I'm Making It Cold

This is Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing the host, well, outside of their comfort zone. This episode is sponsored by ListenLater.net. I'm Christopher Lawley, a YouTuber, now podcaster, and each week I am joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing spectacularly today. Ooh, okay, I like that. And we're also joined by Niléane every week. Niléane, how are you doing? I'm doing all right. Okay. All right. Not as spectacular as Matt, just all right.

Spectacular is a big word. It is a big word. I feel like Matt's coming in with this really high level of energy, and I just woke up an hour ago, so I'm not quite there yet. But we have some stuff to talk about. Matt, you're first in the show doc. You want to go first? Absolutely. So this week I am bringing a number of apps all related to your menu bar. So for those who don't know, Chris, you may want to pay attention since the iPad doesn't have one of these.

Menu bar is a wonderful place on the Mac where you can I think of it kind of like a control center. It's a control center where you can have little utilities that do things on your computer. A few on mine are CleanShot. I use that for some of their more advanced screenshot features that I don't know what keyboard shortcuts for. I use it for AirBuddy, which makes it easy to pair headphones and different devices to your Mac. And it's just really nice to have those things up there. But the problem is that apps can put things up there, and a lot of apps do put things up there.

And that includes things like Adobe Creative Cloud has a non-removable, non-optional icon up there that it'll just always display and always has news that the news is actually nothing. The news is there's some new Adobe thing. And eventually, if you use a Mac long enough and you're a more power user feature, or probably anyone actually, just because of how many apps do this, you're going to have a whole bunch of things up there in the menu bar. and it's kind of a mess and especially if you have a newer macbook that has a notch you don't have space for all these things and so there are kind of a ton of apps that let you try to take control

of this and they all do it in pretty similar ways but i think for a long time the best app out there has been bartender that's kind of been the agreed upon best app for doing this and they released version five i think a few months ago it's it's so so so feature rich it's been around forever and there was a bit of drama i guess around bartender uh recently when it was revealed through not them telling their users not the uh new owner or the old owner saying anything it was discovered that the app had sold to somebody else and somebody else was making it and this rubbed a

lot of people the wrong way. It rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn't I wasn't super thrilled about it. And this made me go, hmm, maybe I should look for alternatives to Bartender because this Bartender, I think, is fairly priced. It's $22 for a license. I think it's like 40 some dollars for a lifetime license. So it's not the most expensive thing. And for something that's going to make your computer better all the time, it's not the worst. But I started looking for some alternatives. And tons and tons of options out there.

So a couple of the ones that I thought were worth bringing up today were there's one called hidden bar, which I think is probably what I would say is the go to recommendation for a lot of people. It's completely free. It's open source as well. So you can check the code if you want to make sure that it's not doing anything funny. And or, you know, someone who can understand code can do it and hopefully find those things. And you can download it either from GitHub or from the Mac App Store. So whichever you prefer is pretty good there.

I guess I'll stop before I go any deeper on this. Do either of you use apps like this? I was telling you before we started recording, it is funny because I am currently finishing up a story that should be up by the time this episode is out on the site on MacStories.net where I'm rounding up, just like you, some of my favorite bartender alternatives on the Mac. And I am using, I was using Bartender, and just like you, the story wrote me the wrong way.

And I was looking for something else. And yeah, you can check out the story on the site, and I have found out about a bunch of options. Back in my Mac days, I definitely used Bartender. I loved Bartender. There's so many cool things you could do with it. Like one of my favorites was when I had a MacBook Pro. I set it up to where it only showed the battery app icon when I was either on battery or it was when it was charging, but it wasn't charging and wasn't at 100%. If it hit 100% while plugged in, it would just hide the battery icon, which I loved.

Like it would clean up the menu bar. It just worked out really well. There was a lot of really cool things you can do with it. Love Bartender. Like the two of you, this story rubbed me the wrong way. If I was still a Mac user, I would have uninstalled Bartender. Because as far as I'm aware, at least the last time I saw the story, which was before WWDC, because I've been busy, we still don't know who officially bought Bartender. Is that correct? Oh, we do. Oh, we do. now yeah they i think people on reddit figured it out and then the original the original owner original developer wrote like a blog post that kind of explained the situation and everything

so i think we do know i forget who it is i should have looked it up but we do know who it is okay but yeah it wasn't clear so to me this should have been disclosed when the when it was sold and i don't put this on the original developer because a lot of times there this is on the new new developer this 100% on the new developer. They should have had a blog post that came out and said, hey, we are the new owners of Bartender. Here's our roadmap. Here's our vision. That's the thing that you do when you buy software. That's what should have happened. They should have done that. I've only vaguely spoken to the original Bartender developer very vaguely over email. I don't think I've ever had

met him in person at any event or anything like that i'm pretty sure we just spoke a couple of times over email um i like the bartender app but yeah this would have been too much for me and i would have uninstalled it because not knowing who owns it not knowing what they're doing and the big issue is bartender in order to do menu bar stuff you have to do some really hacky things like have full access to constantly be able to record the screen. So that way they can put items in the right spot all the time.

And that's one of those things like if you trust the developer, fine. But if you don't even know who the developer is, that's a little scary. Yeah. So these are very much the feelings I had as well. And so I, yeah, like you said, I did uninstall Bartender and I started trying out these other apps. Another two that I actually thought were pretty cool were Vanilla. This is from the same developer who makes Rocket for macOS, which is a way to use the Slack style emoji on your Mac anywhere.

So I love Rocket. I don't even use the paid features, but I actually bought that because I liked it so much. And Vanilla is kind of the same deal. It's free. You can totally use the features for free. there's a couple extra things if you want to pay for it but the normal option gives you kind of the basic stuff that you'd want uh there's also one called ibar uh that's on the app store and the one unique thing about ibar that made it appealing to me is that it does the special thing that bartender does where you can have it when you like hover over the blank space in your menu bar it shows the hidden items below the menu bar which if you're on a mac with a notch especially is really helpful

because they don't get cut off by the notch. So you can see everything all the time. And I think Bartender was the first to do that, but it looks like iBar is an option if you want to do that today. And that's like two or three bucks on the App Store. But the twist to this is I'm staring at my Mac right now. I have a lot of items hidden, and I'm doing it with Bartender. I reinstalled Bartender. Oh, so that's your twist.

Okay. That's my twist. So I don't know how much we want to get into this, but again, I felt the feelings. I was like, this is not how I would have wanted this change of ownership communicated. I would have liked it more clear, even if it was in a release of the app where they update the app and they say, like, hey, we just sold the app or whatever. And then I was kind of looking at these other apps and I was looking at other apps in my applications folder on my Mac.

And I was like, I don't know who any of these developers are. Like maybe 5% of them. I even know the company name if they're not one of like Adobe or one of those companies. But like, I don't know most of these people. If they changed ownership, who knows? I would have no idea. and so while it did annoy me and bother me how they communicated it ultimately it was two things it was i tried these other apps and while they did do the job i still did like bartender more

and i'd already paid for it so it was effectively free to like keep using it and i wasn't sure how much I was actually upset in the long run about how they didn't communicate the ownership change. And I'm willing to be told why that's wrong and I should be more upset. But I guess if I'm being completely honest, it didn't bother me as much the longer I thought about it. So I don't know if that

resonates at all or if uh but yeah that's that's where i landed on it yeah i can i can see that like for me bartender and these kinds of apps that require uh very heavy-handed security permissions to do things like constantly record your screen i kind of want to be able to know who the developer is behind that and be able to trust that they're not doing anything um bad with that information

in our circle we know indie developers we know a lot of indie developers indie developers aren't interested in selling your information they usually sell their app you know for a fee and that's how they make their money so i would not not to say that the new owner of bartender is going to do that but i would be a little more wary if i didn't know who was owning this there are a few companies out there where their whole business model is we're going to go buy uh really established apps we talked about it a couple weeks ago with filmic they got bought and the app is basically kind of

in maintenance mode and it has a really almost kind of scammy subscription model now where like the default subscription is weekly uh so that's one of those things that that kind of um makes me a little wary uh but ultimately like i so i have this mac mini now and i don't have a bartender like app installed on it i just have a few things in the menu bar uh it's control panel volume shortcuts screen mirroring uh jump desktop and there's a riverside icon in there as well for some reason uh i don't know why riverside has a menu bar icon um but ultimately like i i get the need

to be able to clean up the menu bar i'm kind of surprised apple hasn't made a utility like this already i i would feel weird about using the new bartender but we do know who the developers are and as long as they're on the up and up i get you know it'd be fine but the just the permission levels it needs that's the thing that that kind of makes me take a step back and go not not sure about this for sure i guess that's kind of not to make it a mac versus ipad thing but like that's one of the differences right between apple's oldest platform the mac and

their newer ones on their newer ones i think what they would say is you should not you should not be able to because something like this could happen where someone could potentially abuse these permissions we're not going to make them available to you or we're going to take many many years to do it to like get it into a spot that's like exceptionally safe whereas on the mac like i guess from my perspective i can see the risks i can understand the risks and then i can choose to still do it anyway yeah um which again is just is one of the things it's a a difference between the platforms but i totally understand why while this was okay for me uh personally you guys or other

people i'm sure other people listening to the show uh would be like no it's that's a deal breaker you you lost trust in an app that needs trust. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And on that kind of same note, like there are things I really want the iPad to be able to do, but like a clipboard manager, I would want a clipboard manager desperately on the iPad. But until Apple puts out an API or does one themselves, we can't get a clipboard manager because it's against the app store rules. And because it's against the app store rules, I can't have a utility that's really important to the way I work.

I've built kind of a shortcut to get around it, but I still have to manually run it. I can't have anything constantly watching my clipboard. And that's the kind of thing I would give up a little bit of privacy for that. If there's an app that's trusted or a developer that's trusted out there for a clipboard manager. But until Apple makes an API and App Store rule changes, I can't do anything with that. So, yeah. um i so i'm surprised that your twist matt was that you are still using bartender um in my story on the side i also have a twist so i've selected a few of my favorite alternatives

some of them are the same ones that you mentioned and but at the end i explained how i am no longer using anything to manage my menu bar in the end. So what I did is I discovered a command line thingy on macOS that lets you reduce the spacing between icons in your menu bar. And the result is that you can make your menu bar super compact, like in the old days, like in the before Big Sur days.

And in my case, combining that with hiding a bunch of apps in the menu bar, because a lot of many apps do like to have an icon in the menu bar, but a lot of them actually let you hide their icon and still run in the background. So if you combine that with this command that lets you reduce the spacing in the menu bar, You can actually make it work without having to use any utility.

So yeah, that's another option. And that was my twist. We have two twists. I love it. This episode of Comfort Zone is brought to you by ListenLater.net. ListenLater gets you through that big pile of articles you've been saving to read later. I actually use ListenLater myself and have gotten tons of value from it. With ListenLater, you can enjoy more of your reading list by listening to the articles that you saved. And how it works is really easy. When you find something you want to listen to, just email the URL to your Listen Later account. Listen Later will use the latest and greatest AI models to turn that article into a spoken narrative with amazingly realistic voices.

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Our thanks to Listen Later for their support of Comfort Zone and of Mac Stories. I have something that most people probably wouldn't expect. I have a Windows PC. Heck yeah. So before I go too deep into this, a little background on me. I started my computing life putting together computers when I was like six or seven with my dad. We would literally buy computers from yard sales and fix them up and stuff like that.

Then my dad got a job in IT and I would work on computers, you know, in my summers and stuff like that. All of my computers up until I got my very first Mac were home hand-built computers by myself or my dad. Like none of the computers were ever like we went to Best Buy or CompUSA or Fry's or whatever computer store that you could think of. We never went to one of those and bought a computer. We always put together themselves. So very familiar with Windows.

I also spent nine years just kind of after I dropped out of college, I got a job in IT. Did that for about nine years before I quit to ultimately be what I do today. So very familiar with Windows. And when I left my IT job, I said Microsoft and I were on a break. I didn't have an Xbox at the time. I was like, I was just done dealing with Windows. I was done dealing with Microsoft products. I was so tired of the fiddliness of everything. I wanted a break from all that.

It had been most of my life. And obviously by that time, I was very, very into Apple stuff. But then, you know, a couple years later, I got an Xbox. I'm like, okay, Microsoft, our break is over, but not just for the Xbox stuff. Not for Windows. Well, I guess our break is officially over. Because we were on a break. Sorry, that reference is literally for my girlfriend. Millennials around us are losing their minds. Yes. So I have here a Lenovo Legion Go.

This is Lenovo's handheld gaming PC. Think of it like a Switch but running Windows. And this thing is really cool. I love this thing. It runs Windows 11. This is the first time I've ever used Windows 11. It's weird that everything in the dock is in the middle now and not off to the side. It's breaking my brain. But Windows 11 is interesting. Didn't spend a ton of time in that. I tried to spend most of my time playing games on it.

So Lenovo Legion Go, it has their own Lenovo Legion OS or app thing that kind of lays on top of Windows. And ideally, you're probably never supposed to see Windows in the background. You can just go through the Lenovo thing to install games or go to Steam or go to the Xbox Game Store or whatever. But you absolutely can exit that and get into Windows. Hardware-wise on the Legion Go, it's incredibly beautiful. It's big. It is massive.

It's like an 8.8-inch screen. The screen itself is not OLED, but it is one of the most beautiful screens I've seen in any handheld. absolutely love the display the controllers are massive which are great for my big hands but they are not very ergonomic they they actually get quite uncomfortable to hold for a long period of time uh so like if you're playing games for like more than like two hours like it's gonna kind of get uncomfortable because this thing is also heavy too uh when i heard that i was like it's a handheld

how heavy can it be no it's it's bulky like it's if you're playing games for a couple hours it's like doing a workout it's it's bad it's massive um it but it has beefy hardware in it it's got 16 gigs of ram flash storage it's got the uh uh z1 extreme chip from amd like it's it's it's beefy hardware it can play games at high frame rates and stuff like that like i was playing uh Fallout 4, I installed the high texture package, I was getting 60 frames per second, but I was keeping the resolution at a 1200 by 800, so lower than 1080p, but the screen itself is like 2560 by

1600. Wow, I could not say that. That was so weird. My brain could not say that. The screen itself but then it does this thing where like if you run it at a lower resolution it kind of it's kind of almost like a retina display where you run it at the lower resolution but it like doubles the pixels for you so it kind of like emulates a higher resolution but while still stuff on the screen is big so you can read text and stuff like that but it makes everything sharper really nice uh

It really helps with the screen and the quality. And because you're running the game technically at a lower resolution, it helps with performance. Because again, this is a handheld. It does have a fan on it, and the fan is loud. The nice thing, it is very customizable. So you can control the fan speeds. You can control all sorts of different things. There's a control panel right in there that you can do. You can set it up so that you can constantly see your frame rates and performance. what the GPU is doing and the CPU and memory and all that stuff. You can even go into the BIOS. And like one thing I did was I gave myself extra virtual RAM. I think it can go up to eight gigs

of virtual RAM now. So you can do that. Like it's very customizable, but there lies the issue. I love this thing. I'm somebody I've talked about in the last couple episodes. Like I really want a handheld portable gaming device because that's just what my life needs right now i can't sit in front of a tv for hours playing video games but this thing is so fiddly in like the best and worst possible ways so the other day i had about three hours in the day where i could play video games

it was like i had a bunch of free time i was so excited but i spent half that just trying to configure the settings for uh i was playing i was trying to play starfield and uh i spent half that time trying to configure the settings in starfield and the settings on the legion go just to get it to run at a good frame rate uh and that is a much newer game but those are the games i i've been enjoying playing lately there's starfield fallout those bethesda rpgs i just finished up uh replaying skyrim on the xbox not too long ago like i've been kind of going back and revisiting these but like i had three hours and i spent most of that time trying to get this thing to run properly

whereas if i would have just booted up the xbox you know any updates aside i could have just been right into the game playing the game so it's kind of a little disappointing on that aspect it also has really terrible battery life if you're playing really modern games and like by the fiddly stuff What I mean is, like, Starfield, for instance. I was just randomly walking around, and all of a sudden, my character would pull out their gun and just start shooting randomly. My finger wasn't even on the trigger.

I did a little bit of searching around, and it turns out that's just a known bug. And I'm just like, oh, that's annoying. That kind of makes this game unplayable, because now you could just be in a populated area, like in a town or something. And you just start shooting people, and then you're going to have to deal with all the security and repercussions from that. And I'm like, that's not great. And then, like, when I was playing Fallout, there is no, because you're playing with a controller, there's no aim assist. Because it's the PC version of Fallout, and they're expecting you to play with a keyboard and mouse. So, even if there is aim assist, it's turned down so low, and I could not find a setting to tweak it at all.

So, like, it was really hard to shoot in Fallout with a controller on the PC version. Whereas on the console version of Fallout, I can just whip around and I can take out a whole bunch of people without ever using the VAT system or anything like that. So I'm just like, I'm kind of a little down on it right now. I wanted to come here and be like, all my gaming problems are solved. All of my stuff. I can play games. I can play whatever I want, whenever I want. But playing big AAA games, which are kind of a lot of games that I enjoy playing.

Like there's a new Star Wars game coming out later this year, Star Wars Outlaws, that I'm excited for. And I was like, okay, I'm just going to play it on the Legion Go. But honestly, I'm kind of leaning to returning the Legion Go right now because of just how fiddly it is in nature. How much I have to tweak it just to get the games to run right. And even when I do get the games to run right with stuff like Starfield, my character is just randomly pulling out their gun because it's a bug. And it's just going off.

And I don't have enough time in the day to sit here and play with, you know, PC settings and stuff like that. Yeah, I was hoping this would solve all my issues. But I think the thing I'm going to end up waiting for is a true proper Xbox handheld that's running Xbox games and stuff like that. I think that's going to be the thing I end up waiting for. Yeah, and I guess, so, like, those games that you played, were those purchased through the Xbox storefront?

Starfield was purchased through the Xbox storefront. So, if you have the Xbox Game Pass thingamajigger, there is a version of it that's called Xbox Play Anywhere. So, certain games will give you not just the Xbox version, but also the PC version, and your save files will sync. achievements will sink all of that stuff so starfield was through the xbox one fallout was through steam because i was like oh let's give steam a try because that's where all the pc gamer people go um so and i'm still having some issues with it so i i've tried multiple different stores but ultimately i think it is going to come down to me just waiting for a proper xbox handheld

yeah that's super so i have a steam deck i have a steam deck oled and i adore it so So I've had the original Steam Deck, and then I got the OLED a year or so ago. And definitely understanding the limits helped me, because there's some games that just won't run. I tried to play Baldur's Gate 3 on mine. It technically runs, but only if you like 20 FPS and the lowest resolution possible.

And a bunch of other games just don't play well. But a lot of indie games play well. A lot of old games play incredibly well. And so, yeah, that's one of the things that kind of helped me. Another thing that would, I think, help your problem of fiddling with the Steam Deck is that because the Steam Deck is kind of the market leader in this PC handheld space. A lot of games ship with presets made for the Steam Deck so that it just runs fine. And you can continue to tweak. but you kind of get decent performance by default without having to go crazy but the reason i asked about where like those games came from where your games come from is that while you can kind of

similarly boot back into like a linux desktop and then do these kind of other storefronts it's really the best experience when you're using steam so yeah i'm personally very invested in steam but if you're not you're not going to get kind of the ecosystem like as much as i'm locked into apple's ecosystem i'm almost more locked in the steam's ecosystem which is a whole other conversation but like yeah if you're in steam steam deck is awesome and i think addresses some of the issues you had but if you're not then yeah for you i would definitely be praying for every xbox event that they finally show that handheld that they're very clearly teasing yeah they've been teasing it for a

while so i'm i'm kind of in that boat because like you said you're you're kind of locked into steam and Apple I'm locked into Apple and Xbox because I've been playing Xbox has kind of been my go-to console since the 360 when this generation of consoles came out I did try going over to the PlayStation 5 but then Starfield was announced and it was going to be Xbox only and I was just like yep nope getting an Xbox because that looked amazing and then it came out and well that's another story but uh I

actually the new updates have been really good for Starfield and the the new DLC looks pretty So I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and I'm definitely going to revisit it again. But I think I'm just going to go back to my Xbox Series X. I will play games when I have time, when nobody else is home, or if my girlfriend's in bed or something like that. I will play games then. I just, yeah, the fiddliness of the handheld is the thing that bums me out. I knew I wasn't going to be able to get a 4K image running 60 frames per second.

That was obvious. I was totally okay with the 1200 by 800, but kind of like up-res resolution. If I could get like 40 to 60, even if it was 30 frames per second, I was going to be okay with that. But it's just, you know, every game that I've played, it seems to be like there's some bug in it that makes the experience, like it's fine, you can live with it, but it's just not as fun to play when I could just boot it up on my console and play it. And like I said, I mean, I have games.

I pretty much have always done digital downloads, at least since the Xbox One. I did it a bit with the Xbox 360 because I had one of those ones with the big hard drive in it. But so I have a huge library of games that I can play. And I just don't really want to go back and rebuy all of those. That's why I really didn't even consider the Steam Deck OLED. I kind of was just like, OK, we're going to go with something that's Windows based. So I can also have the Xbox Game Store because I would have access to the Xbox Game Pass stuff, any of the Xbox Play Anywhere stuff that synced from both your purchases and to the PC and stuff like that.

So, yeah, it's a bummer. I really, really wanted this to work. I have until the 30th before I have to return it. So I'm still fiddling with it. I'm still trying to make it work. But right now, I was hoping I would come to the store and be like, all my video game stuff is solved. I'm so happy. Like, I had plans of doing the Federico thing where I was going to buy an eGPU and use Moonlight to stream it to my iPad and all that stuff. So I could have an even bigger screen and an OLED screen.

But right now, I'm just kind of like, this just doesn't quite work to the level that I want. And the level that I want is just, I don't want to have to constantly be fiddling with it. I just want to be able to sit down and play video games because that's how I de-stress. Damn, you nerds. How dare you? Yeah, so that's kind of all I've got with this, unless you guys have any questions. You didn't want to go to the Mac, but you went to Windows instead.

How dare you? Yeah, well, there's no video games on the Mac, so... There's a new version of chess in Sequoia. Oh, okay. I'll get right on that. Yeah, I'll get right on that. Yeah, because I still, okay, to this day, I still can't remember how certain chess pieces move. Like, it's so frustrating to me trying to figure out chess. Like, I can't even remember how certain pieces are supposed to move. So, yeah.

Time to learn. Next week's challenge. oh no well there is a lego chessboard that would give me an excuse to buy more lego so there you go yeah not opposed to it anyways so that's that's kind of what i've got for the legion go um if any of you out there know how to make it less fiddly please let me know uh though i don't think this episode will come out in time before i have to return it so yeah i can always go buy it

again. Anyways, so that's it for me. Niléane, what do you have for us this week? So yeah, this week, I tried out an app that I hadn't used in a long time. But before I get into it, I have a quiz for you. This is the first of two quizzes in this show, you'll see. So which are the two most watched events on european tv like i mean in europe what are the most to watch shows events let's say events

one of them has to be eurovision right yeah boom that's one is the other one that that baking show that i keep hearing about no no is that even considered an event that's not considered an event okay um the great british bake-off that's the one that i was that's what i was thinking of uh my maybe watch an episode of that and i'm like this is way too calm for me i can't handle this i need i need some conflict um i don't even know what that is so yeah oh okay uh is the other one uh please tell me the other one's a formula one race like monaco or something like that

no no all right um the other one is euro uh this year is euro 2024 so that's the European championship of football oh you mean soccer football I mean football you mean soccer right all I hear is football you can keep saying it all the nations of Europe come together and fight off in this competition so it's really nice I'm not going to say that I love

football but in french we say i am a footix that means i am a casual football fan let's say okay so yeah euro 2024 is happening currently and there's a great app that's called thought mob for this that lets you track football it lets you track live games it gives you live scores on your iPhone. You can install it on an iPad too. It works great on the iPad. It uses the white layout

really well. And there's a web app too. But on the iPhone, it's really good because it adds live scores to your lock screen as live activities. So if you love football, you should be able to enjoy Fortmob too. And what I love about Fortmob is that it's really cheap for what it is. I believe I paid €2.50 for a year. A year?

Yeah. That's good. And that's just to remove the ads. The rest of the app is completely free and you only pay to remove the ads. So that's really good. Check it out. I have not much else to say about this app. I just wanted to hear Chris say that it's called soccer or something like that. You knew exactly what I was going to do. Yes.

So stay tuned for my second quiz later in the show. Okay. I do have a question, though. And I wonder if one of you can answer this for me. So the UK, specifically the British people, they came up with soccer or football or whatever you want to call it, right? They're the ones that invented it, right? They named it soccer. So how is it all of a sudden that it's named football? Like everyone, even in Europe, is calling it football except the Americans. I don't get that.

I've never understood that one. How did the name get away from the people that created it? And then I don't know. That's something somebody's got to explain to me. I not did the British call it soccer originally? I'm literally getting that from Ted Lasso literally I got that from Ted Lasso so I have no idea you're probably right but I know for a fact that everyone hates the UK on continental Europe so it might just be a contrarian thing where

let's just not do like them do it like them and call it something else is that why you guys kicked him out of the eu i'm oh they did that on their own i know they did that on their own oh that's actually okay that's kind of funny i didn't know there was like this bias against the the uk on on continental europe i mostly mean that as a joke but oh yeah only a little bit oh no a little bit yeah this app kind of reminds me of and i'm sure matt's familiar with this neil on i'm not sure if you're into it or not but box box which is a formula one app where it's kind of

the same thing where it's like you can get all the live activities and positions and driver rankings and all that stuff from there yeah i'm looking at their website the web ui it just looks like a cleaner version of like espn's scores i see france has a game in three hours today yep watching this tonight i see france is uh ranked number two in the world and has been number two for quite a while i guess yeah and that's the extent of my knowledge of football i think you mean soccer bat listen i i feel like i sound fancy when i say football so i'm i'm sticking with there you go

okay all right fair enough that's like that's like when i call it formula one and not f1 because formula one sounds way more fancy than f1 um so yeah uh check out fop mob it's a great app to track soccer or football this this week was matt's challenge uh matt what did you have us do this week yeah so this is i mean this may go down as like a just a classic comfort zone pick of find a very high rated app on the app store that you've never ever ever installed so maybe not the most popular

i don't think any of us chose the most popular but something that's popular that people use but you've never experienced before and just uh find something fun and see uh how it goes for you yeah i i really like this challenge uh so i went down the paid chart route i looked at the free one but there was a lot of stuff that like i would have i just had to scroll down pretty far to find something in the free category that would have a been interesting to talk about and be something i hadn't downloaded already uh so i went and looked at the paid ones yes i know i i joked about i could

have installed tiktok last week but do you really want me to sit here and talk about tiktok for five minutes like no i don't want you distracted scrolling while we're exactly because yeah so So, no, I did not download TikTok. It was mostly a bit that I was joking about last week, but I still have not ever downloaded TikTok. That's not the kind of thing that interests me. Even putting aside video creation root, short form video is not my cup of tea. But the app I did go and find was an app called Goblin Tools.

And I've never actually heard of this app before. It's ranked number nine on the iPhone's paid top charts. So it's fairly high up there. All the other apps that were before it were like really specific stuff. Like I even looked at the iPad's paid top charts. And like the only stuff I hadn't used before was like really specific. Like, hey, here's this app you can use to mark up architectural designs and stuff like that. And I'm just like, that really wouldn't have been interesting for me to talk about. Because I wouldn't have known what I was talking about. So Goblin Tools is a neurodivergent app.

So the idea of this is it's supposed to kind of assist you in different tasks. So what I found to be really interesting is you basically put in like a top tier task. So the very first one I did was Wash Car. And it broke that task down into smaller bits. So if you're somebody that struggles with these big tasks, like wash the car, okay, what all entails with that? So it broke it down. Let me just pull it up here.

When I put in wash car, it broke it down into multiple tasks. So it starts with gather necessary car washing supplies, rinse off car with water, apply wash soap and scrub with wash mitt, rinse off soap with water, dry car with microfiber towel. Super important, people. I'm going to go on a car washing rant here in just a second. But super important. Clean interior of the car if desired. That shouldn't be if desired. You should always clean your interior. Wax car for added shine and protection.

Now, I was really impressed with this because it auto-generated all of those. All I typed in was wash car, and it came up with all of those. And it even really came up with the specifics of using a microfiber towel, which is important so you don't scratch your car. I am obsessed with washing my car. It is something I take pride in. My car has never, ever, ever, ever been through, like, a ride-and-shine automated car wash. I hand wash my car. It is really important. And this got the top-level things.

I mean, if it was me, I would have put in there, like, wash wheels, wash the rubber of the tires. I would have kind of added a few more steps. But that's just my, like, I'm crazy about washing cars. So I thought that was really interesting. I also put in like record a podcast and like in there it said choose a topic, outline the podcast, prepare any necessary research or notes, set up recording equipment, record the podcast, edit the recording if necessary, add any music or sound effects, review the final podcast, publish the podcast on a hosting platform, and share the podcast on social media and other channels.

And that's basically every step we do to create the show. So, and all I, again, all I typed in was record podcast and it broke it down. Now there's a bunch of other features in this app too. It's not just like a task list. There is stuff for compiling an idea into a task list. So like there is, it's a compiler. You can literally come in here, you come up with an idea and it'll break down that idea into a task list. There is a chef category, so you can kind of put in what ingredients you have, and it'll tell you what you can cook out of that.

Like, I put some, like, I put, like, steak, butter, french fries, all that stuff, and it came up with steak and fritz. Like, I love that. There is a professor section, so it'll give you, like, a crash course on a subject. So, like, you can type in, like, learn to cook or something probably a little more specific, like, learn to cook pizza. and it'll tell you how to do that and all that stuff. Then there's like a judge category where like, if you're not quite getting the tone of like a typed message,

like an email or something like that, you can copy and paste it in here and it'll kind of analyze it. And it'll tell you like, okay, this is what we think the tone of this is supposed to be. And you can even have it suggest a response as well. And this is the kind of thing I think AI could be really good at. This is the kind of thing like, like, help me break down the stuff I'm doing into smaller tasks or give me the step by step instructions on how to do something. And this is the kind of I just love this kind of stuff because I can see this actually really helping people.

Whereas like, oh, hey, generate an image of my mom as a superhero, which is was was not exactly the highlight of WWDC for me. But this is the kind of thing I'm like, okay, I can totally get on board with this. Like, this is, I really hope Apple Intelligence does this kind of stuff. So, overall, I think it's a really interesting app. It was only a couple of bucks, and there's no in-app stuff, you know, it was on the paid charts. I think it was $3. I should have wrote it down, but I didn't. $2. $2, even better.

That's 33% off right there than what I said. So, overall, like, I think it's an interesting app to play with. is it the best designed app absolutely not it is not well designed at all um but it does a pretty decent job at breaking things down for you yeah this is cool nice yeah i'd like to have this sort of thing because i do this a lot for in my task management and things but i do it manually right you make all the subtasks for whatever you're working on and have it sometimes i don't necessarily

recognize that this is a thing that's going to take i could actually break this down into smaller things that are more manageable and so letting your task manager do that for you is uh pretty cool yeah i i honestly think this is something that should be built into task managers like things or to do list or reminders or whatever but yeah i i i when i found this app i was like oh this is exactly the kind of thing i would love to cover this is completely different from the app that i chose which is Spirit Talker which was number 38 on the US paid apps list last week when I got it. It was one position behind Things 3 so

about as popular as Things 3 which is quite popular and this is an app that lets you talk to ghosts. Does it actually okay actually work well i mean obviously no yeah okay that's what i was getting at yeah i'm like um yeah okay so i have so much less to say about this app it is complete garbage it is not i mean i kind of knew this going in but like the app is literally one screen it's basically a jpeg image

that pretends to be a ui uh and literally all it does is it you open the app it starts showing like real-time data about your accelerometer and i have a few other things i don't even want to open it right now and basically what you're supposed to do is it's supposed to use the sensors in the phone to detect spirits around you and tell you what they're saying to you and all it does is you open the app You say start like kind of listening and there's little lights that kind of pop on and off and like make it look like it's detecting things.

And then a word will just appear. So I was outside on my patio a couple days ago and I was just like, let's listen to some ghosts. Let's see what they have to say. And or spirits. Sorry. And I should also say it's the middle of summer here. It was almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit and super, super hot. Just I'm just boiling out there. And so I let it go. And like 30 seconds, I got the first word. And the first word was many other souls.

Terrifying. I know. And then a minute later goes by and I see this new word. I'm making it cold. Again, it is so hot outside. We are in a significant heat wave. It is so hot. It is not making it cold. And then it just kind of lists these other things. that said it happened here what you know um noah jasmine cool i'm only eight that one's kind of creepy but like this is literally the entire app and what it's kind of i'm shocked it's so high it

was like three or four dollars again should have looked it up uh but it's ranked surprisingly high and when i looked at the reviews of it like they're all one star and five star reviews it seems like and the reviews kind of turned me on to some of these youtube channels that do ghost hunting and oh wow oh you got in deep yeah so you know how like those like the four hour star wars video was huge and like these like super long the h bomber guy like those those videos like are super long super in-depth and like are very popular there's a whole category of ghost hunting shows

that are multiple hours on youtube of these i mean they're they're just influencers who talk about ghosts who go to like these spooky places and stage these ridiculous situations where supposedly they're in a house and they use apps like this to show what's going on in the house and it just it's so sad i don't like it it's it's it bums me out and that's really all i have to say yeah i don't understand how an app like this could exist on the app store yeah it it looks like they just have like a database of words names and kind of like spooky phrases and then every like

90 seconds or something the app will do it oh the worst part is this the thing about the app that i thought was kind of funny is you can have it read out the names so if your phone is not muted it will like actually say the words out loud as they come up but like it uses the basic siri voice so it's this very friendly voice that says like it happened here so it's like it's it's it's just it's so bad we'll put screenshots and links and everything in the in the show notes so you can check it out but it's uh i would not recommend it i'm probably one of the one star reviews

yeah i was just looking at the app store i i'm not gonna even i'm not gonna even buy it but i was just looking at the app store page and i'm just like okay uh app app review let this on but we have some indie developer friends that have issues just getting their updates to go live and i'm just like what is shouldn't this fall into the category of like no scam apps like because i mean they clearly like okay like i'm trying to be nice but ghost can't manipulate your phone like come on

truly i just want to see i want i want them to open source this i want to see the code and i want to see how it just like has a random number generator that grabs a thing every x amount of time anyway i i can't even see the app because it doesn't seem to be available in france that well you you got lucky then you you got lucky no french ghosts we call it soccer and we have ghost hunting that's so yeah that's uh spirit talker uh would not recommend but link in the show notes if you

want to check out a wild app awesome all right um i guess i'm up next um so i went on to the app store and i have a french apple account so i have the french app store um it was really hard to find something in there that was not super specifically French and would be worth talking about on here

so I thought that I would embrace this and I went into the paid app paid apps top charts and at number 30th, I think it's ranked 30th right now, is an app called Naturalisation en France. And this app, so Naturalisation is the process, the administrative process when you want to become French, when you want to have the French nationality.

So this app is ranking really high. It's got a 4.6 out of 5 rating. pretty good rating and what it does it it trains you to go through this process if you want to pass the test to become French there are very specific questions that you're going to be asked and it's a long and tedious process but there's a theoretic test that you have to pass in order to gain the French nationality and

And this app wants you to let you train to pass this test. So, guys, here's the second quiz of this show. Oh, no. Are you ready to become French? I am so ready. Okay. I know Les Miserables, so hopefully that helps you. All right. So, the way this is going to work, I'm going to keep it short. So, I will have, let's say, okay, all right, four questions. Let's pick four questions. You will each answer once.

And I will have two possible answers every time. Only one is right, of course. All right? All right. Ready. All right. Matt, you go first. And Chris, can you name three cities in France? All right. Okay. There are no multiple choices for this one. I was going to say, can I get some choices? For other questions, there will be multiple choices.

Oh, no. Can you name three cities in France? Okay, Paris. Yes. Oh, no. Okay, this might be long. I... All right, Chris, can you name three cities in France? There's Paris. There's the one where Jean-Luc Picard's vineyard's at. And Normandy.

All right. Yeah, that's Normandy. I'm literally like stretching my World War II knowledge right now. I'm like literally just trying to think of everything I know about World War II. This is brutal. I feel very bad. Normandy, Paris. I knew this would be fun. and Jean-Luc Picard's vineyard. Nice. Oh, you got a second one. All right. Can you name a third one, maybe? Oh, no. That was... Matt's ahead. Wait, I got Normandy.

Is Normandy not a city? That's not a city, Chris. I thought that was a city. The beaches of Normandy. That's an area. It's a region. Okay, yeah. No, I don't have anything then. All right. Let's give it to Chris then. he was able to name two cities in France. Matt was not me. Matt caught that, not me. Oh, Matt, sorry. Yeah, Matt. We both did so terribly, we're just interchangeable. Yeah, basically.

All right. Second question. What is La Marseillaise? All right. Is it the national anthem of France? Is it a famous monument in Paris? Or is it the name of a famous river in France? National Anthem. I know this one thanks to Formula One. All right. Well done.

Well done. The only reason why I remember that one is because I saw the name of it out of the corner of my eye and thought it was Les Miserables. And I was like, wait, nope, that's not right. And then it said National Anthem. So yes, that's the only reason why I know that. All right. Can you... So you're just going to have to guess the closest possible. Can you cite the date of the French Revolution?

Which one? Didn't you guys have a bunch of them? The first one. The first French Revolution. Isn't that what Les Miserables is based on? Maybe. I don't know. I'm going to say 1575. I'm going to do 1576. Price is right rules, right? Alright, Chris gets it now.

Yes! i would totally be the person on the prices right that goes 501 dollars oh boy this all right uh so the the answer was the 14th of july 1789 oh we were so far off hundreds of years hundreds of years i because i knew there was see my problem is i know there's a but the one, I don't know which is which.

And then I know there was one after the American Revolution, thanks to Hamilton. Wow, all my knowledge this week is coming from musicals. That's weird. I don't even watch a lot of musicals. That's weird. But yeah, I should have got that. All right. Final question. And then I will tell you about the app finally. Final question. Can you name at least one overseas territory of France? okay um yes all right your french nationality depends on these guys overseas territory oh um quebec all right matt sorry you're not getting your nationality today chris is it um

it's one of the islands Jamaica I come from one please guys oh no we're such bad friends oh my god alright that's too late then it could have been Guadeloupe Martinique Guyane La Réunion is mine La Réunion Island Mayotte Polynesia, which is, I think, a thousand islands.

Yeah, Tahiti is one of them. That was the other one. All right. So, sorry, you're not French today. Maybe sometimes in the future. So, yeah, this app is charting so high in France right now. And I chose, I tried to choose on the fly here some of the easiest questions for you. some of these are really... No, that's just to say that some of these are really technical.

Like, for example, what gives the executive power its legitimacy in the French constitution? Something like that. So, yeah, really technical questions that you have to study for when you want to have the French nationality. This naturalization test... Is that a word in English? Naturalization? Yeah. So, this naturalization test became much more difficult in the recent years under Macron. And so I wanted to just

explain my theory, which is probably, very probably right, about why this app is charting so high right now. Obviously, when I come on this podcast, I don't live in a, this is not in a vacuum, this is not in a bubble. And currently in France, there are snap elections happening, right? And unfortunately, it is very probable that a far-right party will win

this election and will come to power in less than a month. This results in a social chaos You have no idea, guys. But just imagine if you're in France right now, you're in the process or maybe about to begin the process of naturalization. And you know that in less than a month, there could be a far right government in power that absolutely doesn't want you to gain your French nationality.

People are panicking right now, obviously. So people are downloading this app among others. And there are other apps like this one that are charting right now in the French app store. So I could not go over this challenge and look at the charts and see all of these apps that relate to the current context and not mention it. This is really bad, right? I have a friend. She manages a website. The website is called administrance.fr.

That's a website that trans people go to. It's a toolbox that lets you, if you're a trans person, see what steps you have to go through to get your gender change approved by the French administration. It's a long process. So this website is a toolbox that lets you go through that. And she told me a few days ago that the stats on this website have spiked.

Like right now, French people, French trans people are panicking like never before to get this done as fast as possible before this far right government, if elected, comes to power and ruins everything. So yeah, unfortunately, that's what I had to mention today with this app. Of course, we had a bit of fun. I had to add a little bit of fun beforehand to show you that you are really bad at geography, guys.

But yeah, that's it. Yeah, I'm sorry you're having to deal with all that. I won't pretend that I understand French politics, but as an American, we've definitely done our share to mess things up, and we've had similar situations. So I'm sorry you're having to deal with all that. That sucks. Yeah. I think we've proven we have no idea what's going on over there.

I do, I've heard enough and I know enough to know that it doesn't sound like a great situation. And obviously, we support you and want what's best for as many people as possible. So hopefully the good things happen, but I guess we'll see. Yeah, maybe they won't win and it will be fine. We'll see. All right, Chris, you have a challenge for us? Yes, I have a challenge. So I have a challenge for you guys. I don't want to undercut the importance of what Neil Leone just said, but we'll keep the show going.

So, of course, it is the summertime. Well, at least the summertime in the northern hemisphere. And that usually means travel. I know, Neil Leone, you just did a bit of traveling. I just did a bit of traveling. But normally it means like, you know, hey, vacation time, go to a beach, go someplace nice. France, I'm assuming that just means go to like a vineyard or something like that and like just be all posh and stuff. I don't know. I've never been to France, so I don't know. But I want you guys to reorganize your travel bags.

And I'm going to let you do be as broad or as specific as you want. This could be get a whole new bag. This could be change out cables. This could be I put things in a different pocket. I have an idea of what I want to do for mine, but I want you guys to just reorganize your travel bags, audit the stuff that's in there, take stuff out that you don't need. One thing I did this year for WWDC is I packed as light as possible. The last two years I've gone, my backpack was way too heavy.

I packed as light as I possibly could this year. I feel I could have packed even lighter. So I just want to see what you guys can do with this. all right this should be good i'm actually this convenient i'm actually leaving i'm driving a few hours north in like an hour after we stop recording here so i have an immediate opportunity to change up my bag nice well this is perfect and that reminds me i got to talk to you guys about something for next month but uh we'll we'll save that for after we stop recording all right i think all right

Maybe this will not be it, but I think I will change my bag. I have an army of bags in the closet. So maybe it's time that I'd use at least one of them instead of my everyday bag that I've been using for a year. Okay. I'm excited. When I went to the New York Apple event, I tried up a new backpack. And I think this is going to be my go-to backpack. Now, it's bigger than my everyday backpack, but it's got a lot of flexibility in it.

I don't know. I'm going to play around with it. But it's the Peter McKinnon Nomadic Travel Bag. And what was great about this thing for this trip is not only was I able to pack all my camera gear and computer gear, but I was able to pack the clothes I needed for two days in here. And it was the only bag I did four flights in two days and almost three days in New York with. It was the only bag. I didn't bring any other carry-ons. I didn't bring any other luggage or check bags or anything like that. It was the perfect bag for like a couple of days of traveling and having camera gear and stuff like that on me.

So I have some ideas of what I'm going to do. Before this, I always use the Peak Everyday Bag, the 30 liter version, which is a great backpack. But I've just been using it for so long, I feel like it's time to mix things up and try something new. Well, that just about wraps it up for this week's episode of Comfort Zone. Thank you all so much for watching, listening, however you're enjoying the podcast. It comes in both audio form and video form over on the MacStories YouTube channel. We are a MacStories podcast, after all.

Thanks to them for having us. Matt, tell everyone bye and, you know, where they can find you. It's something you're looking forward to. Ooh, okay. Goodbye. You can find my work on birchtree.me. And something I am excited for is traveling with all devices that are on a developer beta 1. And hoping that everything works out. That's called living life on the edge right there. It's actually called terror, but we'll call it excitement for now.

Hopefully that GPS bug from a couple of years ago doesn't come back where GPS doesn't work at all. That one got me so bad. Same. Same. That's, yeah. I didn't install the beta one until I got home on my iPhone because of that issue. So if anyone who's knows Chicago, I got stuck. The GPS broke. I got stuck on lower Wacker, which is the most terrifying place to be even with GPS and is horrifying when you don't even have any idea to get out. So if you know Chicago, you'll know that's terrifying.

But yeah, hope that doesn't happen this time. OK, all right. Hopefully you make it home. If you're not on next week's episode, we know GPS broke. Niléane, say goodbye to everyone. Tell them where they can find your work and something you're looking forward to. Au revoir. You can find me on Mastodon at Niléane. And something I'm looking forward to, I'm looking forward to recording this again next week. Ooh, I like that.

And I'm Christopher Lawley. You can find all my work on YouTube. it's Christopher Lawley, L-A-W-L-E-Y or you can go to theuntitled.site and it has links to all my stuff there I am really looking forward to the Spanish Grand Prix this weekend, we have Formula 1 this weekend, we actually have a triple header so it's coming up for the next three weeks in a row, and I'm looking forward to it, I missed the last race because of WWDC so I haven't actually got to watch a Formula 1 race in a while, so yeah, I'm excited about that, so thank you all so

much for listening we will see you next week