's see here. Shop refurbished HomePod. The thing is Apple has a different refurbished store for France. So it needs to be on there specifically. Gotcha. So on the American store currently right now at the time of recording, they only have the big HomePods in the refurbished.

But at the very top of the refurbished HomePod page, it shows the HomePod mini. So I'm guessing they're probably just out of stock there. Yeah, I can see on the French one, there's the big one as well. Just the big one. I mean, the big ones. It's a pretty good deal. That's not a bad deal. I love. So I don't know if the video people can see this, but I have two big white HomePod minis behind me. And these are the new second generation ones.

They're great for playing music while I'm in the studio and stuff like that. I have had some weird issues where, like, they'll be playing music, playing music, and they'll just stop. Like, I won't say anything. Of course. They just stop, and that's been driving me nuts a little bit. But I also have some first-generation HomePods still in the kitchen, despite the fact that they've been discontinued. Like, they're not supported by Apple at all anymore, and they work great. But that being said, for your situation, because we're talking about you here, because you like that yellow one, who knows what the next colors are going to be.

Who knows if the next ones are going to work in a stereo pair with the old ones. And if you don't care about the Siri stuff, just buy a new one now. Just buy a new one now and put it in a stereo pair. Now you got me worried. I should not wait. Yeah. I don't think you should. I think under your circumstances, it makes sense just to get a second one now. I need the yellow one. Okay. Yeah. Because you know what's going to happen. Even if they do have a yellow one for the next one, the color is going to be slightly different.

You know exactly that's what they're going to do. And maybe no one will notice but me. And that's going to be annoying. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'm done, by the way. That's it. All right. That was good. I like that. I love a good desk setup topic. I love it. I'm working on a desk setup video right now. If you get a scented candle, be safe. Be safe. Oh, I have scented candles. In fact, have you ever heard of candles that have wood wicks?

Whoa. How does that work? So instead of like the fabric wick that normal candles have, whatever that is, like nylon or whatever, This is wood, and it makes this crackling sound throughout the whole... I'll send you a link. Is that safe to have inside? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's completely safe. I mean, it's the same thing as the nylon one. It's surrounded by wax. It's not going to go anywhere. It's just like this little piece of some kind of wood. It's actually... I think it's like two pieces of wood together, and it separates and makes this crackling sound.

Oh, it is so satisfying. Oh, I like this. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, they're the best. All right. But you ready to move on to the challenge? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. All right. So the challenge I issued last week was I wanted us to do something new with AI. Use an AI tool for your work. Just something new. This stuff is always evolving. There's new stuff coming out every week. And like we've talked about earlier in the show, people love to just label things with AI.

So it was a very open-ended challenge. like you could absolutely like just use anything you wanted as long as it was labeled ai doesn't actually have to be ai i just wanted it to be labeled that um so i did something um related to our podcast i edited the show using riverside's uh podcast editing tools so we've talked about we we use riverside to record the podcast but in the past typically what i do is i just go in download the tracks and then put them in Final Cut and edited them myself. But Riverside has been heavily updating their podcast editing tools. And they're actually quite impressive. They're not 100% of the

way there. They're still a little fiddly. But you're able to do some stuff. So like it cuts up the tracks for you automatically. This is the thing I spend the most amount of time on when I'm editing our podcast is cutting up the tracks and then this goes in and mutes people when they're not talking so for example right now neilion's not talking but if neilion maybe had like a bag of chips and was like grabbing chips out of that and the microphone picked that up it would just mute neilion automatically

so you mean i can eat chips while no please don't okay please don't i saw that please don't Please don't. But it takes that stuff out, which is really nice. Also, you can have it set up to remove filler words. So if I'm like, um, and, um, yeah, it would just cut that section out for you automatically, which is kind of nice. Like, it leaves that blank bits. You can have it also kind of go in and tighten up the playback.

So if I did have it cut out the, um, and, um, by default it would just leave that section blank so that would be kind of awkward so you can go in and tighten up the the the talk like like the playback essentially basically it's like smart speed but in post-production uh so that way you don't really have like those blank spaces which is really nice uh they also have the ability to take care of enhancing the audio which did an okay job but I would still rather run it through Hush and do what I do in Final Cut.

And it gives you the option to do kind of an auto layout video cut. So, for example, if you've watched the video version, you know we have like this three shot or this shot with like the three of us where it's kind of us cut into thirds where it's Matt, me, Neelion, or whatever. Riverside kind of puts us in a random order, which is annoying, but whatever. And then there's also individual shots where like, if I'm just talking like I am right now, like I'm just soloing, I could just cut to me. Well, Riverside will handle cutting to those automatically.

So like, if you have like a big group discussion part, it'll do the three shot. If you have somebody just soloing, then it'll just show the one person, which is really nice. Like that, that is actually a really nice feature. There's a couple of non AI tools. Like, for example, it gives you a transcript of the podcast, and you can go in and edit the podcast. So you can edit the audio and video part via the transcript. So say there's a whole section that we talked about something, and I'm just like, ah, this is boring, doesn't work for the show.

I just go in there, highlight the text, hit delete, and it would delete the audio and video as well, which is nice. And then finally, you can export into Final Cut or Premiere Pro, but for my case, it would be Final Cut for like touch-up stuff as well. So overall, I actually really like these tools. They are 80% of the way there. I still think the final product that I get via doing everything manually in Final Cut is better than using their AI tools.

But I could see in a year or so, these tools being so good that it just makes sense to use these to save time in the edit. Just frankly, like, because editing the show takes about four hours. So it's about, it's an afternoon for me. Like, Daniel comes home for lunch, we eat lunch together, and then usually I jump into editing the show. And that's my entire afternoon there. So if there was a way to speed this process up, that would be really nice.

I don't think I will use these right now. I'm not going to use it for this episode. But going forward, I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on it and seeing how these tools evolve. Nice. This sounds very nice. Yeah. And it's also a non-problematic AI, or at least I hope so. I couldn't figure out anything that makes it problematic, but who knows? all right what do you got for us all right so first i asked the serial the ceo of oracle to participate in the challenge and he was very weird about it this guy larry ellison what a weird

guy uh yeah i asked him hey so chris has this challenge where you got to use an ai tool for something new and he said something like citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on we're using ai to monitor everything they're doing via the video so yeah this is a joke but i mostly just wanted to mention this yeah that's very dark very dark that that was a statement i read that and i'm like dude what are you saying and yeah i will have a link in the show notes for people to click and see that

yeah piece of news anyway so ai police state uh has just entered the chat and we'll probably win all the challenges forever. Yeah. But my real participation in the challenge, I had a first attempt that did not go well. So I tried something else. My first attempt was I set ChatGPT search as my default search engine in the browser for a full

week. And that didn't go well? I hated that so much. I cannot state how much I hated it. I don't understand how people, because I've seen, why have I done this? Because I think Matt did this at some point. I did it too. You did it too? Okay. I've seen a bunch of people on Masterdom say that they tried it so i wanted to try it and i tried it and i think it's it's a bunch of small things first

it's the fact that it takes it takes so long like it's very i think it's very slow to find anything um plus it doesn't give me enough links every time okay i think i i want more than that it chat GPT if you enable the search option of course it gives you like at least three sources links and then you can

click the there's more links I believe more sources button that you can click and it opens a panel to the side where you've got a bunch of other links and I think that's not enough like interesting yeah and it goes it goes out of topic very quickly, like those links. Like the first three are very directly related to what I've searched for and then the rest of the links that they give you in this side panel that you can open they go pretty wild sometimes it's completely unrelated sometimes.

There's also the fact that even with the search functionality in ChatGPT, it's still making stuff up. And I don't have specific examples because there has been a bunch of various different examples. And I think it's probably easy to replicate with very simple things. But the idea is sometimes it will try to sum up what it's come up for as results, that search results in the first paragraph,

and it has nothing to do with what the search result is right below it. And I'm like, okay, you're contradicting yourself inside of this very small space. Yeah, well done. I don't know. I really hated it, and I gave up very quickly. Also, I tried to do it both on the iPhone and the Mac. And on the iPhone, the web version of ChatGPT is extremely buggy.

And so if you try to set it as your default search engine inside Safari, good luck. Because scrolling is terrible. opening this more sources button panel. It's extremely buggy. You can't go back without having to reload the entire page. And also I found that it's clogging my history of prompts. You know, the Chagipity history. This made me realize how many times a day I search for things.

Like, very quickly, ChatGPT was, like, full of various random searches. And I found that I was losing interest in having an history at all when I had it set as my default search engine. So, anyway, I think it's not great. I've gone back to DuckDuckGo in the meantime. I think DuckDuckGo is very basic, but that's why I like it, I think. Gotcha. Yeah.

Anyway. Yeah. I think for me, what I like about the chat GPT as a search engine, as compared to DuckDuckGo or Google or something like that, is you can talk back to it and have it refine its search. So, like, okay, maybe my search query was a little too general. Let me refine it and, like, dial it in a little bit more. I think that's what I kind of like about it. But I also understand your complaints are completely valid. Yeah. I completely understand those as well. but I mean I can't do that with the go like I don't see the difference like if you if you like in a typical

scenario if you're searching for something in a regular search engine and it's not exactly right you will be refining your query anyway you will be adding keywords anyway to your search query I think that's something that you can already do so I don't know Yeah, that's a good point. That's completely fair. Yeah, no, I get that. So what I've done, I've tried something else as a result. I've been using Raycast AI on the Mac to write the alternative text for my images that I post on Mastodon.

Oh, nice. But there are. Sometimes it's screenshots. Sometimes it's photos of my cat and photos of landscapes. I've been in Berlin over the Christmas holidays and photos of that as well. And I've got a few points on that. I think it's very useful because especially if you've got a lot of stuff going on in a photo, it can feel very overwhelming to tackle that project. like it feels like an entire project having to describe that photo and I know like there's writing the alt text

for images there are some common sense guidelines for that like you don't have to go too much into the details because that's not the point the point is giving across the main feature of the image so that people who don't have the ability to look at the image, can just read it quickly as part of all the content in their timeline as well.

So it's an accessibility feature. So you got to go straight to the point. And that's why the prompt for ChatGPT, or in my case, via Raycast AI, that you have to use is write the alt text for this image instead of describe this image. Oh, okay. See what I mean? So I've seen people use ChatGPT to write the alt text for the image, and I know that by looking at their alt text

that they've asked ChatGPT to describe the image, not to write the alt text specifically. And I think it's got a good sense of what an alt text is supposed to be. So just ask him to do that. Ask him, ask it, to write the alt text for your image instead of describing it. So most of the time, I think it goes straight to the point. It will highlight the main feature of the image.

It will not overly detail your image. And I would recommend just trying it out. It's really nice. If you feel overwhelmed by describing your image on social media, try this out. I will say, though, that most of the time I adjust the output. I don't straight out copy and paste what it gives me. I adjust things. I shorten them.

I tend to shorten them a lot. Even if it's not overly describing stuff, it tends to be a bit long. So I tend to remove a bunch of words and sentences. Yeah. I struggle with that too. How much do I put into alt text? I try and describe the image as best I can, but I don't want to be like, oh, there's a tree and there's 176 leaves in the tree and stuff like that. Finding that balance is really key.

I like this a lot. I wish there was something I could do like this on the iPad. I'm sure there is. I should do some research. Yeah, using Raycast is really easy because you can just like, I have a global keyboard shortcut, which is Command-Alt-I, which invokes Raycast AI. So I just invoke it wherever I am on the Mac, drag the image into there, and I've got a preset, write the alt text, and it gives me the alt text, and I can just adjust it on the fly and upload it to master.

So that's pretty nice. Nice. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah. All right. Well, that just about does it for this challenge. But Niléane, since Matt's not here, we're going to skip him and go right back to you. Do you have a challenge for us to do this week? Yes. So I've been, I tried to come up with this today on the fly. It was not my turn. But I think I came up with something nice. Okay. I believe all of us, we have an Apple TV.

At least one Apple TV. Yeah. So the idea is just do something with your Apple TV. Because we've never talked about it. And I think it's time that maybe we talk about the Apple TV. I like it. I like it a lot. And it's very vague because I think I don't want to restrict us too much. There are about 10 apps on the TVOS store. So I don't want us to have to fight among each other for which app to review among those 10.

That's actually not the thing I'm worried about. The thing I'm worried about. So I had to completely change the way I used my Apple TV. I had to change the fact that I used to keep it the default way where when you'd hit the TV button, it would open up the TV app because I use the up next queue a lot and stuff like that. When Danielle and I moved in together and when her mom comes and stays with us, it completely confused them. Like they didn't understand what was happening. So I had to completely upend how I use my Apple TV. So I'm more worried about them being able to figure out whatever it is I come up with.

So, yeah, I'm excited for this. This is actually, I like this one. Yeah, and I have an idea in mind. I will see how it goes. Nice. And hopefully Matt will figure something out. Nice. I like it a lot. All right. Well, that just about does it for this episode. But before we wrap up, I have an end of the show question for you. No, I have one for you. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm turning things around. I like it. I like it.

Caught me off guard. All right. This is a visual thing. So I'm sorry. I'm trying. I will narrate the alt text for the audio listener. So there we go. Something will appear in frame. And the question is, what is it? Just try to guess. What is it? Okay. Okay. So something's appearing in frame and it's black. It's a fire phone. No, it's a rounded black rectangle.

It's not completely in frame. Oh, is it a wrist rest? Yeah. Is it a wrist rest for a keyboard? Okay. It's a wrist rest. Okay, nice. There you go. I'm showing it in full now. This is the Logitech MX Palm Rest. Oh, okay. Do you like it? I like it. I think it's very flat. like it doesn't I don't I didn't want a something chunky on my own yeah I've had it for a while that's not new by the way that's very old I have a few chunky ones but that's just because mechanical keyboards are chunky

so you're not so I read something a long time ago not to go off on a tangent because I know we're wrapping up the show but I read something a long time ago and I'm curious if you know anything about you're not supposed to actually use wrist rest like you're supposed to keep your wrist up high but that just doesn't it doesn't feel comfortable like i don't know how that works like there are some like ergonomic uh keyboards which uh are have inverted profiles yeah like they so that your hands are like just resting like this on them in their natural position

uh that's one of the reasons why i like the magic keyboard because it's very flat Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, that's interesting. I am going to have a keyboard topic here pretty soon because I have a new favorite keyboard, but I actually have to save it until after I make a video. So, yeah. And don't forget to try Clack, listeners. Do not listen to Neil Leon. It goes very well with the Logitech MX Palm Rest and the Magic Keyboard.

It's a package. we were gonna make it through the whole episode without mentioning it i was like i was like oh my god we're gonna make like when i was typing up the mac topic in my in uh in the show notes and stuff i was like neilian's gonna mention clack and i was like we got to the end i was like okay she didn't mention clack okay and then i saw you had desk setup stuff in your topic i'm like oh she's gonna sneak in clack she didn't then we got to the very end of the show it's all right it's all right i love it no i absolutely love it all right well thank you all so much for listening uh thank you

Jelly for sponsoring this episode of Comfort Zone. Thank you to MacStories for having us. We are a MacStories podcast. After all, go check out the other podcasts and writing. Neilion does writing over there. Go check all that stuff out. Neilion, do you have anything you want to promote this week? Not specifically. I will have a review of an update to an app that's been out for a while, but it's really nice nice nice i should have at least one video out by the time this episode airs i don't

know which one it's gonna be it's been a really weird week i've had a very strong cold and i've been on uh dayquil and nyquil so it's been a very uh hallucinating week um but yeah i think you all should check out app stories with matt yeah oh yeah we mentioned that right matt was on my app stories yes yeah i haven't listened to it yet it is next in my queue uh i'm excited to check it out so yeah go check that out all right thank you all have a good day