Better Stickies

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 we are sponsored by Ecamm Live. As always, I am joined by Matt Berchler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing wonderful. I'm coming down from WWDC, but for the second week in a row, I've realized I do not have a drink with me and I will once again become increasingly raspy as we go. What are you doing? It's like you're not a professional podcaster. I don't have my life in order. I'm so sorry.

Nelian, do you have your life in order? I have water. Yep, that means you have your life in order. Yes. You're good. Still the same glass. Yeah, I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. It's been a week as it's been for you. I have a Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar with cream soda. And fun story about this. Wednesday, my last day at WWDC, I was hanging out with Federico and John. And I have on camera Federico and John drinking this.

And it goes exactly the way you think it will. At some point, I will get that video cleaned up and release it so everyone can watch it. But yeah, it's pretty great. Okay. You won't spoil it, I guess. You won't tell us what happened. No, you'll want to watch the video. It's pretty good. And it's not very long. So, yeah, so I'm back from WWDC. We're back to normal recording, back to normal audio quality. I do apologize for the audio quality of the last episode.

It was a whole thing to use the Apple Podcast Studio and have people call. it was a thing i apologize but we're back to normal and because of that we got some tiny topics uh neilian i believe you're first in the tiny topic section yes my tiny topic is weather related it's a weather report um just to say that and it's tech related unexpectedly um i have a air purifiers in our home in almost every room and these air purifiers are very important for me

because otherwise I die of allergies during the day, at night, spring, summer, fall and even winter if I'm lucky. So these days the air purifiers, especially the one in this room, they have revealed something very worrying to me, which is that... So they are air purifiers that trigger them on their own, you know, so they have air quality sensors and they will go to the max

as soon as they detect that the air is not right. Like, it will adjust it by itself and come down to a low hum noise, low home level when the air is clear enough. And these days, if I open the window just to get some fresh air in, the air purifier will go up to the red level, the LEDs will go up to red, and it will be at max level and permanently, like until I close my window and wait an hour or two, it will stay on.

And I don't, I didn't know why at first. Then I looked up the news and there is some fire smoke outside. Like, it's very foggy these days. And I thought that was just like low altitude clouds or whatever. I live in the Alps. That happens sometimes fog. But it is actually weird to have fog, even though it's a billion degrees at the same time. So I should have guessed. And you might have seen my post about this, but guess where this smoke comes from.

Can you guess where this smoke comes from? It was already spoiled for me. I saw your post. And you know what? They're horrible neighbors. Is it Canada? It is Canada. Okay. I was going to say, I'm dealing with the exact same thing here in the Chicago area. You know, I hope every Canadian writes you an apology note because... This is crazy, guys. Like, I've never seen this happen. This is the first time it's happened. And yeah, like the air quality is really bad.

There's a funny thing in Grenoble, France, where I live, the city where I live. So the city is surrounded by like mountains and hills. At my window, there's very one, like one peak that's a bit in the middle of the city. and so it's visible from almost everywhere in the city and on that peak they have a pylon, I guess, like a tower, I guess,

and that tower lights up at night. It lights up green, orange or red and that tower is meant to tell the inhabitants what the air quality is going to be like tomorrow. It's really neat. So at night, I just look at my window and I see the color of the tower. It's been there for years. But these days, this tower is purple, which is the max level. And I've never seen that level before.

Look, I like a good purple, but not in that case. That's not a good purple. So there you go. That's just it. Just to tell you that my air purifier told me not to open the windows anymore. And I won't until this clears. man nice oh uh hopefully hopefully it clears up for you soon yeah thank you canada uh yes thank you canada thank you um for another tiny topic matt you said recently well actually you brought to the

show a surface pro and you're like i bought this thing because the ipad can't do what i want it to do or what I need it to do. So, what is the status of your Surface Pro after iPadOS 26 announcement? Yeah, so I bought the Surface 30 days before WWDC, and there's a 60-day return window when you buy these things from Microsoft.

And so the timing was perfect. I could buy it, get used to it, and then see what Apple had up their sleeves with iPadOS this year. And I have not started a return. Ah. Why? I'm shocked. And it's simply because, and I think we'll talk about this more in this episode, but they made the iPad better in a lot of ways, just not the ways that I, if you go back and listen to that episode where I talked about the Surface and what I was doing with it and why I got it,

none of those issues are fixed for me personally. So I know that's not the case for everybody, but yeah, I still can't do the things that I want to do with it necessarily, even though there's quite a few more things that I can do now. So the Surface lives. It lives on for another, I don't know how long. We'll see. Until Apple releases the thing that I will, I won't even say out loud because everyone knows what I want. Just say it. It's a touch-based Mac that is a convertible device that looks more like an iPad.

I don't want them to just slap a touchscreen on a clamshell. I want this. I want this. A convertible device that runs macOS. I kind of don't think you're going to get that now. I think this was the year, if they were going to do it, that would be the year to do it. And after seeing demos playing around with iPadOS 26 windowing and how similar it is to macOS, this very much seems to me that they are, yep, nope, we're not giving you a macOS mode, but we will make the iPad more Mac-like.

I'm four. I'm all four. I jumped on the just put macOS on the iPad bandwagon after I literally just had no energy left in me to believe that iPadOS could become more professional, more robust. But yeah. Sorry, Matt. I think I'll be right in the long run. You can't bring me down. I don't know about this one. We'll see. We'll see.

It's so much work for them to turn the iPad into a literal Mac. Anyway, I'm done. Well, let's just get into the first topic. Because I basically, so last episode, we had Federico on, and each one of us brought like one thing that was announced at the keynote, and we kind of dove deep into it. I want to take a minute to kind of cover the rest of the stuff in iPadOS 26. And I just want to say right off the bat, I'm loving it so far. Like, I, it's developer beta one. It's extremely buggy. It's extremely slow.

And the battery life is horrible. It's the worst beta of all the ones I've used. Yeah. So Federico and I both loaded it up on our iPads at WWDC. And like, we were, I had an external battery and like, I topped my iPad up and then he needed it. And like, we drained, I, it's like over 20,000 milliamp hour battery. And we drained that sucker fast. and I don't even think either one of us got our iPads to 100%. So, yeah, it's a little rough.

If you rely on your iPad, I wouldn't put it on there. That's all. I don't like being the person that tells people, oh, don't put on developer betas. They're not meant for your main machines. I don't like being that person because I do it, and that's hypocritical. But I will just give the warning of this one in particular is very rough. So last week you banned us from installing the betas, and now you're banning everyone. Wow. No, I'm giving it. Okay, I banned you too from doing it on your production machines because we need stable machines for this,

which Matt just raised his eyebrow. He's totally calling in from Mac OS. I'm calling in from Tahoe. I swear, if there's anything wrong with this recording, you're editing this episode. Do you want a twist, Chris? You're calling him from Tahoe as well. No, no, I'm not. Oh, okay. I actually figured you. I thought you would. I'm actually kind of surprised you haven't done that. But okay. But yeah, so I kind of wanted to go over a few other things in iPadOS 26 that I am just loving.

I think we touched on the pointy mouse cursor, which is pretty great, especially for more precision stuff. Like I opened up Photoshop and I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much nicer now. The menu bar is fantastic. The menu bar, it replaces the ability to hold down command and see all of your keyboard shortcuts on the iPad. It replaces that. That menu's gone. It's the menu bar now. All that stuff that was in there lives in the menu bar now, and you can see all the keyboard shortcuts in the menu bar.

So I'm not upset that that's gone. I like that developers can add features there. They can add navigation stuff. They can add shortcuts to things in there. But then you can go into the window mode, and you can actually tile windows. You can shift windows and stuff from the menu bar there. It's pretty great. Have you guys played around with the menu bar yet? All right, no, Neilion, I'm sorry. You got rid of your iPad. Sorry, Neilion. I've got so many things in my menu bar, Chris.

Wrong menu bar. Matt, have you played around with the menu bar? I have played around with the menu bar. I think it's great. I think menu bars are great. We should have menu bars expose all the functionality of an app to users. So if you are wondering, hey, can I do this? You can often explore the menus to find out if that's a thing that can be done. I like that it works very much like the Mac one. I find it hilarious that the touch targets are smaller than they are on a Mac.

which is again I'm just saying Matt we can't have touch max we'd have to re-architect the whole thing we'd have to redesign the UI you want that again geez Matt oh man yeah that is that's actually very funny but yeah I think it's great I like having it and I like the window management being able to throw them wherever I want so are you saying the menu bar because that wasn't clear from the keynote I think the menu bar you can bring it up with touch

it's not just with the mouse a slight swipe down from the top of the screen brings it up from the bezel and then if you push the cursor towards the top it reveals the menu bar as well and is there an option where you can have it always be displayed I don't think so I don't think so because I've seen screenshots from some developers on Mastodon where the menu bar is always on the screenshots Maybe that's in the simulator. I don't know.

That could be it. I will look. Actually, I have the iPad right here. That could be a pretty cool option. That could. I could see just because the iPad, especially the smaller iPads, you have so little screen space. You might have noticed I grabbed a 13-inch iPad and not an 11-inch iPad for video viewers. I don't see anything in here. Yeah, I don't see it either. The interesting thing is if you haven't used it, it doesn't take up any new vertical space.

So this could kind of happen even on smaller screens because the menu is exactly the same size as like the time and the battery and Wi-Fi indicator. It's exactly that size. So it's in that same row. You're absolutely right, Matt. Like it actually doesn't take up any space, any extra space. So it could always be visible. And that would be an interesting way for people to know, like, what is the active app? Because you can have a lot of apps open. Oh, that's true. Yeah, that's great. That's a great point. That might be some feedback I file, because that would be interesting.

Yeah. I also like the fact that there's the help option in there. I love the help menu in macOS, because I use it to, like, where is that, like, one thing in Photoshop I use once a month? And I can never remember where it is, but I know the name of it. So I can just type it and boom, there it is. And I do that all the time. Like, that's absolutely fantastic. So it's also got the search field. Yes, it does. It does. Yeah. It's nice. On the telling which app is in the front, I'm also noticing now that we have the traffic lights there,

it makes it easier because just like macOS, the front app will have them in color and every other app has them in gray. Yep. Yep. That's a nice little touch right there. Background tasks was probably the thing I was surprised about the most. I don't know why this was the thing that surprised me the most. But basically now, if you're doing large file transfers, like I did this to my NAS yesterday, or if you're doing large file downloads from Safari, it moves to the background. You kind of get this live activity, and you can move to other apps, and the live activity will disappear.

and you can tap there's like a little like blue indicator next to the um like the wi-fi and cellular and all that stuff and you can tap on that and uh it'll bring back that live activity but all that stuff you don't have to leave files open in the foreground you don't have to leave safari in the foreground that's great um they showed in the keynote final cut um is going to be getting an update so that you can do you can start an export and then move on to something else and it just keeps going in the background and no longer crashes.

Thank baby Jesus. As Craig would say, wow. Yeah. I know some people were rubbed the wrong way about Craig's attitude in the iPadOS section. I thought it was funny because as somebody that's been dealing with iPadOS window management and multitasking since iOS 9 and I've gone through all the revisions and I've talked about all the revisions the fact that they kind of are like okay yeah we're just going to embrace what the mac does

and kind of kind of they were poking fun at themselves some people took it as they were poking fun at ipad users and i'm like no that's absolutely not what they were doing they were poking fun at themselves and i i i actually kind of found that bit funny yeah that's how i took it too the audio stuff the the audio and video stuff so now there is a option in control center for what's called local capture and you can set this up to record audio and video while you're doing a call and you know what that's perfect for say it with me everyone podcasting nobody said it with us

podcasting oh that's it yeah yeah thanks guys you'll fix it in the edit inside i don't even think neilion said it that's okay all right whatever um uh we we will be having a discussion later on about how we record comfort zone going forward after the beta gets a little more stable. There's going to be a team meeting. I'm sure it's going to change much for me. Honestly, I hope Riverside just updates their app because basically this can work with third-party apps. So Zoom, WebEx, Riverside all have the option to update and support this feature so that we can record the call.

I can have a local option. It would be fantastic. but the Riverside iPad app is notoriously bad. In fact, they claim, so if you use the Riverside iPad app, I'm going to go on a quick tangent here. Hopefully somebody is listening that can fix this. They claim if you're using an external mic, like what I'm using right now, you cannot talk and listen to your co-hosts at the same time. You have to mute yourself to listen and then unmute yourself, which mutes them to talk, which is insane.

They said you can't have both listen and use an external mic at the same time. And I'm like, I know that's not true because I've definitely have done that before. But, and their recordings are server side. So it's not like it was doing a local recording anyway. So anyways, that's my tangent. Riverside fixture stuff. The files app got some pretty big updates. List view now has collapsible folders, which is pretty cool. You can, all the columns are resizable. And by the way, sidebars are resizable as well on iPadOS now.

Oh, nice. Yeah. You can tag folders. And when you tag folders, it assigns a color. And you can put emoji and stuff on it. That's fine. I've never been a big tag person. But that's interesting. But the really cool thing is now there is an open with option. So if you right-click on an app or long-press on an app, you can go to open with and pick a different app to open it with. And you can also go into Get Info and set a default app as well.

So this is going to be huge for media apps, like media playing apps. I'm actually kind of surprised they didn't bring QuickTime to the iPad because Preview is no longer the default way of opening. Well, QuickLook, I'm sorry, QuickLook, not Preview. QuickLook is no longer the default way of getting into media or getting into PDF documents or something like that. You can still hit the space bar or long press and open with QuickLook, But you no longer have to do that. So I kind of expect to see a lot of apps come to the App Store this fall that didn't make sense before, like media playing apps.

Like, I've actually been using VLC on my iPad now, which is something I never really did before. Wow. Yeah, no, this is huge. One of my biggest, not my biggest pain points, one of the most annoying pain points is when there's a file and you don't know what it's going to open in. Like, if you have a markdown file, what does that open in? Delta. The emulation. Sometimes. What else do you have installed? But like, yeah, it doesn't really, what is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there is an emulator that uses.md files. It's like a Sega one, I want to say. Master drive or something? Yeah, that's what it is. Yep, yep, yep. That's what it is. Yeah. So those use.md files. Megadrive, not master drive. Megadrive, okay, yeah. But those use.md files, which is also markdown files. So I actually had to remove Delta from my iPad because I wasn't able to open markdown files. But now I can go in and I can set Obsidian to open my markdown files or something like that.

And you can change it for just like on macOS. You can change it for just that file or for all the file types. Like it gives you that option. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's huge. The Apple Pencil got the Read Calligraphy Pen, which is interesting. I can't do anything with that because my handwriting is atrocious, but if you can, hey, good for you. And then lastly, there was a couple of new apps. There is the Phone App, so you can make phone calls using your phone number from your iPhone.

You could already receive calls, so that's just kind of like a nice, you know, parody, I guess. There is the Games App. I kind of think the games app would have been a much bigger deal if they took games out of the app store and put it into the games app. But I also see that Apple could be afraid of that because everyone knows if you want games, you go to the app store right now. But as somebody that covers a lot of apps, it's hard to sift through all the games to find productivity apps and stuff like that.

So. yeah oh yeah and then the last thing is the journal app is now on the ipad um i'm pretty excited about this like there's going to be a lot of people are a lot of people have been asking for the journal app to be everywhere and not just on the iphone uh and the journal app on the ipad has uh pencil kit support so you get all those tools, including the new read calligraphy pen. So if you want to handwrite your journal entries, go for it. Or if you want to draw little doodles, you can do that too. But that's

kind of like the high level iPadOS 26 stuff. There's a bunch of little stuff that I will talk about over the summer after the public beta comes out. And then I will obviously be doing my big iPadOS walkthrough this year, the return of just the iPadOS walkthrough, because I couldn't do just iPadOS last year. I had to do iPadOS and iOS because there really wasn't anything in iPadOS. So now it's the return of the king. I'm excited. I'm so... Literally the phrase everyone kept saying at WWDC this week is, we're so back. We are so back.

Jetpack reference. Is it really? Yeah. Sorry, I still haven't watched it yet. So do you guys have any thoughts on iPadOS or are you guys pretty good? I'm curious what Neilian thinks about iPadOS as a non-iPad owner, a giver up of iPads. I'm curious what you thought. So I think I'm burned out. So I used to work from an iPad all the time.

It was my main machine. I did not renew my Mac for years because I wanted to stay on the iPad. and so that was the 2018 one iPad Pro then I moved on to the M1 iPad Pro as my main machine 13 inch both times and that's the year there was a year when stage manager was announced and I was so excited I was like oh my god that was my very first WWDC oh dang yeah but that's the year I was like okay I made a good choice to be on the

iPad and that was so terrible I did not enjoy that I believe in the next few months I bought a new Mac and that was a point of no return my Mac picked up dust in the drawer and now it's happening again but now I don't have an iPad while it's happening so I feel a bit distanced from it I'm seeing it all yeah Windows, menu bar, that's nice background tasks with podcasters are happy.

And I'm like, okay, sure, my Mac is great. An iPad could only be a secondary device to me. And, I mean, that's my iPhone. And I don't know. It feels like it's in my past and no longer in my future. I get it. You got burnt. I mean, I totally understand. The 16 to 18, I think, is going to be remembered as the dark time for iPad users.

And I think 26 will be returned to the light. I will say, ever since I've been using iPadOS 26, the only thing I've touched the Mac for is editing video and recording this podcast. I'm not going to try editing video in Final Cut for the iPad during the beta period, or at least during the early beta periods. Maybe more towards the fall, I'll give that a shot again. But right now, I'm going to keep the Mac as the production machine, and then the iPad for everything else, because I've been enjoying it.

I've been really liking it. Matt, have you been using your iPad more since iPadOS 26 came out? Or at least beta period? I'm trying to, yeah. I'm using it a little bit. I think one of the challenges, and this is my big feature request, that if Apple, you're watching or listening, I have an 11-inch iPad. And the windowing is cool, but there's so little space for windows, especially with the way iPad apps are built,

where they're more bubbly and there's just less efficient use of space. In iPadOS display settings, you can choose like standard or more space. So I have more space set, but I want a third option for even more space. I want it to be shrunk down even more. So that especially when you're using like a mouse, like I, I want, I would like to be able to get more advantage out of the windows than I can now. Maybe I can drop the, the, the font size and the text in the settings or something to maybe get a little more space.

But yeah, I think it doesn't really change how I use the iPad myself. Chris, I'm actually, you are a science experiment. You don't know this yet, but you're a science experiment for me. I am going to be watching you keenly for the next few months as the honeymoon period ends. And I'm curious if six months from now, you're still as high on it as you were. Because I wonder, I'm thinking back to when you talked about how you're having fun on the Mac and there's all these new app types and there's not a lot being made for the iPad anymore.

I'm wondering if after the buzz of WWDC wears off and you're used to this, I wonder if you start to get those pangs of, ah, the Mac has all this cool stuff going on. Or maybe this will revitalize you, revitalize other developers to bring more to the iPad. So I'm curious how this is going to go over the next year or so. You and me both, buddy. This is why I'm not. I am not. And you can check the receipts. I am not saying I'm 100% back on the iPad. I'm not saying I'm still all in on the Mac.

I am literally just in this free-flowing, kind of go with the flow. Let's see what device I want to use right now. I'm going to keep covering the iPad. I'm going to keep covering the Mac. I'm not making any definitive statements right now. And I don't feel like I should have to. you shouldn't there's been a few people that are like okay so are you back on the ipad now what's the deal and it's like i i i'm like it's beta one it's incredibly buggy i need to see what beta

developers are going to do like i'm like let's all calm down let's like it's all gonna be okay i'm and like i had a few people after i made that video about changing my relationship with the ipad telling me i like betrayed them because i i'm using the mac now and i'm like i didn't betray I just got to the point where like literally nothing was happening on the iPad. There was no new apps. There was no new nothing. I needed to do something different because I felt stuck. I felt like I was talking about the same thing over and over again because for the last three years of iPadOS,

there hasn't really been any big changes. And the big change that did come, stage manager, was not good. So it feels good to be excited about the iPad again. Like I'm genuinely excited. I just put out a video at the time recording this, but by the time you listen to this, it'll be about a week old. But I just put out a video about iPadOS 26 and literally I end it with I have not been this excited about the iPad in a very long time. Probably going back to like the M1 iPad Pro or iPadOS 15, maybe even 13, something like that.

Like, I haven't been genuinely this excited about the iPad. Like, I'm just loving it. So glad the sale of my 13-inch iPad fell through. But I'm still stuck with the 11-inch one because it's past the 14-day return policy. So I'm like, crap. What do I do there? But yeah, that's kind of where I am with iPadOS. I'm so excited about the future, but I'm cautiously optimistic. This episode of Comfort Zone is sponsored by Ecamm Live.

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Broadcast better with Ecamm Live. Our thanks to Ecamm Live for sponsoring Maxstorys and Comfort Zone. Alright, Matt, I am very excited about your topic because, well, I'm going to kind of piggyback off of it too. Because, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, so this week I am bringing the Nintendo Switch 2. The new console from Nintendo. Oh, and thank goodness Chris has a visual. I feel left out today.

Nintendo, sponsor us and send Neliana Switch 2. What is going on? I don't know, but I'm going to have to cut all that because audio. I was hoping somebody would talk, and I was just going to like van a white it. I thought you were making a point at some point. If you're an audio listener, you're really missing out right now. You are. He's just gesturing at his Switch. Yep. So, okay. So, let's talk about it.

The Switch 2 is pretty good. It's fantastic. I really, really, really like basically everything about this. 99% of it. There's 1% we'll talk about. But 99% of it is fantastic. Where do we start? Let's start with the Joy-Cons. Okay. Do you guys like the Joy-Cons on the original Switch?

No, they're too small. I mean, they're nice. I don't know. Okay. Big hands. Too small for me. They were very uncomfortable. I pretty much always used the Pro Controller, and if I had to play in handheld mode, I couldn't play for very long. They're just really annoying to pull out. Yes. Which is why I never pulled them out. Okay. So, yeah. Same as you, Chris. They're so small, and the joysticks are so tiny for any game that needs precision. I found them tough to use.

These new Joy-Cons, they're bigger, but they're better in every way. Like, every bit about these is better, unless you wanted the same size as before, if the bigger size is no good. They made the R&L buttons on kind of like the inside significantly bigger. That's really good. The magnetic, I think Chris is trying to show it here, but like the magnetic release. Can we have some ASMR with the magnetic? Oh, yeah, please.

I don't know if Mike picked that up It's very satisfying They lock in more Solidly than on the Switch 1 On the Switch 1 there was always a little loose in there There's a little bit of Looseness but it's much less Than it was previously It doesn't feel like they're going to snap Yeah And they're in there rock solid The magnets do a fantastic job I've tried to pull them out without using the little release thing. I'm sure I could if I really, really tried, but they're in there.

They're locked in. The joystick is bigger. The buttons are a different type of clicky, which is really good. So they're just wins overall. The only downside of them, I guess, is that they don't come in fun colors. Yeah, I was very surprised because that was a big deal with the original Switch was there is the gray one or the black one or whatever that you could have got, but everyone got the red and blue one. Like, everyone got the red and blue one. You had two.

Yeah. I love black, and I got the red and blue one. I have a ton of Joy-Cons. None of them are red and blue. Really? Interesting. Yeah, my Switch is the Switch OLED. So it's got the white ones. And then we bought two sets of the purple and yellow ones. Yeah, I have the purple and orange ones or yellow or whatever it was. But the purple one has major drift issues. So I have one white one on my original Switch and one orange one or yellow one or whatever color that is on the other side.

So I have mismatched Joy-Cons on my original one. But surely they will release. I'm sure they will. Oh, yeah. They're very expensive this time. I think they're $95. Ouch. Which is a lot. I got this one yesterday it showed up yesterday because I got my finally got my invitation from Nintendo to give them money to buy one I had the worst luck with the pre-orders and then the day that it was in stores

I didn't bother to go get in lines or anything to line up and do anything I was like I'm not going to do that and then it turns out every place had plenty of stock but I had these big meetings and stuff that I just like my that day was insanely busy for me so I was like well can't do that but then Nintendo finally gave me the invitation to do this so I did it and I went to order another controller and I was like whoa that is a lot of money but pro controller on the way yeah I do have the pro controller it is really nice that's what everyone says it is okay so it is also more expensive than

the previous pro controller of course it is I would say it is closer to the pro controllers that Sony and Microsoft make than the previous pro controller the previous pro controller just felt like a normal controller in my opinion but this one has it has like the back triggers that you can customize to be whatever you want it's not modular like the Sony one but it's also less than half the price of the Sony one so that's something. It feels really good. It's really light, which is great. The Sony and Microsoft

ones are heavier versions than their regular controllers. This is a pretty darn light controller. And the joysticks are the smoothest joysticks I've ever used. Now, let me ask you a question. The buttons, when you click them, does it make that hollow sound that the Xbox controller makes? I don't think so. I don't like the Xbox controller buttons. I don't either. That's why I use the Xbox Elite controller because the standard Xbox controller, when you hit the A, B, X, Y buttons, they have this hollow sound that nails on a chalkboard to me.

Let's talk about a game now. There's more hardware to talk about, but let's talk about a game. Yeah, it's a video game after all. I think it's one that we all are interested in. And it's Mario Kart. It's also basically the only launch game. Mario Kart World. That is a little weird about that. Before we get into Mario Kart World, it is a little weird that supposedly the Switch 2 was delayed and the only launch game from Nintendo is Mario Kart World. Like, there's no 3D Mario game.

There's no 3D Zelda game. There's no none of that. It's just Mario Kart. Now, I love Mario Kart, but Mario Kart isn't exactly the most, doesn't have exactly the most depth to it. I mean, this one has more depth than any others, but. Yeah, I think it's the perfect launch title, honestly. Okay. It's a game every, like, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was a Switch launch title, and it was, like, it's very, the install base for that is, like, the Switch has this many sales, Mario Kart is

like this, like, everybody gets Mario Kart. It's like over 60 million copies sold. It's huge. Which is almost the amount that the Switch sold. So it's nuts. Yeah, it's crazy. So I think it's a good broad crowd pleaser. It's lovely. It's so fun. I don't love the Grand Prix mode, but the tracks themselves are fantastic. Why don't you love the Grand Prix mode? Because that's a pretty standard Mario Kart.

That's a normal mode, right? So they changed Grand Prix mode. So typically in Grand Prix's and Mario Kart's, you would do four tracks in a row and do like three laps or whatever, however many laps that track did. Baby kart, seven laps, love it. And you just do those in order. In this one, the first track, you'll do three laps. And then the second race is driving through the open world to the next track. And then you do one lap of that track.

And you do that two more times. And I do not enjoy the open world particularly. It's just wide open and it's mostly straight and it just doesn't do as much for me for the track. So I was kind of actually a little down on the game. I was like, I mean, it's fun, but it's not, it's no Mario Kart 8, which I think is kind of unbelievably good. But then I started doing just the tracks themselves, like in just single races. And these tracks are wonderful. They are so, so, so well made. They're so fun. And a lot of them are, as they always are, remakes of old tracks from the DS games and even the N64 games.

But I didn't even recognize them until after I was told, like, oh, these are the same. But I think the tracks are wonderful. The characters are incredible. There's tons of unlocks. If you like stickers, this game has got stickers. Oh, my gosh. There's so many things to unlock, and a lot of them are stickers. Yes, yeah. You'll get out of a race, and they'll be like, You just earned 17 stickers for driving 130 kilometers, 140 kilometers, 150 kilometers. And they're all these like stickers of Nintendo things. So I'm curious, Matt, have you tried the Knockout Tour?

Yes. Yes. That one is pretty fun. I've played it online. It is chaotic online. Ooh, okay. See, I have not played anything online yet. I will. I was just kind of like kind of getting my feet wet and kind of figuring everything out because this Mario Kart has a new mechanic where you can do these grinding and wall ride things. I'm still trying to figure all that out because I know everyone online has already figured it out and I will get dusted if you don't know how to do that.

So, yeah. But anyways, Knockout Tour, probably my favorite mode. Yeah. My new favorite Mario Kart mode. Yeah, it's fun. It's chaotic. Like, you'll go in one corner, you'll go from 1st to 15th and then it's actually very bad because if the next checkpoint is knocking out the 12th 12th and later then you're screwed so it's fun neilion what's going on i think we lost neilion okay we've lost neilion okay we've lost neilion um i think she's mad at us i hope she'll be back

okay all right um what do you think of the uh switch one games that have been upgraded like legend of zelda and the pokemon games and i believe super mario odyssey was another one i think so yep uh they're great across the board okay so guys help me um sorry to bother you by the there is a way that I could trade in my Switch OLED and then it would fit into our budget okay maybe I could do that I've been living over the past

week because as you may know I'm a huge Mario Kart fan and this is basically the only Nintendo game I care about ever And since Monday, I've been watching Twitch streams. And the NoCat Tour looks awesome. I probably will not have a life once I get the chance to play this mode. Just aiming to sit down and not leave the game until you win first place in this mode.

you will spend the entire night and that sounds amazing so yeah just wanted to plug that in maybe i would say if you love mario kart that much this is my favorite mario kart game of all time hands down i've been playing mario kart since mario kart 64 i think i've played every single one of them except the super nintendo mario kart game i would say this is my favorite mario kart game of all time and unlike matt i actually like the open world bits because they're kind of fun just drive around like i had to kill like 20 minutes while while i was waiting for dinner in the oven to be be done last night and i just drove around the world doing like there's like mini games and

stuff that you can do for unlocks and like you can find costumes for characters and stuff like that i had a lot of fun with it it's it's pretty good i want to switch to and i don't have it and now it's no longer in stock anywhere either so i can't just impulse buy it literally the target had stock the other day yeah like that's just thing where i live sure well i don't i mean just the equivalent to target check their in-store stock like i don't know no i've never even been to france i don't know i've almost bought it twice impulsively this week and both times it was out of

stock so it's for my own sake okay yeah it's shipping only by the end of the month right now in most places i mean if you can if you can put in an order for one and it's still shipping like and you can get it to ship to you i mean i i i look i love everything about it your switch one games move over so it's not like you're losing out on access to stuff it is good console uh yeah so rapid fire through some of the last things uh switch one games run great the zelda games running at 60 fps is wonderful delightful high resolution um it's it's great looks so good on tv at 4k

um the other zelda games the uh link to the past not link to the past um links awakening and echoes of Wisdom games now are a consistent 60, which is great. I bounced off Echoes of Wisdom because the performance was rough. So I'm playing that again. The Pokemon games finally become competent pieces of technological entertainment.

Yeah. I loaded one up last night, and I was like, whoa, things are bouncing all over the place at like 3 FPS. Yeah. I have Pokemon Violet and that game was just horrendous and now it's a silky smooth 60 it's great oh the one thing I don't like the one thing I don't love the screen really? yeah and it probably wouldn't be as big an issue if part of the setup process wasn't putting your old switch

nearby your new one so they can do the data transfer So I had the OLED screen sitting next to the new LCD screen, and there's no contest. The OLED looks so much better. It's way, way, way, way brighter. It has actual HDR. This one has, if you've ever been mad at TV manufacturers for that HDR 400 thing, that's exactly what this screen is. It's 400 and it's HDR. So it's kind of HDR. It's real HDR on your TV. Chris, your TV is excellent, so if you're plugged in, you're fantastic. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been playing docked most of it.

The only time I actually undocked it was when we went to bed last night and Danielle was reading a book and I just played a little bit of game. We lost Neelion again. The one thing I don't like about it, the screen doesn't bother me as much, but I'm playing docked. The one thing I don't like about it in handheld mode, the ergonomics. It's very flat. It's very, very flat. So I played for probably a little over an hour and I was kind of feeling it.

So I can see me getting like an ergonomic case or ergonomic like third-party Joy-Cons in the future. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's it. I won't say any more. I want Neelian back. Sorry, Neelian. We're back. We're done. I'm scrolling TikTok. Everybody's talking about the Switch 2 on my TikTok. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Did you hear the thing about the screen? You probably don't want it. It's not that good. And the ergonomics aren't great.

You guys are trying to make it bad. The Switch OLED, sorry. It has a pretty good screen. It's really good. That's one of my favorite OLED displays. Other than the M4 iPad Pro. M4 iPad Pro is the best OLED display. Switch OLED is probably my second best. when the Switch 2 OLED version comes up, it's going to be an automatic upgrade. Like, Nintendo, I'm a sucker. Like, Nintendo has my number. Like, it'll be an automatic upgrade for me. Yep. But yeah, that's the Switch 2.

I've been enjoying it. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I need your friend code, Matt, so we can play Mario Kart together. You guys are still going, huh? Okay. Yeah. But okay, we'll wrap it up there. We'll wrap it up there. Let's get into the challenge. Nelian, it was your challenge from two weeks ago because we didn't do one last week. I hated this challenge. It's a good one. It's the best challenge. So it was two words. It was automate stickies. As a reminder, people, stickies is a Mac app that's been around since the dinosaurs, basically, and has changed.

You mean us, Matt, by the way. I know. I know. I know. So, yeah, it's a sticky note app, basically, on the Mac. It's been around since System 7, whatever. People say that every time. And it's very basic, which was the challenge by itself. The fact that it's a very basic app. You just create sticky notes on your desktop, and you can't do much with it except, by default, you can't do much with it except text formatting,

basic text formatting, bold, italic, etc. And change the color of the sticky note. And you can export to a plain text file as well. And as well as a formatted text file, I believe. So there you go. Fancy. Okay. Yeah. So those are the basic functions of stickies. But I wanted us with this challenge to find a way to automate it somehow. Let's hack our way into it. Do you want me to go first? Yes.

Because I did something. But I don't know if I did good or horrible. And I need to see what you did to know if I'm even brave enough to say what I did. To set the standard? Okay. Okay. So my idea is something that I came up with before I suggested this challenge. And it is because I had this idea that I suggested the challenge. I was like, hey, let's have the two dads try something as well. So what I've done is I used BetterTouchTool, my all-time friend on the Mac, which is a great automation tool,

lets you bind custom actions to key binds and even gestures on a magic trackpad or magic mouse, etc. So I used BetterTouchTool to automatically create new stickies and cycle between colors with just a hyperkey shortcut. So in practice, what does this look like? I am, picture me, everyday situation.

I'm on my Mac, so many windows on screen. I'm Neleon. I like Mario Kart. I'm flowing. I'm picturing. Not having a task manager. You're in my head. You have stickies, which you use as task manager, but that's okay. And I need to write something down because I'm on a call at the same time. Somebody just told me something that I need to write down. So I ever grab my pen and write it on my Sidekick notepad right in front of me. But I tend to just keep the very important stuff on the Sidekick notepad.

So that's not something I want to do always. So now what I can do is I press hyperkey S on my keyboard. And it immediately spawns a new sticky note on my screen. And it has randomly selected a color for that sticky note. So that my sticky notes are always various different colors. I don't have to pick the colors manually. And that's it. I just hyperkey S. And if I press hyperkey S multiple times in a row, it creates a bunch of sticky note columns on my screen.

because by default, macOS spawns new sticky notes right below each other. So if you do it in a bunch of times in a row, you can spawn three sticky notes right below each other, and they all have three different colors. That can be useful. If I need to write a bunch of things down that are related to each other, so they're already set in a column on screen, I can just do that. I can press three times, I have a key S, and write what I need to write down in those sticky notes. And that's it. Very simple.

better touch tool the action itself is just two things in better touch tool one is launch stickies in case it's not already running the second one is have better touch tool trigger command N to create a new sticky and then the third one is to pick I believe in the menu bar you can have better touch tool pick a menu bar item to trigger a color

because that's in the menu bar for stickies. Okay. And with better touch tool, you can have it cycle so that if you press the same trigger, the keyboard shortcut, if you press it the same keyboard shortcut multiple times in a row, it will cycle between actions. So I have it cycle between different colors. So that's it. Okay. Okay. Yeah, I did not do good.

Matt what did you do so okay so I I have three things I have what I wanted to do but couldn't what I actually did and what I would have done if I had more time so what I wanted to do I think I've talked about this before is what I want stickies to do is I want to be able to stick them to windows on my Mac so that they could move around and I could note something in my browser and then it would just be attached to the browser.

Oh, that would be so good. Yes. So I was working with Keyboard Maestro, which is my better touch tool, and I was trying to find a way to get it to... It would be very non-performant, but every time the window moves, could it somehow track the location and keep the sticky pinned to it? I could not figure out how to do this. I don't think it's possible. I could probably do it by making a native app but I couldn't figure out how to do it so that was out the window but I think that would be cool

what I actually did do thank god macOS Tahoe came out and I installed the beta because now there are automations in shortcuts now the problem is there are stickies because they released in macOS 7 and have not been updated since presumably not even the UI they have no shortcut support so all I can do is make an automation that at a certain time opens stickies and all my stickies open and I just have one that says like what does it say I said this is for

Neelion and so right when we started recording my sticky note popped up on my screen and it said this one's for Neelion so that's fun that's useful In my further research, which if we're recording just a couple of days after our last episode, although it's been a week and a half, no excuses, I guess, what I could do if I wanted to take this further is it does support AppleScript. So you could use AppleScript to do things like create a note from the command line or from Raycast or from BetterTouchTool.

You could have something that triggers that generates with dynamic content with like a timestamp and whatever you want to pass in there. You can also export all of your open stickies to a single file with AppleScript. So you could basically have, if you just like have like too many stickies and you're like, I can't live with this, this is too much, I need to start fresh. You could like run this little script that exports them all to a text file. And then you could start over and you'd still have all the stuff that was written there. - Oh, and maybe you could have, you could create a script that restores them into stickies.

Oh, yeah, you could. Yeah, you could definitely do that because you can create stickies so you could just feed it back into it and be like, we are so back. The last thing that I found is Raycast has an extension for stickies that I did not use. But the one thing that's super notable about this is it lets you add stickies to your menu bar. Oh. Raycast has an extension for stickies? It does. What? Oh, it does.

that's incredible so I said a lot but what my actual submission is which we don't do democracy anymore but if we were doing democracy my submission is at 10am every Friday my Sticky Zap opens which is not so good but in theory I could have done really great yeah so this was a really busy week for me probably should have tackled this last week before wwdc so i completed this was it nine at nine a.m

right now so i completed three hours ago um so i didn't exactly have a lot of time to do what i want uh it's funny i was sitting around with uh john and federico and jason snell and dan morin and topic comfort zone came up and i was like yeah the challenge this next week was nearly on its automate stickies and they all go how are you going to do that and fadamico goes oh apple script i guess but i was just like i was like yeah i don't have time for that i mean i could have had like chat gpt or quad or something like uh shoot something out but i just i i legit did not have

time for that so i looked at the three core automation utilities that i use uh shortcuts Automator and um what's uh Keyboard Maestro uh Shortcuts didn't have any sticky actions and I don't have Tahoe installed so I didn't I didn't I couldn't use Automations Automator doesn't have anything for stickies so Keyboard Maestro uh Keyboard Maestro has the ability to do certain things with apps and so I was playing with stickies for a little bit and I realized one of the things that would happen

is stickies would fall to the background as you'd start opening apps and moving things around. They wouldn't stay to the front. So I created a hyperkey shortcut that basically brings all stickies to the foreground. So if you trigger hyperkey 8, it takes all the stickies and brings them to the foreground. That was what I got in the time that I had. Sorry. It wasn't very good. I know it's not a very good one. But actually, I did think it was kind of useful because it just brings everything to the foreground.

And if you're somebody that uses a lot of stickies and you use a lot of windows, yeah. I think we have together a very good wish list for Apple to make stickies 2.0. Make stickies great again. Make stickies great again. Have it. Nope. Have it cycle between colors automatically. Have it be able to save and restore sets of stickies on screen.

Pen to windows. And pen to windows. I mean, like if those three things. I mean, Chris, I don't know if you're aware, but Matt is a developer. He could be. And he could make that like in just snapping, snap his finger and pops on screen. Maybe 20 minutes, maybe. Yeah. He's just stingy with his time. He just doesn't like us enough. He's stingy with his time. He doesn't want me to be happy and have better stickies.

Oh, that's the title, better stickies. That's the name of the app. You know, if he really wanted you to be happy, he would send you his Switch too. Yeah, but he hates me. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Anyway, thank you for taking part in the challenge. I win, so that's good. I expected that. Sure. Yours is the more complicated shortcut.

I think ours has like two actions or something like that. So, yeah. My other idea, by the way, was to do something with the export and have it maybe sync to Apple Notes with the export, something like that. I wanted to do something with like dictation where like I would hit like a keyboard shortcut and I would just be able to dictate something and it would go right into a sticky. That was my original idea, but it was too many parts, and I was like, I don't have time for this. So, yeah. The point is there are many ways.

Maybe people can achieve something listening to this if you're trying the challenge. Yeah. All right. Well, that was this week's challenge. Matt, it's your turn to issue a challenge for us next week. What do you got for us? Okay. make sure it's the right thing on the clipboard. I'm pasting it into the doc now. I would like us to replace one of your most treasured apps with an Apple app. This is kind of full circle because our podcast is now a year old and the very first challenge you ever had us do, Matt, was use reminders.

Oh, was that the first one? That was the very first one. Oh, wow. Yeah. That might have been the test episode one. Or no, no, we didn't have a challenge for the test episode. I think you issued it in the test episode, and we did it for the first episode. But yeah. Okay. Well. Yeah, so it's kind of full circle. Yeah, it's a similar one. But it's largely because Apple has new operating, new betas out. And so there is an opportunity to, you know, maybe you try Spotlight. Maybe you, instead of Raycast, maybe you try Safari instead of...

So you want me to install the beta as well. Ideally on your production Mac, yes. Yes, okay. Obviously. So, yes, whichever one you want. All right, okay. I have an idea, by the way. I do have an idea as well. I'm going full WhatsApp. Just kidding. Full WhatsApp? Never again. All right. Well, that just about does it for the end of this episode. But as always, I have an end of the show question for you guys. I want to know, what was the last iPhone game you guys played?

What was the last game on your iPhone you played? I can tell you right now, it's Bellatro for me. But I had to delete it. I have no games on my iPhone right now. It's going in a busy summer season. Can't afford distractions. So no games on my iPhone, but Bellatro was the last one I played. It's still so good. So good. I think iOS got rid of the games section in the app library. Really? I don't know why I'm looking at my phone. I don't have games installed. It always moves around. You never quite know where it's going to be.

Oh, there's an arcade folder. Oh, yeah, that is correct. The last game I've played is Mini Metro. A good one. Yeah. The last game I played is Holdown. Hold that. I haven't heard that one. Is that the thumb on the icon? The thumb with the face? The thumb with the face? I've tapped it so many times I've never... Does it not look like a thumb with a face?

It's a... This one right here. It's blown out. But yeah, it is a thumb with a face. It is. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's a thumb with a face. He opened his bank account and linked all of his information. Great games. Three GOAT tier games. Some of the best ever made. Nice. That's nice. All right. Well, that just about does it for the end of this episode. Thank you all so much for listening or watching. We have a video version on YouTube, on the MacStories YouTube channel. You should go check it out, because we do gags while other people are talking.

We like to distract each other. Neelian straight up walked away at some point. Yeah. If you're not watching the video version, she just left. Okay. No one's done that before. I actually kind of figured I would be the first one to storm off, but whatever. Huge thank you to MacStories for having us. We are a MacStories podcast after all. Go check out everything else. They did a couple of episodes of AppStories for WWDC. In fact, they were the only show to get two recording times in the Apple Podcast Studio.

So that's pretty cool. And then Niléane, you and Jonathan and... Sigmund and Devin did amazing work. He edited all of the stories. And yeah. All of the team has written pieces about WWDC and more to come. Yeah, they're very good. And I just published my iPadOS. Well, just published. By the time you're listening to this, it's a week old.

but my iPadOS 26 kind of impressions, like not even impressions, just like what happened video. Matt, you got anything you want to promote? Just my little puppy. Aww. This is for the video people, but a little Sherman here. The cat's gotten time on screen, but never my dog, so. See, if you watch the video version, people, you get to see a good, good dog. They're all good dogs. I have something to tease for next week. Ooh, what do you got? Okay. one, yet another window manager.

I will say just that. Another? I found one and I'm really happy with it and I can't wait to talk about it. All right. Well, we'll save that for next week. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye.