Niléane's Favorite Dinosaur

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lawley, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts, and this week they have backs that work, I do not. As always, we're joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing well. I am drinking this seasonal bubbly water, melted ice pop. Ooh. It's terrible.

I'm disappointed. Nobody from the Dr. Pepper company, listen, I love bubbly. But that's disappointing to hear that it's bad. Yeah, I wouldn't. It does taste a little bit like that, but it's like all the things where it's like 1% of that flavor. It's not like just like chugging one of those. Yeah, it's like I like sugar water. I like the bubbly lime flavor. And that one just used to like water down. Oh, and we're also joined by Nelian. Nelian, how are you doing?

Yes, hello. Do you have any bubbly hot takes? On my end, I am drinking. I wanted to say something as well about my drink. I'm drinking from a free McDonald's Coca-Cola glass. Yes. Nice. Okay. I am so glad you guys have those in France. I have a million of them. And inside is just a sprinkly... What? Sparkling water? Sparkling water. That's the word.

Made using a machine at home. Oh, I like it. I like it. Nelian, I really respect your adherence to the podcast rules that you are not allowed to speak until you're introduced. Those are the rules. If someone hasn't introduced you, you're not allowed to say anything. But you can make coughing noises to remind the host to get on with it. yeah allergies by the way of course i have dr pepper that's what i'm drinking because on brand uh all right let's let's get to the show uh we got one thing in a tiny topic section

and uh it's mine i'm i will be at wwdc this year so if you see me walking around be sure to say hi uh federico john will be there uh i'm actually wasn't entirely sure i was going to be able to go but I got some stuff moving around. I will be there. Should be a good time. I'm actually really excited. There's a bunch of people that are going for their first time that I know from the YouTube world. So it'll be their first time at Apple Park and Apple events and stuff like that. So I'm excited to meet them, show them around, and yeah, it should be a good time.

Apple, call me. Hi. They refuse to call me. They won't return my calls. Sad. yeah sorry i'm glad you're going chris i hope it's fun and matt just made me a liar because he added something else to the tiny topic section even though i said we only had one thing we do have two things i'll make this very quick this is my weekly plug of jet lag the game thank you neilion for introducing it to me not only am i addicted to it my wife is addicted to it and we're now nebula

subscribers so we can i don't even know why but just because we want to support the lads um we are also now subscribers to the podcast the layover podcast which they do as basically their own reaction to their own shows with the guest host it's so good it's so great we're currently watching the one where they go from the highest point in the u.s to the southernmost point uh with michelle i forget her last name but she does like the challenge accepted youtube show which is also good anyway watch jet lag it's great i'll put a link again in the show notes for it because it's so good

nice I still haven't got around to it but I've been busy I am introducing Danielle to Ted Lasso right now okay that's I'm getting here we're getting we have one episode left so maybe after after that that we will get to that lag it is actually dangerous my wife has it is had a negative impact on our ability to keep up with our other real shows like TV shows because it is as my wife said the most bingeable thing she's ever seen okay that's that's true

i gotta adjust my heating pad for my back oh seriously don't get old people um yeah i threw out my back the other day hence the intro um all right let's get into the main show uh nimion you're you're first up in the document what do you got for us this week yes i have a um an app that's a kind of a follow-up to doppler remember i'm a doppler fan now i have an offline music library kind of offline because it's my music library stored on my home server where there is a Plex server as well so I can access my music library via the Plex app and their secondary app which is

called Plex Amp and so it's a dedicated music streaming app to stream music that's on your Plex server. But I mostly use Doppler. It's a Mac app as well as an iOS app. Doppler is just an offline music app, very basic in the way that it works. But it's pretty and it's fast, contrary to Plex, and it works well. And I access my music library by pointing Plex, Doppler, sorry, to the home server

directory via SMB, Samba. So that's how it works to remind everyone of my setup. I've already said it once as well, when it comes to purchasing music, how do I deal with that? I'm not the richest person in the world. I'm like the exact opposite of that. Most of my music is music that I've acquired over years, like since high school, middle school, like even inherited from my sister, my father, music files that came from all over the place,

as well as music that I bought over the years. So I'm not like, don't picture me as like someone who buys music every day or whatever. I cannot afford to do that. And I don't even want to do that anyway, because I like to enjoy the music that I've been listening to for years. And I rarely discover new music. And when I do, it's organically. It's because somebody recommends something to me and I will look it up. But I don't actively try to discover new music in the way that some people do.

That's how I get my music. And I got my music. Now there is a thing where sometimes I will have on my hands music files. And I will have to be very careful with what I say here. Music files that fell off the truck. And I don't mean, so I'm not talking about piracy here.

I'm talking about something even more niche. picture some very exclusive music files that was used in a worldwide show, event. And I found myself having the connections to get those files, those exclusive files that only a few people in the world have access to.

And I'm really happy. I love this album. It's, I will not say, you can ask me, but I will not say. What is it? Because I've been sworn to secrecy. But my point is, these music files, they are WAV files, very high quality. However, there is no metadata in them. They just have a file name and that's it. And so when I imported that, a very exclusive album into Doppler, it was trash.

Like it was classed as unknown artist and there was no tags, no title, no number tracks or anything. So I had to do it myself. And I was looking for apps to do that. And because I know these exist. And I found one that is so good, guys. It is amazing. It's genuinely so good. It's called Meta. Facebook? You found Facebook? No, no, no.

Instagram? No, no. What's up? Oh, you're talking about the glasses. No, I'm talking about Meta by Nightbirds Evolve. Is that the name of the developer's company? Sounds right to me. Yeah, I will have a link. Nightbirds Evolve software. They make meta. So it's, as you guessed it, it's a music tag editor for the Mac.

And it's so well done. So it's a very modern looking app. And the way it works is you just batch select your music files that you want to edit. and you drag and drop them into meta, either directly onto the meta icon in the dock or onto the window. And there you can do basic stuff. So you can insert titles, you can insert the number for the tracks, the disc number as well, if there's multiple discs,

which is my case with this very exclusive music album. and there's also a feature where it will look up the album cover for you it's very well done so you just basically it's just a search engine for album covers you search either you have already enough information in your metadata and when you click on the button it will just find the most relevant album cover for you

or you can just type yourself the correct keywords which was what I had to do to find an album cover that can work. And yeah, where it's very nice is that it was thought to be used like with tens of files at a time. So you can, for example, edit 10 MP3 files to change the title of the tracks using a pattern.

So that's either a regular expression or just any... You can tweak it. You can have a pattern to name all your files at once. Same for the... You know how it can be annoying to number all of the tracks. But if your music files already have the numbers, you know, in the file name, Yeah, music, the meta can look at those.

Oh, I like that. Yeah, use them as proper track numbers in the metadata. Okay. I was going to ask something about that, because I'm looking at their site right now, and it's taking me back to when I was in college and had tons of MP3s, and this is like, you didn't get everything from iTunes back then. And the files would normally, they would often be titled like 1- and the artist name dash the song title and so i remember as a younger person going through and

selecting them in itunes edit all and like adding the album and artist but then i had to like go in and change the names and all the titles had to be manually done and the track numbers had to be manually done so i would have loved this when i was yeah much younger so at a certain point do you guys remember itunes added the feature where like if you popped in a cd to rip it it would actually like go out and find the metadata for you automatically that's itunes match right no i think it was way before itunes match okay but like it would like if you popped you went to target and

you bought a cd yeah coming home and i'm gonna put it on my ipod and you put it in you go to rip it like it would actually like if you were connected to the internet go out and find the metadata and do that so a friend of mine uh had got his his very first ipod uh after that feature had come out but he didn't know about it and he didn't have you know this was before wi-fi was really popular and stuff like that so he was in his room he didn't have plug to plug into the internet there so he literally sat there manually typed all of that stuff out each cd one at a time because he didn't

know if you just connected to the internet itunes would go out and like find the proper metadata and like rip all that stuff for you and stuff like that. But anyways, that was just my fun end of the day. Oh, man. Chris, this is not the point, but you really took me back to the era where like you could be in one room of your house just didn't have internet. Yep. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because one thing had the internet. I bought a laptop and I didn't have internet because I was in the living room and only the computer room had. Anyway, I'm really aging. Oh, that's bad.

So my house was the cool house because I literally when I was, I must have been like 13, maybe not even that. But my parents bought a house and there was a crawl space underneath the house. When you think crawl space, literally dirt and like the foundation of the house, like there's the concrete around it. There's the wood going down to the ground and dirt. I had to army crawl through it, and I ran network cabling throughout the whole house with me and my dad did it.

He wasn't going to do it. I did it. I was not happy about it, but I did it. And that got me internet in my room. But more importantly, it was perfectly set up for LAN parties, and we could put computers in different rooms so you couldn't look over your shoulder to see where the other person was. Man. Okay. I'm old. Okay. You guys are old. We get it. But in 2025, you can use Meta to solve all of this if you have this issue.

Anyway, I just wanted to recommend this app. It's great. It's not... The pricing is pretty fair. I think it's €25. I don't know how much that is in dollars. Probably about €24, somewhere around there. It's pretty equivalent. Yeah, true. It's just a one-time purchase, and you can use it forever, which is great. I bought it.

I've also, apart from this very mysterious music album that I've got access to, I've also used it to fix up a bunch of my old files, which were tagged decently, probably because I bought them from whatever store, maybe iTunes at the time. So they were tagged pretty decently, but I found that, including some of the Sigur Rost albums, which I'm a big fan of,

I've noticed some of them would not scrabble correctly to Last.fm. You must be scrabbling correctly. Here we go again. Chris, here's what Scrabble is. It's very easy to understand. I actually kind of forgot. That's okay. We don't have to. And Last.fm, what it does is it looks at the metadata to match your songs correctly with the correct data. So I fixed some of those using meta as well. And that was nice. And it worked.

I love this. I love utilities like this that solve a very particular problem. And they do a good job at it. That's fantastic. Yeah. And the icon is really good, too. It is. I'm looking at it right now. It's a cassette, I guess. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yep. First. Man, I had a lot of cassettes back in the day.

Anyways. Okay. I think we've actually gone too far. we're so old. You're really taking this. The problem is you're taking, I'm just like flashing back. I'm like the critic in Ratatouille who's just like the, that's maybe reference. Oh, right. Yeah, but I'm brought back to my childhood and I'm like, whoa, this would be awesome. This icon reminds me of like the delicious generation of apps as well with like the really realistic materials

It just looks great. I miss when app icons were fun. Now everything is the square, rounded square thing, and it's just like, oh, it's not fun. Yeah, they're all black and white now, too. Anyway. Yeah. Oh, no, and then there's some blue in them, too. Don't forget about the blue icons. Anyways, moving on. I have a Mac app for you guys this week, and while Neelion's covered audio, mine covers video. But I'm actually going to need your guys' help with this. I don't know how to pronounce the name of this app. Is it INA?

It's I-I-N-A. INA? Ina? I would say INA. INA. Okay, we'll go with INA then. It's the INA video player, and this has completely replaced QuickTime as my default video player on Mac OS. It is everything QuickTime can do, plus a whole lot more. It's really, really good. One of my absolute favorite features about this is, okay, you open up a video on your Mac, and you're watching it, and you hit Command Q, you quit the app.

Windows gone. If you double-click on that video again in Finder, and it opens back up in Ina, Ina, I forget which one we went with already. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'll probably jump back and forth between the two. It opens back up in Ina. It remembers the position that you were watching. It doesn't start the video over. If you were at, let's say, the 6 minute and 40 second mark, It starts right back up at the 6 minute and 40 second mark. Fantastic. Love that feature.

It supports picture in picture, which QuickTime does have. I'll give it that. You can create playlists. So you can have a whole host of videos. If you're doing a course or something, you can add a whole list of videos to a playlist. And it'll just run right through them. It has chapter support. So if the videos have chapters embedded into them, you can skip right through them. it has playback speed controls QuickTime does have that I'll give QuickTime that but this one I think they're a little more granular in Inna

it has playback history so imagine basically having clipboard history but for the videos that you've watched and like if you watch a lot of videos locally on your Mac that could be really killer I can see that being a really nice thing but what's also really cool is you can play a video from a URL and I tested this this morning because WWDC is coming up. So there's going to be a whole bunch of developer videos out on Apple's website. You can actually take the URLs from the developer page from the, from the developer video page, put it in, and it'll actually, it takes a minute to load it,

but it'll load it up and you can watch it right in, so you can have all the playback speed controls and stuff like that. Um, I don't know about you guys, but, uh, actually Danielle, my girlfriend, Uh, she told me this story when she was going through optometry school, her school basically offered like, yes, you can go to class, but also all the classes are posted online. Like the audio is posted online. So she would sit there. So she would skip class a lot of times and listen to the audio at two X and just like, yeah, saving a bunch of time and stuff like that.

So, um, for lectures and stuff like that. So like, I could see that, especially a lot of the developer videos. Like, for me, I watch a bunch of developer videos over the summer, but I'm really only interested in like the first five to 10 minutes of those videos, basically like the explainer of how like an API or something works. I'm not interested in how to implement it because I'm not making an app. I just want to know how it works. So I can, you know, talk about it in my walkthroughs and stuff like that and understand like the apps that are coming out the behavior i should expect from them kind of thing um you can play

you can play different audio tracks so say you rip like dvds or something like that you could switch to like the commentary track or something like that if you wanted uh it does support subtitles as well which is a nice feature and you can force it to do different formats so like you can change like the aspect ratio or the rotation i don't know why you would want to do that but you can But the one that I found very interesting is you can force HDR to be off. So if a video implements HDR and you don't want that, and you're like, okay, it's maybe a bad implementation of HDR,

you just don't want it. No one wants HDR. Can we talk about this for a second? Okay, yeah, let's get into this. No one wants it. Let's ban it. I disagree. I hardly disagree. I'm right in the middle. I think HDR was a bigger leap forward than going from 1080p to 4K. Oh, no. That's wrong. Absolutely. HDR adds dynamic range. In fact, you know what? I'm going to send you. It adds blindness. No. Not if it's done right.

Okay. The guys behind Halide, Ben Sandowski, I'm sorry. they literally just published an article I think this last week about what HDR is I'm going to send it to you guys and we can put it in the show notes it's a very good explainer of what HDR is and it's going to do a much better job than what I can do but HDR essentially it gives you the ability to shoot in a room but if that room has a window

you can still see out that window and things aren't being clipped it just gives you that more dynamic range If it's implemented properly, if it's implemented poorly, a lot of people just use it to crank up the brightness and make things look pretty. And I'm using air quotes for that because like when you go to like a store to buy a TV, one of the things they do to make you think like this TV looks amazing is crank the brightness all the way up. I used to sell TVs before my current job. And yes, the brightest TVs would be seen as the best.

It's so tricky. I have HDR on my iPhone when I shoot video because when I watch that video back, it looks more realistic to me. It looks more like real life to me. However, I hate when HDR is forced upon me. If I'm scrolling a social feed, if I'm on your website and there's any HDR content, I will scream. I hate it so, so much. Because everything is like your screen is exactly the brightness you want it to be. And then this HDR thing, just like you said, it blinds you out of nowhere.

And you're like, I hate this so much. It's so terrible. And that's it. I think it is mostly people who shoot things on their iPhone. And then the apps are like, oh, we'll do the right thing and we'll show HDR. That's a feature on the checklist. And then it's just a murdering feature. And that's no good. So it's tough. So I've only ever done one HDR video for YouTube, and it was literally like, hey, here's some iPhone footage kind of thing, so I want to show off HDR.

It might even have been the year HDR video was added. No, that doesn't sound right. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. I don't remember. But I don't shoot my YouTube videos for HDR. All that is standard dynamic range. Actually, no, it's not. It's REC 2020, which is a... Never mind. Oh, no. We're losing him. He's going too deep. I felt my brain ready to sprint off, and we were about ready to lose every single listener.

Anyways, my point is, I don't do YouTube videos in HDR, but if I'm sitting down and watching a movie, a TV show, or playing a game, and it has HDR, I absolutely want HDR for those. Yes. Give me HDR when I ask for it. i'm a radical i disable hdr system-wide on any device i own including the tv in the living room which i believe is the worst offender uh i hate it on the tv on the tv like

it it's so bad it's probably my tv that's bad i don't know but it's it's so bad i uh i love it on my tv i i've talked on this show i have i have the lg c3 77 inch like this this thing was my baby when i moved in moved into my condo the place before daniel and i moved in together um my whole goal was to basically have a theater room in my living room and essentially i was like i don't want a projector because projectors can't get bright enough but i i so i got like the biggest tv that i could have biggest and best tv i could afford and that would fit in

that room um and that was that tv and i was like give me all the htr i want all of it because it just looks stunning when you like it's implemented properly in movies tv shows games when it's implemented properly it's fantastic when it's not it's just you know they're just cranking the brightness yeah but i think that you know when it's not that happens too often to be good it happens too often that it's bad so you better turn it off instead of bothering every time with it i don't think that's the case anymore i think when hdr was first being introduced it was it was

hdr is really hard i will fully hdr is incredibly hard to edit and to color grade it is incredibly difficult but i think it's as as it's kind of come up it's gotten a lot better and the more modern stuff now the newer stuff now looks a lot better than the stuff that came out i don't even know when hdr was introduced 10 years ago five 20 years ago it's been around for a while yeah i just had i just had a realization um i actually also have hdr turned off on my tv even though i do hdr capable TV. You know what I hate? I hate bouncing between the modes. I hate that my screen has to

flash off and come back and then the interface looks horrible. It's annoying. I do love HDR on my PC monitor, but yeah, I have it off on my TV as well. Wow. I would never turn it off on my TV. But for you HDR haters out there, you too, you can use Ina, Ina, whatever. You can force HDR to be off if you want. Perfect. There is a couple of other features in here.

It does support hardware decoding. So if you have like H.265 video, it will use hardware to decode that video. Probably other file formats and stuff like that that are more compressed that do require some decoding when playing back. and what's really cool is they have a future feature and it's already in the beta version of the app but I don't have the beta version installed I just have the regular version they're bringing in plugin support and like there's not a ton of plugins right now

like there's support for stalling stalling stalling stalling oh okay here we go nope nope I don't need to stall anymore uh there's support like there's a plugin that brings mpv support so if you rip like blu-ray videos you blu-ray um uh dis you can play them back without like needing to convert them when something like handbrake uh there's plugins to add like a sidebar view uh like some sort of like file support and console and all sorts of weird things um so they are bringing in plugins but the really nice

thing about Ina or Inna or whatever it's called is it's completely free and it's open source and it's actively being developed. So, um, you know, you can check it out. If you want to contribute, you can contribute. I'm not going to contribute, but you can, if you want, um, that's the thing about open source, you know, I'm gonna go on a small tangent here. I always see people that's like, yay, yay, open source, we can contribute to it and stuff like that. But I really want to know the amount of people that say that and actually contribute.

I mean, that's not the main point of open source. Open source software, like my personal view is that the main point of open source software is that there's accountability that can be done. People, if they want, people can look inside it and see if it's done well, if there's any issues. It's the opacity thing. It's the fact that you, transparency, I should say.

It's a transparency thing. Yeah, I just, I always see people like being like, I only use open source software or like, yay, this is open source. We can contribute to it. And I'm just like, I just, I'm like, I'm always just curious, like what the percentage of people that like maybe like are yay pro open source software and like of those people how many of them have actually contributed to any open source software i don't know it just seems like one of those buzzword things that like people get excited about but i i just want to know but i also worry

sometimes about open source software that like hey is this going to go away because you know they can't get any financial support best best point of this obsidian plugins there have been so many obsidian plugins i've used over the last couple of years that are basically like yeah i can't justify working on this anymore i have to stop development because there's no way for obsidian plugins to charge right now uh that you can go through the obsidian store and you'll see like not an active development not an active development and yes it's open source so somebody can fork it and build their

own thing but will they yeah open source is a is a wild thing i mean the web is built on open source everything so like yeah absolutely there's some that's like fall off and you go to the github page and they never survive but like there's people out there who do it i i good good for them honestly like whenever when i loaded this page i actually use inna as well um as my video player on the mac just because it opens everything and quicktime opens most things um but i'm like right at the top of the page there's download and github i just always get a fuzzy feeling when i go to a

an apps page and like the github link is like right there because it just makes me like yes it's absolutely free and i'm not going to contribute to it either but like i like that it's there i like that i can see the history i like that there's like a just an open place it is honestly if you wanted this to have a different name i could call this chris's video player and give you that forked version of it maybe i bet i can figure that out i like that then you wouldn't you wouldn't have to worry at all what app do i open videos in my video player of course can you call it like chris Lawley or Lawley or something like that that way it just strokes my ego a little bit more like no other chris can like you know uh claim it i will do this and i will legitimately

put it in the show notes if i can figure this out yes uh i i just want to say for the record i'm not against open source software totally for it like yay but i'm just i'm just curious about like how many people like say they're gonna contribute and actually do like that that's just my curiosity but I am pro open source software don't at me bro alright well that's kind of all I got for this this one unless you guys got any questions on it we can move to the challenge the one other thing I wanted to mention about it is something that I especially used to like

you're really taking me back to my college days when like video players were a big thing I had to have five different ones installed to support all the different formats Oh, VLC or the VLC forks. Oh, my goodness. I think this maybe is as well. I don't know. It's all based on FFMPEG. I'm going too far down a rabbit hole. The thing that I like about this, and a lot of these players do, is they will let you increase the volume past 100%. So it'll let you boost the volume even more, which is great if you're on laptop speakers and the audio track is just a little too quiet. You can boost it more than you can in quick time.

And I want to say before Neil Leigh-Anne can get to it, for us old people, we're deaf and we just need to be able to hear a little bit more. I didn't say anything. You were thinking it. I was thinking about sound source. I saw it in your eyes. I was like, you know. I was thinking about sound source, which also lets you boost audio. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get to the challenge. Matt, it was your challenge. What did you have us do? It was my challenge. I wanted us to find a really cool media tracking app and identify your favorite little thing about it.

Nice. Matt you want to go first yes I have two one is unfair so I did the second one so my favorite feature I knew he was going to do this absolutely my own app quick reviews it's magic mode I love magic mode I type in a movie I get the movie I get the artist actually the other thing I like is letterbox I write the review in letterbox and then I open the app and it just pops to the top of the list and everything I just tap it and share it to social media I used that yesterday by the way. I saw you saw Lilo and Stitch,

I think. Yeah. You were not super impressed, but it made me sad. But I did use your feature where I wrote it in Letterboxd first, then open Quick Reviews, and it was right there. What a great feature. Link in the show notes. But my actual pick... My actual pick is... It's so stupid, but I really, really like it. It's in Letterboxd. So basically I will go to Letterboxd and I'll search for a movie. and probably the movie that I'm watching right now or I just watched. And then I hit the log button to like log that I watched it and write my review. And what I love is that that interface

just brings up a search box where you can search for whatever it is. Or if you're already looking at a movie and you hit log, it gives you a nice little button there that says, hey, are you trying to log the thing you're looking at? And I just click it and it is doing it for that. And it's a very little thing. It doesn't really matter, but every time I do it, it makes me happy because they knew how I was going to use the app. They knew what I was doing and they did exactly what I would want them to do. So I like it a lot. Nice. I like this. And Letterboxd is great. Letterboxd is so good. I pay for the subscription and I pay for my sister's subscription.

Every Christmas, I just like say just another year or that. Right. And she's like, yep. So I love Letterboxd. I love it too. Letterboxd is great. So for me, I went looking at different media tracking apps, but I came back to my old faithful sequel. I love sequel. It's great for tracking movies, TV shows, games, and books. Like, those are, like, my four media categories. Those are the things I want to track. I like having them all in one place.

So, like, I'm like, okay, I got some downtime. What can I tackle? What I really love about it is it gives you notifications for when things are released. So I add a ton of stuff. I had movies, I had games, I had shows. I don't always remember when certain movies are coming out or when certain games get released or something like that. So when they do get released, you get a notification saying, hey, this thing is out. Fantastic. For TV shows, you get an episode or you get a notification when a new episode is out. Fantastic. Because living with Danielle and having her mom come and stay with us quite a bit, the Up Next Q on the TV app is absolutely destroyed

and is no longer reliable, which is a bummer. I tried getting them to use profiles. That was not going to happen. For TV shows and movies, inside sequel, it will display where you can watch them on different streaming services if you want, which is a nice little touch. I really like that. And then each category has a watch list, kind of up next section, and then there's a completed section. And then for books and games, there is like a currently playing, currently reading kind of section, which I like is kind of like,

I think of it almost as like a Kanban board of like, okay, this is what's up next. This is what I'm currently doing. Okay, completed. And then like when you complete it, you can rate it, you can write a little something. It's fine. Like, it's great. And then you can create custom collections as well. So like right now I'm working on my all-time favorite video games, shows, and movies list of just like, you know, like, hey, these are my absolute favorites. I, I, I, I'm not doing a books one because it would just be the Lord of the Rings. Um, it would just be Lord of the Rings.

That would be it. Um, but yeah, I, I, I, it's a really well thought out app. If you want an app that can just track all the different kinds of media, but my favorite feature of the whole app under custom icons, there's a star Wars icon. Hmm. I win. I win. Yeah. Yep. I win. I win this one. okay well what do you do okay so my pick is first I want to say there are two media tracking apps on my home screen

and they have been there for years and those are my pick and letterboxd so you have my stamp of approval for letterboxd and my pick is TV forecast TV forecast. So at first, this app was dedicated to tracking TV shows. Now it also does movies. I do not use the movies feature part, the movies part of the app. I just use it to track the TV shows I'm watching.

Long story short, it's really well made. It's very neatly designed. I really like the design of the app. It's very clean. and I like that the main tab is just two subsections. One is your progress, so you can see how far along you are in a TV show or your upcoming episodes. So if there are ongoing TV shows that you're watching, you can just have countdowns, big phone countdowns on that screen.

So, for example, let's see what's coming up. Sometimes the countdowns are ridiculous, by the way. Foundation Season 3 coming in 48 days. That's soon. Oh, I didn't realize it was that soon. Yeah, that's soon. Squid Game Season 3, 35 days. The Bear Season 4 is in 34 days. Poker Phase, I'm watching right now. And the next episode, Episode 6. Yes, it's very good. And episode six is coming in six days because it came out yesterday.

The latest one as we're recording. Last of Us in three days, the next episode. And Stranger Things in 140 days. But yeah, it's really nice. It has tags. So it shows you in that view in the upcoming episode. It shows you if it's a new season with a big red badge. So that's very clear. And there's a section at the bottom as well where you can see all of the TV shows that you've watched in the past. You can see which ones are ended.

So they are separated. The ones that are ended, that are over, canceled or whatever. And the ones that are renewed. So you can expect new seasons. So that's really nice. I really like this app. And the one feature that you asked me to select, the one little thing that I like about the app is something that Chris, I'm sure, will agree with is an alternative icon because this app has so many alternative icons.

It has a Star Wars-themed alternative icon. It's called Rebellion. It's really nice. It's very simple. It's a black background with a yellow outline of the app icon. But my favorite is, of course, the fact that you have both an orange icon, a vibrant orange icon, as well as a vibrant yellow icon. I really like those colors, if you know me. So there you go.

Nice. I reinstalled the app to look at these icons. There's one called Happy Chappy. I don't know if you've seen this one. This is all of the icons are built on a theme. And then there's happy chappy, which is... That's true. Can I show this? Maybe. There you go. This will absolutely be the chapter art. VHS, the VHS one is my absolute favorite. I love a good 80s synth theme. One of my all-time favorite icons is the alternate icon for working copy.

That is the 80s synth one. That's so good. Ooh, there's a 007 one too. Yeah. Not technically. Not technically. Yeah. For legally speaking, not. Question for you guys. How long did it take for you guys to realize the barrel at the beginning of a 007 movie is a gun? One viewing. Well, that's obvious, Chris. Okay, never mind. TV forecast. One of my all-time favorite features that I wish every other media tracking app would steal is TV Forecast's widget.

So a lot of media tracking apps will show when a new season of a show is about to start. But then it falls off the widget. It doesn't go like, okay, there's a new episode coming in seven days or something like that. TV Forecast doesn't really care necessarily about the season. It's just like, hey, this is the next episode for this show that's going to be airing. And I love that. Because I can see back when streaming first started, like with Netflix, you know, they drop everything. But most streaming services now don't drop everything.

I mean, they have weird plans. Like Andor was like, we're going to drop three episodes on a single day. And we're just going to do that for four weeks. And it was okay. Like, it was weird. But, yeah, I wish more media tracking apps would do that. I love TV forecast, but I just like the ability to also have books and video games in the same app as well. Yeah, I agree. That's why I really like TV forecast as well. The fact that you can both just look at the schedule of a TV show and track your own progress.

So there's both at the same time in the app and they're well separated. And that's nice. Yep. Well, great job, everybody. I think we did very good at this challenge. especially you with your own app a little self-promo there yeah and we all had different apps that's the sign of a good challenge when we all come from different directions also I'm wearing my Letterboxd shirt right now oh my gosh you're such a shill Letterboxd sponsor us we all pay for your service so pay us that'd be a great sponsor by the way Letterboxd if you're listening

my subscription has elapsed and I did not renew it because I'm trying to cut down on subscription costs. But hey, if you like us, you know my address. They must like us. Come on. Who doesn't like us? Never mind. YouTuber says something that... Never mind. I'm cutting that. All right. You guys ready for my challenge? I believe it's my challenge this week. I put a challenge in the doc, so I'm pretty sure it's my challenge. That works, yeah.

Okay, cool. All right. So the challenge for you guys, and it's very timely because there is an announcement that happened. I want you guys to do something with a stream deck. Now, if you don't have a physical stream deck, that is okay. Because Elgato just released a beta and I put a link in the document already that you can set up a new virtual stream deck on your Mac. Or you can also use their mobile application, which lets you kind of turn your phone into a stream deck. But I just want everyone to do something with the stream deck.

It could be a physical version. It could be the software version. I wanted to make sure, you know, I wasn't going to make anyone spend over $100 on a challenge, but I made sure there was some free software options in there as well. So, I might be wrong. I believe those virtual options, they require the hardware? I just downloaded it, and, oh, maybe I do have the, Stream Deck installed plugged into the Mac. See, I read someone complained about this.

The fact that the new virtual Stream Deck that you can install on the Mac, you need to have a real Stream Deck to be able to use it, which is strange. So until I can verify that, we're not going to do this challenge. I will save this challenge for another time. Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have a Stream Deck. Yeah, no, no problem. No, I don't want anyone spending over 100 bucks on this. So the new challenge is find a new background app for the Mac.

And by background app, I mean an app that you install, you might configure it a little bit, but then it just lives in the background. Think of like Supercharge or Better Touch Tool or Better Snap Tool or something like that. Something that like you install, yes, there's a little bit of configuration, but once it's configured, you never really open it again. Okay. And this should be something new we haven't used before. Yes, something new. Okay. Yeah, you haven't used it before. Okay. Interesting. Okay. I have something in mind already, but I forgot how I found it.

Oh, no. That you've never used. I haven't. I saw a link go by my feed somewhere today, and I was like, oh, that looks cool, and then I kept scrolling. I need to scroll back. I wonder if it's the one that I bookmarked as well. Oh, boy. History shows, probably. So this was my original challenge for this week until I saw the news that there was a virtual stream deck now, but I didn't see the part where it required you to have the hardware. Yeah, I saw someone say the same thing, so I think that is the case.

Okay, so until I can verify that or until they change their mind, I will save that challenge for another time. But for now, the challenge is find a new background at Mac app. I might acquire a stream deck at some point. I will let you know. If you do. Matt, do you have one? I think I have one in the garage. Okay. All right. Well, if you... Why is it... Or if Elgato, you're listening, send us some. Yeah, Elgato. I'm using one of your mic arms right now. I want... It's him. It's him.

I mean, I want one of the new ones that uses the scissor switches and not the membrane switches because I hate your membrane switches. Oh, do they have one with better switches now? Yeah, the new one now has scissor switches and not membrane switches. Okay. My biggest beef with it is how terrible it feels to press the buttons. Yeah, I hate pressing those buttons. But yep, I was okay. All right. Well, we have the challenge and we have a future challenge as well. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. But before we wrap up, I have a end of the show question for you guys. I want to know, what is your favorite dinosaur?

So, it's either Chris or Matt, and I can't decide. Oh, my God. Yeah, we get it. We're old. We're old. This is actually hurtful. You delivered that on a platter all day. during the episode. I saw that question when we started. I saw that in the document. I was like, hey, I will make a joke about the dads. And then you went along with it without knowing. We're Dadasaurus Rex. Oh, no. That's not making us look any younger. No.

I will say Chris is my favorite dinosaur. I will choose. I win. Yes. Come on. I win. I don't know if I like winning this one, but I still win it. I don't qualify as a dinosaur. I think that's how I'm going to interpret the answer. You're older than me. My favorite dinosaur is the Velociraptor because it has such a good PR team. Because we all think of Velociraptors like they were in Jurassic Park where they're these big, mean, tough guys

that are opening doors and everything. And in fact, they're just little feathered guys who weren't nearly that big or that ferocious or that nimble with doorknobs. I was like, what's the word? What's the word? I still remember seeing that opening, or not opening scene. I guess it is the opening scene in Jurassic Park when they're bringing in the Velociraptor and it pulls the guy in. Oh, yeah. That's the Lost World, I think. But yeah, it's so good. That's the first Jurassic Park when they're bringing in the cage and they have all the people and like they're opening the,

the opening scene in Lost World is the people on the yacht vacation and just stumble upon the second island. Anyways. I'm actually excited for the new Jurassic Park movie. I hope so. I have hopes for it. I actually have hopes for this one. The thing that makes me excited about it, and I swear I'm going to wrap up, is the fact that it's not just like, oh, we stumbled onto this island and now we have to figure out a way to get off of it. It's actually they're going there for a purpose. So I am, we'll see. But anyways, my favorite dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Like, come on. Like, how can there be any other option? I think it's awesome. Mainstream answer, though. Yeah, these are mainstream answers. I Googled what are interesting dinosaurs, and I just chose Velociraptor anyway. Does it show your photo? Stop it. Stop it. So mean. So mean. That hurts more than getting eaten by a Velociraptor. Oh, my God. Anyways, that's a good way to wrap up. Thank you all so much for listening.

Big thank you to MacStories. We are a MacStories podcast. Be sure to go check out the other writings and podcasts on the network. There's a lot of good stuff happening over there. Matt, Neelian, say goodbye. You guys got anything you want to plug? Yeah, I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I'd like to plug my app, Quick Reviews. It's really great for writing reviews that look great on social media. Another feature of it is that when you use our magic mode to pull in a movie, it will guess what score you're going to give it. So it may even have the score already in there for you. So just another perk. You're just trying to influence people into liking your terrible, terrible tastes in movies.

Listen, I am. I like that he said our magic mode. Yeah, I know. I caught that too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We're a big company. We, yes. Team people. Hundreds of thousands of people in his employ. uh nilhan you got anything you want to promote yeah it's an app called quick reviews i just released it it's great uh we worked hard on the magic mode and i have a great announcement i am

the newest member of the quick reviews team i'd like to promote that we have magic mode we have support for pulling your letterbox uh you know uh scores and and reviews and stuff like that go check it out. I apparently get half of the revenue per my contract now. Here's the terrible news. It's done the exact thing that every app does where there's a spike and then almost nothing. People use it. In 12 months, you'll go down to 15% unless you're making over a million dollars. You'll go down to 15% and then that revenue will be coming in. If I was making over a million dollars, you guys would never see me again.

Honestly, the same. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. bye bye