The Things That Pinch

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. As always, I'm joined by Matt Bursler. Matt, how are you doing? Chris, I'm doing great. This one's just for you. We have a new drink. Yeah. Oh, this is a Dr. Pepper. Matt has seen the light, ladies and gentlemen. He has seen the light.

That's pretty good. For audio listeners, Matt is drinking a Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar. Is that a with a flavor one? It's a blackberry one. I have not had the blackberry one. I'm not much for a blackberry person. Okay. You know what? I got my... Matt, cheers. I got cream soda. Cheers. Do they have Diet Dr. Pepper in Europe? Probably. I don't know. You should find out.

Join the cool kids. Everyone's doing it, so you should too. I'm Niléane, by the way. Hi. Oh, yeah. We're also joined by Niléane. I think that's the second week in a row that Matt derailed me. I blame Matt. But you know what? He was in the right this time to derail. I have fizzy water again. I'm just healthy. That's it. Because as a European, you cannot drink flat water. You have to have some bubbles, which I appreciate.

I'm actually all for the bubbles. I am 100% team bubbles. That's not really true about France, by the way. Oh, really? This is mostly a German thing that I've imported. So, yeah. Okay, interesting. I know when you go to the UK, you have to ask for flat water. Like if you don't specify, you get bubbly, which again. Same in Germany. You ask for water, they bring you fizzy water. Interesting. Sounds great. We got some tiny topics. I have no idea who put what in here. So I'm just going to let you guys go ahead because apparently we only talk about one thing on this show.

Of course. Welcome back to the browser podcast this week. I have two topics on the browser podcast. First one is, hey guys, I found this new web browser. It's really nice. This one is called Aura Browser. And it's extremely alpha. Some people have mentioned me on Mastodon about it. And I've seen people talk about it elsewhere as well.

It's basically just another clone of Arc browser. but this one seems to be a more native feeling. I tried it out for a bit. And it's based on WebKit instead of Blink. However, some red flags on their landing page, they have a Grok example, so you can ask Grok from their address bar.

But na-na-na, don't like this. Don't you want the truth? Don't you want the real, you know, non-filtered truth information? I do not. Truth? No. Information? Okay. Just for what it's worth, they also used the ChatGPT logo next to Grak, which is an attention to detail that I... Right. I'm sure that's intentional. Yeah. Anyway, so there's not much to say about this. It's interesting that our clones keep popping up. It's almost like people love Arc and wouldn't do anything to just keep that going.

I don't know. Yeah. It's almost like the best thing about Arc is just its UI and people didn't care about much else. And anyway, speaking of Arc, it died in favor of the browser, right? From the browser company. And I saw a bit of news today I wanted to share. Google announced a Gemini integration in Chrome that's coming to the US first. Gemini? Gemini? Gemini.

Gemini. Okay. In French, we say Gemini. It's correct. It's correct. I will say Gemini just to trigger people. Oh, I'm so triggered. Yeah. Gemini in Chrome, right? Yeah. And it's just like as the same way that the browser works, you just ask things about the web pages you have opened. And anyway, so as soon as Google rolls out this thing globally, there's absolutely no point to the browser and the likes, I think.

And this will be interesting to see unfurl. I have said this before. I don't really care about AI browsers. So it's just funny to watch from afar. Do you know what the original AI browser was? What is it? The original one. Early 1900s. Actually, probably before that. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who makes the best website of them all? What?

What are you on? That got my reference. So in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Evil Queen has a mirror that she can go up to and ask questions about things and stuff like that. The mirror has her browsing history. It's a whole thing. Exactly. It's personalized to her. It's personalized. Sure. Okay. Anyway, this has been the Browser Podcast. See you next week. You know what? I might just start showing up about five minutes late for the show, just so you guys can get the browser stuff out of the way.

And then, yeah. Nimeon, I think this next thing is you as well, right? Obviously, I put in the doc that it's been a rough week because it's been one week today of using macOS Taho. You know what I've been saying about the UI. I will not be ranting about the UI. I will be ranting today about performance. Apple shipped a nightmare of an OS. It's really, really bad.

Like system animations, like entering mission control, switching spaces, stage manager, all of this was butter smooth on my Mac until last Saturday when I upgraded to Mac OS Taho. Now it's dropping frames left and right. Menus are glitching out. Any bit of translucent piece of UI will glitch out at some point during the day.

Anyway, it's really frustrating. But to come back to the UI, to my opinions on the UI, I have tried the two most recommended ways to like dial down liquid glass. And those two ways are the accessibility settings called reduce motion and reduce transparency. I have opinions. I've tried them both. I think reduce transparency, if you don't need it, don't enable it.

It will just look worse. If you have a hard time reading stuff, definitely enable it. But otherwise, it's like Apple does not care at all how it looks with this setting on. Things look really, really unfinished when you have this setting on. Like paddings are missing, margins are missing, and translucent toolbars are suddenly opaque, but with a huge white rectangle all around, it looks really, really bad.

however the other setting is reduced motion and reduced motion i found is pretty cool pretty cool because uh so like the name says it will tone down animations uh this setting has been around forever of course like the other one but it will turn down animations like entering mission control it will just uh fade in instead of doing the whole swish well your only windows fly all around your screen. Same with Stage Manager. So it's kind of nice. It makes your OS feel snappy, especially right now with all of the system animations dropping frames left and right.

This is a good thing to turn on. And fun fact, boys, if you turn on Reduce Motion, it will actually dial down the transparency of liquid glass UI elements. It makes no sense, But maybe it does because it's like I can see the reasoning behind this. Like maybe you want liquid glass elements to be less transparent with reduced motion on because they create motion on your screen when you scroll things behind them.

So anyway, you can turn this on and liquid glass stuff will be frostier. This is interesting. One week with Tahoe and it's been a long one. Yeah. I mentioned in my iPadOS 26 walkthrough that, at least on iPadOS and iOS, if you are having issues with the transparency stuff, reduce motion, reduce transparency. Oh no, it's increased contrast and reduced transparency seem to really help. But yeah. Yeah. Increased contrast.

If you don't need it, it will look... It looks weird. Extremely different. Just be prepared. But if you need it, it's there. Yes. I have a piece of a tiny topic. Our Messiah, the Bean, from FocusFriend has been updated. They have now added a new room to the FocusFriend app. It is no longer just your office. You now have a living room that you can also design. I am very excited to see that they're adding rooms because I was very worried that, like, okay, I kind of hit,

like, I had decorated the office, and I was like, okay, there's nothing more I can decorate in here. And that's like half the point of the app. So there is more content there now. That's very good. I'll let my wife know. I think she's filled up hers as well. Oh, nice. Your wife is using it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. She loves the bean. Nice. Everyone loves the bean. Who doesn't? Okay. I have an update. Two updates. Finally, after much battling with app review, the two apps that I talked about a few weeks ago on the show are out.

Besto Masto is a Mastodon client that just shows you the most popular post from your feed in the last couple hours. And Quick Subtitles, which generates transcripts, subtitles, whatever you want for audio files, video files. They're both out in the app store right now, and they are lovely, I think. But yes, the battle with app review is very real. It is very fun. Yeah. Yeah. I saw what you were going through. You were texting us a bit too. And I was just like, oh my gosh, this is ridiculous.

But I guess this means you are 100% a true iOS developer. You've dealt with it all. You've had in-app purchase issues. You've had app review issues. You've had all sorts of things. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to get too into it, but there's a curious thing where if you're wondering why the app description is a little vague as to what social network it uses. It's because they really didn't want me to say it was a Mastodon app which is very Which makes sense. Strange. Why would you say it's a Mastodon app when it's a Mastodon app?

I don't know. I'm trying to trick people into download. Anyway very strange stuff going on. I have seen people on my timeline share your announcement of Best of Mastodon People are very happy I hope so. I've seen a few people who are like FanPay already does something like this. It is true. That's the worst I've seen. But FanPay doesn't have an iOS app. That's true. It's not really the same thing. FanPay is a catch-up feature where it helps you catch up on your entire timeline, which is not what Mastu does.

It's subtly different. There can be more things. Mine has liquid glass in it. And HDR color effects. So can FanPy do that? Don't think so. Yeah. Nice. Well, this week on Cozy Zone, for those that aren't aware, Cozy Zone is our members podcast that it's an extra episode of Comfort Zone every week, but it's just a little more cozy, you know, a little more relaxed, a little more laid back. And this week we talked about what we do with our old tech, how we recycle or reuse or, you know, gift or whatever we do with our old stuff,

resale all that stuff and then one of my co-hosts makes another revelation two weeks in a row makes a revelation that um i you know you'll just have to listen to to hear but yeah yeah that's cozy zone go check it out if you're interested uh and i guess we're ready to get in the main show obviously it's new iphone week so we all have new iphone to talk about and it's not friday morning and one of us hasn't got there is the other one's still waiting on review units and their shipment And we all have it, right?

Yay! You might actually notice a clock above me. This is actually, if I get out of the frame for a second. This is very cool. Audio listeners, Matt ducked down completely out of the frame. I have a timer that's counting down to when I pick up my iPhone later today. Wow. It's about three hours and 42 minutes from now. I would have done in-store pickup, but we record this show Friday morning. So I was like, well, I guess I'll just have it shipped. Oh, yes. My store opens now.

I could be getting it now, but I'm here. Yeah. My store always opens early on iPhone day too. So like I could be getting mine right now, but I am not. I'm talking with you guys. So anyways, let's get into the main show. Matt, what do you got for us this week? So I waited until this very moment to put in my topic. This is why he was emptying a document. I was wondering what he was doing. Yeah. So my topic, shockingly, is liquid glass updates.

Yes. And this might be just a short little topic. We always say that. Do you guys need me for this one? Yes, we do. Yes. So the specific thing I want to talk about is something that I've heard from several prominent iOS developers. I think Mark Warman has probably been the loudest about this, of like apps that don't update to Liquid Glass are going to look old. They're going to look out of place once iOS 26, specifically like on the iPhone, comes out.

And I've gotten a hundred or so app updates on my phone probably since the new OS came out. Lots of them are from indie devs who are there on day one or two with here's my Liquid Glass update. And I got to be honest, it is really a blink and you miss it sort of thing, I feel like in almost every case. Like, I'm going, I was, before we recorded, I was kind of like going through my phone and like going into some apps and like, it's just so subtle.

I think the biggest thing I've noticed in a couple cases is the icon change. But even that's been pretty subtle because iOS automatically glassifies a lot of icons. so i feel strange i feel and this is gonna sound a little weird it feels a lot like android not this isn't an android segment don't worry everybody don't get to put your pillows away we're gonna we're gonna keep talking about apple stuff um on android like we all know material expressive like the like crazy like shapes and everything for the ui and like you're gonna

redesign your apps and everything and if you use an android phone especially a pixel phone the os has these wonderful shapes and colors and wildness and everything google has updated their apps to do this and made it some ui changes but no third-party devs basically have done anything so like they still look the same um in this case third-party devs on ios have done more but they look the same they behave the same like i think the biggest thing i can think of is overcast

has a new mini player that people don't particularly like and so there's an option in there to go back to the old one which is the exact old one just with a little bit of glass background i don't know i guess i'm only a week into this but like i've been using liquid glass all summer for three months the update came out i got all these new apps and my phone feels the same if apps haven't updated they feel just as native as they always have like i don't know so i always want to talk about are

there any really great liquid glass updates you guys have noticed or do you feel kind of similar to me where like they happened but they're very subtle yeah i so i would say the one that probably surprised me the most that they actually did it was to do ist because to do is very much a Oh, wow. Our design everywhere. But they did, I don't know if people are going to be able to see that or not, but they have a liquid glass menu bar. So, like, there's three buttons at the bottom where it's a tab. So, they have today, upcoming, and browse.

Then next to that, at the bottom, they have a search button. And then at the top, where, like, your name is, where, like, you can see your karma and stuff like that, which I hate that feature. I hate that feature so much, but I want the stupid badge. I know. I know. I'm a horrible person. that uh your name that's a liquid glass button and then they have the notifications and the settings button that is also liquid glass as well and then like if you go into like the menu for like um like a task or something like the menu button's a liquid glass button and menu like there are liquid

glass elements but it still feels like to do with like a liquid glass overlay like it doesn't it doesn't feel like this huge redesign like ios 7 was like it's really not that um it just feels like the button elements the menu bar elements the menu like the menu elements and stuff like that those have just been updated with a glass effect and not really a whole new design language does that make sense it does make sense i i think about the things update which has done liquid glass

all the things they have a new icon that is probably the biggest change and then on all the ui elements they rounded the corners a bit more is basically what i've noticed which is fine it subtly changes the look but it's basically the same um fantastical got an update to liquid glass that's the other one and literally all i see in the ui is that like what used to be just like a text button like because buttons previously were just like text with no outlines or anything now they're just glass buttons. So very subtle. Speaking of fantastical, I got the liquid glass update as well.

I really dislike it. On your phone or? Both, on the Mac and the phone. But I agree with you, Matt, that in most places, like when an app got liquid glass, it really feels the same. It never feels very different. However, in terms of fantastical, what they've done is they moved a bunch of controls that used to be at the top to the bottom of the screen. And you would think, hey, that's nice. It's close to your thumb.

Yeah, I don't want these buttons to be close to my thumb. The buttons in question are the button to change your view, to change between day, week, month, view, etc. The one to switch between calendar sets and the search button. Those used to be at the top. And now I find myself, especially with liquid glass menus, when you long press them, you enter the menu, basically,

and you end up switching stuff accidentally. I don't know if I'm using my phone wrong. Oh, that's cool. Sorry. I didn't know you could do that. It is cool, but it's annoying because I do it accidentally all the time. Because it's in the area where I'm scrolling my events. Okay. I see that. Yeah. This is annoying. I don't like this. Plus, I've saw somebody say on Mastodon, and I agree with them, that this has removed a bunch of color from the app.

The app used to have these buttons at the top be bright red. And it kind of acted as an identity marker for the app. Yes. And now they're gone. Now these buttons are just translucent buttons that look very generic at the bottom. That is true. I'm trying to find the article. The something, something of something, something. here it is all right the Verge wrote something like this is that right incredible yes exactly how did you know that

because I was reminded yeah yeah he calls his article is headlined the unbearable sameness of liquid glass yes and I agree I agree with his points yeah I haven't linked to this yet I don't think on my blog but I'm in the middle of writing something about this because yeah there is something about like it it can suck out some of the character. I know you can do tinted glass buttons, but like I don't see many of those. I've seen one in day one. Day one, so my journaling app, day one.

Okay. I kind of want to show it, but it's very private stuff in there. So I can't really show it. But the new entry button in day one is tinted according to the color of your journal. Yeah. So I think this all goes back to starting with Swift UI, where there was like this universal design language for the Apple platforms. And like, hey, here's all these elements developers use these.

You can you can use. Yes, you used to be you could create your own custom ones. You used to create your own custom stuff. But now we have all these things for you to choose from. And it kind of started to make a lot of apps feel the same. Like, whereas, like, apps used to have, like, Nealian was saying, like, they used to have their own identity. They used to have their own feel to it. And that's what made them different. Now, all calendar apps kind of just look the same. Like, they don't, there's not a lot of, like, if they're using the native development OS tools and stuff like that, they all kind of feel very similar.

So I think Liquid Glass is like literally just taking that up a notch where there's just another level of like, hey, you have all these same elements across all these other apps. And while I could see that being useful, like, hey, I know where the settings are going to be for every app because the menu icon is the same in every app. But that can also get a little boring. Yeah. I will say, I want to say two things. Number one, as a developer who has released three apps using SwiftUI, I love it for being able to get up and running.

It was actually made developing so much easier for someone like me who's not super experienced and doesn't have the design chops to do crazy custom stuff. So it's been awesome for me. I understand more advanced developers are quite annoyed by it in many ways, but that's fine. The second thing is, now you got me going down a thing, I will be very quick. I want to read a paragraph from David Pierce's article that we just mentioned. It's all part of a trend within Apple right now towards the total collapse of the gaps between devices

in an attempt to make everything be everything to everyone all the time. This fall, your new software will all bring a full-featured phone app to your Mac, a menu bar like a menu bar and Mac like window management to the iPad and lots of widgets to basically all your screens. Many of these are good and handy features, but it's an enormous and somewhat surprising shift from a company that has so long believed in using the right hardware for the right job. The context collapse is strange to watch. And that really resonated with me just with like

looking at here's the mac app here's the ipad app here's the iphone app they're the same now there's little margins where they're different but if you're i don't know if we can say i don't know how much we can swear on this show but as i think i think i don't know i don't know if john gruber was the one who initially said this but i first i feel like that's where i heard it first but the idea of a mac mac app was like a thing where like these are like made how apple wants them they're made for the Mac, they're distinct for the Mac, they're totally different from iPad and

iPhone apps. And now I'm looking at my Tahoe Mac and these are just iPad apps. If you're making them with Apple's tech, the way Apple says you should make them, these just look exactly the same as the iPad. And yeah. The phone app is the perfect example of that. The phone app came to the iPad and the Mac this year, and it is the same on the iPhone, the iPad, and the Mac. The only difference on the iPad and the Mac, you can blow up the window and it can be... But they all have that unified layout.

And do you know what the ironic thing is? The apps on the Mac that do not adhere to this, the ones that do feel more like a desktop experience exclusively, electron apps. They're it, yeah. Yeah. Speaking of electron apps, this is tying into what I said earlier about performance. Apparently, uh, electron apps are the cause for huge system wide lag on Mac OS 26 Tahoe.

So yeah, it's interesting. I still not have updated my MacBook pro to Tahoe. I'm just going to hold off until like point one or point two. Cause all, all I use this machine for now is big final cut pro editing projects. Like, that's all I use this machine for. Well, and recording comfort zones. So I'm like, I don't care if it doesn't have Tahoe. I really, like, there's stuff in Tahoe I like. Like, I like the new Spotlight. I like the new menu bar stuff.

I am not, I'm just not going to put it on there. Yeah. The Mac is a tool for you, a dispassionate tool, it seems. You're passionate about the iPad. For me, I'm just waiting for some key features to come to Final Cut Pro for the iPad. And convincing you guys to move off Riverside and go back and go to like Zoom for podcast recording. And I would be completely done with the Mac again. Like, I'm just like, I just like, there's a couple of things I just need to happen. Because there's a few, and a four terabyte iPad.

I know that sounds ridiculous. Just trust me. Yes, it does. The amount of project, like, I have four terabytes in this MacBook Pro. With the iPadOS walkthrough and a few other projects that I've been working on, it's completely full right now. Like, I am actually going to delete the iPadOS walkthrough project today because it's over a terabyte and a half of storage. We live in such different worlds. Yeah. Video, man. Video is just nuts. I know. Video.

But yeah. So I am not jumping at the bit to upgrade to Tahoe because this is just a production machine for me now. I do all my work. I live off the iPad and I'm editing video off the iPad too, but I'm not editing big projects right now because of storage reasons. And there's a few features that I've complained about a bunch, so I won't rehash it with Final Cut Pro for the iPad that just slow me down that I don't want to do big projects on that. Yep, totally makes sense. So I just wanted to talk about liquid glass one last time before we forget about it.

Never think about it again. Yeah. See you next week on the liquid glass podcast. Liquid glass corner, the browser podcast. My God. I swear we do talk about other things if you're new to the show. We do talk about it. Speaking of, Neil, what do you got? I will talk about something else. Okay. Yes. I will talk about music. You've never talked about that before. I will agree. This is a recurring topic of mine, like theme of mine.

But yeah, I've never talked about this specific thing before. This is a music player on the Mac. And I've never heard about it, even though it's old. It's really old. But it just got an update. So it's still actively maintained. It's called Swinzian. I'm assuming you pronounce it that way. And I discovered it via Anthony on Mastodon in a conversation about a conversation on Mastodon that we were having between people who have offline music libraries.

And as you know, I have adopted Doppler and I still use Doppler. It's really, really good. I use it both on the iPhone. It's got an iPhone app and on the Mac. But yes, Winsian is just like that, just like Doppler, a music player for people who have an offline music library. And I want to talk to you about it. It's kind of interesting. First off, it has a yellow icon.

So that's good. I like it. But is it a good yellow? It's a good yellow. Okay. All right. I know you've got some opinions when it comes to like good yellows and oranges. The orange opinion is completely wrong. Cosmic orange is great. Everyone knows it. We can move on. Sure. It's got a good yellow. A nice, yeah, nice, very bright yellow, very nicely saturated. Anyway, this is the yellow podcast.

And its UI is very old school, but it doesn't look too bad. And by old school, I mean, do you picture in your head the old iTunes days where the main view in iTunes was that view where you have three panes? You've got artists, album, and then below, you've got the album you're looking at. So, basically, it's a tree.

You navigate your music library. Oh, yeah. Down the tree. And this is really nice. In Swinzian, this is like the main thing. This is how and basically the only way that you navigate your music. But it's done in a nice way and customizable way. They have a thing that's called the art grid, where instead of the artist and album panes at the top, you can have just one column with all your albums.

And they are displayed with the album artworks mainly. So it's a good way to browse. If you, like me, and I assume most people, if you browse music mostly by looking at art covers and you identify albums, you recognize albums by their art covers, this is a really nice way to navigate through your library. And I want to point out the performance of this app is kind of amazing because it's displaying a ton of data at once, including like image heavy, like heavy image data all at once in one window.

And it's all dynamic. It's one view that never refreshes. I don't know if you understand what I mean. Like basically it feels like the Swinzian is always displaying your entire music library and you just filter down in this view. And when you filter down using the search field, it just like it just filters out the things that don't correspond to your search terms. So in the end, this is extremely fast.

Very, very nice. I really like that. But otherwise, it's very... It's kind of old school, and I like that. And just like the old iTunes, you have your big controls at the top, and they also have a mini player that doesn't look amazing, but I don't really care about mini players. I've never understood mini players. I have me neither. I never even used it back in the old school iTunes days, and this is giving me old school iTunes flashbacks.

This looks very much like old-school iTunes. I never used the MIDI player back then either. I never quite got the purpose of it. I would, you know, if I wanted to change something, you just tab over and change it, and then I always felt like I was, like, hampered. Like, I couldn't, I don't know. I agree. You're 100% right. This is giving old-school iTunes vibes. Young people don't remember how good... No, I did not say the V word. For the record, I did not say the V word. What V word?

What Matt just said. What did I say? What? Vibes. I don't say that word. Oh, vibes. That's a bad word. No, I don't apologize. That's bad word. Deal with it yourself. That's a bad word. It very much reminds me of those early iTunes days, which people, if you're young enough, you don't remember, iTunes was awesome. It was like, people liked it. It was fantastic. I also, I'm looking at their website and on the customize section showing that art grid, they know who they're talking to.

We got Wilco, we got Jenny Lewis, we got Pavement. Like, they're talking to people who have been around a while. Old people's stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So, it looks cool. There's a version of me that wishes I was doing what you are doing. Yes. And I just want, I mentioned quickly, but they just got an update. The app just got an update. where basically it's a modernized version of the same UI and a bunch of new features, including I believe the art grid is one of the new views in the app.

But otherwise, the app is pretty much unchanged. And like you said, for people who are doing what I'm doing, if you care about the quality of your music files, this is a great app too, because it allows you to view all the data, the metadata associated with your music files. You can see the codec, the sample rate, all of that at once. Basically, the app has a toggleable detail pane on the right side. And by the way, every single thing in the UI, like everything I've said, the art grid, the list view,

the artist and album split view, all of that is toggleable on the fly. So you don't have to go into the settings window to choose what you want. You can just adjust as you're browsing. It's really nice. It has basically a toolbar at the bottom of the window where you can just toggle the panes on and off. Really nice. I really like this. And I am impressed once again that it's handling so well the size of my library. And Anthony, who talked to me about this app, mentioned that they have a huge library, an insane library, and that Swinzian handles it perfectly well.

It does support, and can I get a drumroll, please? Yes. Editor Chris, go ahead and put that in here. It supports Last.fm Scrobbling. Yes, it does. I still don't remember what that is. Yes, it does. You guys have explained it to me multiple times. I do not remember what it is. It just tracks so many times you listen to a song. I don't know why it's not sticky. I'm not going to remember that. I don't care. I don't care. I'm not going to remember that. You're right to mention it. It supports Last.FM. Scrubbling, which is an essential feature for this kind of app.

Yes, if you know what it does. Yeah, everybody knows what it does. It also supports playback over AirPlay. It has podcast downloading. It has AppleScript controls, smart playlists, Regex search. Like this thing is full featured and it's only $35. I was about to come to that. Sorry, I'm stealing your thunder. I'm sorry. I'm so happy that you're excited. It's indeed a one-time purchase. $35. And you've got a 30 days trial.

So plenty of time to try it out to decide if you want to buy it. It's a very generous trial. And you mentioned all of those specific features. There's one specific feature that I want to call out as well, which is that it lets you play bit perfect music. Basically, it can adjust the sample rate of your sound output to match the music file. So this is very in detail stuff, but if you are playing a music file at 44 kHz, it will it will change your

sample rate on your audio output if it supports it to 44 kHz etc. So it matches always matches. That's a really specific feature it's really nice if you care about that stuff Yeah, that's pretty cool I am very impressed by this app and I'm bummed I don't have a local music library anymore to play around with this is something I would absolutely love I've talked about it before I lost my local music library and it would be way too big of a pain to rebuild it.

So, yeah. But this is pretty cool. I like this. I'm happy that you like it. Yes, it's really nice. And you're right, I forgot it, but it has full podcast functionality. And this is one of the things I unchecked immediately because I don't want podcasts in my music player. But yeah, it does that if you're interested. This really seems like they went to iTunes in 2006. And we're like, okay, we're just going to build that.

Yes. And they stopped. There's a tipping point with iTunes when they started adding a bunch of stuff like paying RIP to the real one. They started adding all this stuff. When they started adding movies and TV shows and stuff like that, that's when it started to get a little too much. There started to be a little too much in there. There's a little too much cruft and it just stopped being awesome. But this feels like they went like, I mean, maybe 2006 is even too late. Maybe it was like 2004, 2005, somewhere like around there.

Where like right before they added movies and TV shows, before Ping was a thing. Yeah. What did Ping ever do to you? Ping was great. Underrated. Oh. You can follow your favorite artists and. And watch them never post anything. Yeah. Other things you can do, tags. You can tag music and group music by tag. Amazing. You can import music to your phone, just like iTunes.

You can have watched folders. So basically, you can say, watch the... I'm thinking of Corbuse, for example. You know, the music store, the online music store, that's also a music streaming service for audio files. Anyway, Corbuse, they have a Corbuse downloader that you use to download the music you purchase on their store. And it always goes into some weird folder on your Mac. And yeah, using this, you can add that weird folder as a watch folder.

And it means Swinzian will automatically import the music you just downloaded from Corbuse. Very specific stuff, but I'm pretty sure like most people will have a use case for this. And yeah, I'm done. we can't list all the features. It's really, really packed. That's great. Whenever someone says it supports watch, watched folders, I love that. I am just a sucker for a, when a file appears in this folder, do something to it. Yes. I love that. It's so satisfying.

I mean, the automatically add to iTunes folder back in the day. Oh, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. I use that. I use that. Oh, yeah. Hazel. Yeah. All these things. Yep. And it's got an equalizer as well. Nice. Another one. Things are coming to me as I'm poking around the app. Nice. Yeah. All right. Ready to get to the challenge? Yes. Let's do it. All right. So this challenge, it was my week to issue the challenge.

And coming off of this last week where I was working on the iPadOS walkthrough and getting ready to do iPhone stuff and all sorts of things, there was only one thing that could come to mind and that was relax so i wanted all all of us to do something that isn't related to work and you can't monetize it but do something with tech do something with technology uh and you couldn't do you can't monetize it you can't turn it into a job so uh would you guys like me to go first yes so the afternoon uh the the monday ipad os 26 came out

that afternoon. I released my video in the morning. I watched it like a hawk for the first few hours. Thank you to everyone that's watched it, like, commented, shared, really appreciated this video is doing extremely well. Thank you so much. But after I knew it was good, after I knew everything was okay, I took that whole afternoon off. And while taking a whole afternoon off may not sound like this big deal, when you're in the middle of OS update season, and iPhone update season, and AirPods update season, and Apple Watch update season, taking an afternoon off means you're not getting a lot of stuff done.

So, but I knew I needed a break. So I sat back and I ate chicken wings, drank some Dr. Pepper, and played video games, specifically Borderlands 4. I loaded this up. I got it on the Xbox Series X, and I played through a bunch of it that afternoon. I really enjoyed it. It's a fun game, but it's not like some thought-provoking game. It's not some like, it's not Silksong. Everyone's playing Silksong right now.

I did not want to play Silksong. Silksong is a very difficult game. I wanted something I could relax to. And you know what? Borderlands is the perfect. I'm going to shut off my brain and play a video game. So I had a lot of fun with that. That was just literally took the afternoon. If you like the previous Borderlands games, you're going to like this game. It has a bit more Ubisoft fetch quests to it a bit, which is kind of a bummer. It's focused on this big open world, and it definitely feels a bit like Assassin's Creed-y almost, which is kind of a bummer, but it's not too bad.

It's not as bad as Assassin's Creed is, but there's some moments in there where I'm just like, okay, these challenges, I don't care. I'm not going to do these things because they're very much just like, go here and collect a thing. And like, I don't, I don't care about that stuff. Give me some story side quests. Give me some, the main missions. Give me all that stuff. I'll play that. But I don't care about like, go here and collect this thing. The techie angle to it, I guess, other than, you know, video games themselves, use the new elite controller.

My new elite controller, not the new, my new elite controller. Because somebody in my house broke my last one. not me. Broke the Elite controller? Yep, yep. Somebody was playing actually Assassin's Creed and the right button stopped working. I don't know who. It wasn't me. I don't know who else that could be. Could be one of two people in the house. No, the cat doesn't play Xbox, weirdly. Because your mother-in-law knew it. Yeah. She's definitely playing a lot of Xbox.

No, so I got the new Elite controller. What was different about this one as opposed to the last one is i had the white one last time so it doesn't come with any of the accessories any of like the bits like the the thumbstick changes d-pad changes and it doesn't come with the bottom like trigger buttons so i uh tried out the bottom trigger buttons and they're not bad i took two of them off and i just left two of them and i mapped two of them to the right button and the left button so i can basically get to everything without having to move my pointer

finger from like the triggers to the buttons. So yeah, that was pretty cool. I like that. I will always get the Elite controller over the regular controller for one thing. The Elite, well, actually two things. The Elite controller is rechargeable and you don't have to use batteries. The second thing is because it has a big old battery in it, it's not hollow like the regular Xbox controller and doesn't make these terrible, terrible sounds. So yeah. Yeah. So that's what I did.

okay yeah I was not expecting that yeah the challenge was relax and that was very relaxing to me especially the eating wings and drinking Dr. Pepper part okay I was a little worried at first yes something related to tech what do you got Niléane okay it's actually you've been seeing it since the start of the show today yes if i if i move just a bit like that you can see it

more i see something yellow i think it's on the back of your chair yeah i have no idea what it is like a chair cover or something okay so what i've done and it's extremely tech related because it's it relates to my task there you go so what I've done is I've taken my chair it's usually a yellow not a white chair sorry white chair that's pretty hard but I like it and it's covered in what do you call it?

cloth a very stiff cloth which is nice but something more cozy. So I grabbed a duvet, right? A yellow one. Very fluffy. Very nice. The cat really likes this one. And what I've done is I've wrapped my chair in it. Because it is a huge... And you can't see with the... Should I move the camera now? It's annoying. Like, the whole chair is wrapped in it. Let me just turn around, maybe. See?

Can you see? Oh, okay, okay, okay. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Oh, that looks nice. This is low-tech, but very tech. See? Wait, did you make it? No. I just... Oh. This is like a Jouvet cover that I wrapped, and I wrapped the chair in it. Okay. I'm using... It's very hard to show with this camera angle. I should have thought of this ahead. But I'm using the things that pinch in English.

What is that? Clips. Clips. Yes. The things that pinch. I'm using a bunch of hair clips, the big ones, to make sure it doesn't move around and come off when I move around on the chair. And that's it. This is my submission to the challenge. My chair is a lot more comfy. And it's ready for winter. This will be a perfect setup for the winter months. There you go.

That's good. And this is tech. Like, hair clips are tech, right? Yeah. Everything's technology, in a way. There you go. And it's not related to my work, because I also do non-work-related things at my desk. So there you go. Okay. And like Chris, who, like, I think Chris's submission doesn't work. What? Oh, boy. Because you took the afternoon off for what?

To play video games. Yes, but because you were tired by your iPadOS walkthrough. So, see, it relates to your work. But I relaxed. No, I walked away from work. I walked out. I didn't even check my email. Do something with tech that isn't related to your work. And what you did is you took your afternoon off because of work. So it doesn't, it relates to it. There's a relationship. I mean, were you working while you put the duvet on your chair? No, I was not.

See, I wasn't working either. I wasn't working. I literally walked away from work. I don't know. Normally, I work in the afternoon. Instead, I walked away from work. I didn't even check my email that afternoon. I mean, it's obviously a fraud. Maybe not. Okay. I'm just going to say I agree more with one of you than the other, but I won't say who because I like the conflict. You're like the child in the middle of, like, arguing parents. You're like, I love you both, and you're just trying to give us both a hug.

Okay. Well, these are two submissions, absolutely. Not talking about the quality. They're both great. They're both great. Is there more to say about the duvet cover? No, no, no, no. Okay. Okay. Just making sure. I honestly didn't know what I was going to do with this challenge. But I happened to get very lucky the day after we recorded. I was at my parents' house for no exciting reason.

But my mom has this very specific thing she does where every time her children come home, she will have some stack of things for them to look at, some mail that is still being delivered to our parents' house instead of us, things from our childhood that she's going to throw away and absolutely should throw away or donate and wants to know if we want to keep it, and we never do. But she cooked this time because when I walked into the house in the spot where all the stuff that we're supposed to look at every time was there, I saw these two cameras.

This is a Canon T-70, which my research tells me released in 1984, I think. So it's basically, it's actually even older than I am, which is shocking. And then I have a Konica C35, which is from the 70s, I believe. And apparently, these were my dad's when he was around my age. And I had no idea. Never knew these were a thing.

He never talked about it. But I bought some film for these because these are obviously not digital. This one needs power. This one, actually, the Kaneko one is completely manual. There's no power in here at all. That's so cool. There's like a little crank here that I have to use to wind back the film once I'm done with it. There's a little hand crank here. So like if I take a photo, which is very satisfying, I have to.

Oh, that's so good. That's so good. I know. I have to crank that. But with this one, Chris, you said double A's are annoying. This is powered by two double A's. Imagine if your Canon that you're filming this on right now is powered by double A's. And it's awesome. It would eat it up in 30 seconds. I know. And you know what's crazy about this is there's no off button. Because it's not doing anything. There's no like EVF or anything. No like screen to power. There's a tiny little thing here on the top that shows you like how many photos you have left on the roll.

or how many you've taken on the roll but that's it that's just always on it's been on for a week and it's not sucking up any power i don't know what sort of screen this is but these it's a very old school sort of screen but like it's so cool um that's awesome it's made me very much appreciate modern cameras though because y'all it is crazy shooting on like an old school film camera um when you're shooting on a camera now even if you're going like full manual right you've got to balance your iso your aperture and your shutter speed right yeah on these cameras

i can control my aperture but uh that's about it i can't control the shutter speed on these cameras at least it's just a fixed shutter speed which i don't even know what it is and then the iso this one just broke my brain the iso is not the camera the iso is the film you buy for the camera Oh, interesting. So like, and these do have like sensors in them that will like have a, there's a sort of auto mode for like getting the exposure right.

On the Konica one specifically, it's not really going to show here easily, but on the lens, there's a little thing down here where you rotate the lens to match the film speed that you got. So I got 400, I got Kodak 400 something. and so i had to like rotate this to know that it's 400 iso so that when it does its auto exposure thing uh which is very funny like look through the viewfinder and there's like a little like a little springy little like uh arm that kind of just bounces to like what the right uh aperture is for the current light situation um it has to know what what sensitivity your film is focusing is

insane on these like because they don't have autofocus you have to manually focus every single shot It's very hard to tell through these old school, not... I wouldn't say their retina. I mean, it's literally... You're just looking through the world, but it's also different. Autofocus is the thing I think I miss the most for my current cameras. You just aim it and you shoot, and that's great. This, you have to be like, everybody hold still. I need to focus. There's no loop. If you go to manual focus mode on a Canon, you can zoom super way in and get it pin sharp.

This one, you're just looking with your eyes and eyeballing it. Hoping for the best. Yeah. I love this. I absolutely love this. In fact, I vote for Matt to win the challenge. If we bring democracy back for this one, I vote for Matt because I absolutely love this. What do you mean? My chair. There's absolutely no way I would win. The duvet would destroy us all. Yes. Well, I mean, if we put it on Mastodon, yeah, because everyone votes for Neely on no matter what. But I'd vote for Matt because I love this. It's very trendy to shoot on film cameras right now.

I'm not really interested in it for the exact reason that you said. I like autofocus. I like being able to have controls to really dial in the photo and stuff like that. My camera, my Canon camera, your Canon camera that you shoot with are going to take much better photos than film camera. But there is something. There's something fun about it. Yeah. Yeah. There's something romantic about film cameras and shooting on film that like it's just satisfying. And I very much want you to send us some photos that you shoot on film.

Yeah, I will. And that's the crazy thing. I don't even know if these cameras still work yet. Like, they seem to do the things. But, like, I'm halfway through this roll of film. I just started with this one. So, like, I don't know if these photos have come out. I don't know if these lenses are, like, if the sensor is actually still working. I don't know if I got focus right in any of these. Like, it's crazy. So it's going to be another week or two before I even finish the roles and can send them in someplace. So it's a whole thing. I wouldn't advise it, but if you can get your hand on an old camera, it is fun.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love this. Matt wins. I'm just going to say it. Matt wins. I vote for Matt. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Speaking of, Matt, it's your turn to issue a challenge for us this week. What do you got? Okay. We've just come off an easy challenge, and I wanted to do another easy challenge. So my challenge is it's similar to one we've done before, but you can scale the difficulty to whatever you want it to be.

It's new iPhone week as we record this. They've been out for a week when you listen to this. What I like to do on a new phone is give it a new wallpaper. So my challenge, or if I don't get the new phone, I like to like download the wallpaper that the phone has. I do this a lot of times with like the Pixel phones. I'm like, ooh, that's a cool wallpaper. And then I go to like nine to five Google or something and download the wallpaper. My challenge is find a very cool wallpaper.

Wait, find, not make. Can I make one? You can make one. You could find it in your documents folder on your computer. Okay. Okay. Just find one. It doesn't have to be new. I just want us to bring three awesome wallpapers. Okay. I like this. And it must be for your phone. A phone wallpaper. Specifically. Okay. Okay. No problem. Must it, like, what are we submitting? The wallpaper? Or how it's, how well it does with our home screens? I think we should.

Yeah. Whatever you want to do. I would like to be able to link to all of these. So anyone who sees them in the chapter art and whatever and thinks they look cool, they can go get them. So if we make it, just make it a download. If it's a free download, do that. If it's a paid thing, link to the store. We're not going to pirate it. But yeah. Okay. So just present it however you want. Whatever you think makes it look the most dope. Okay. I think what I'll do is I'll take a screenshot of my home screen and then I'll also have a link to the wallpaper.

So that way people can see both. Cool. All right. I like it. Let's wrap up the show. As always, we have an end of the show question that was submitted to us in the feedback form. So if you want to know something about the three of us, we have a feedback form. Submit it into the show question. You can ask us about anything. If you want to mention how you did the challenge along with us or something that's come up on the show, that's what the feedback form is. Have at it. Challenge ideas as well. Yeah, challenge ideas. That'd be great too.

We got one question that I thought was interesting. How did the three of you all meet and decide to start a podcast? So Matt and I have known each other via Twitter for years now. It must have been Twitter, yeah. I'm pretty sure it was Twitter. Were you on a slab of glass? Did we have you on a slab of glass? I believe I, that was with you and Jeff Perry, right? Yeah, Perry. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I guessed it one time. Okay.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure we had you on there because you were a big iPad boy for a little while. And, yeah. And that's how you and I started following each other. I think that's right. I was going to say, me and Neelion, I don't think I knew you until I started using Mastodon again. Yeah. And you like shepherded me into understanding Mastodon. Yeah, I guess so. I came to know Nelian when she started writing at Mac Stories.

And I was like, wow, this is some good stuff. I like this. And then Matt, you and I have always kind of like, we have had like this joking rivalry sort of. Joking. We've debated, you know, having one of those YouTube boxing matches to really settle our beef between each other. But I think it would just be Rock'em Sock'em Robots instead. Yeah, it would be less embarrassing. Right? Could you imagine? No.

No. That's not going to happen. But you and I have joked about, oh, we need a podcast. We need a podcast for a while. And then one day, we were like, well, why don't we just do it? And I think we talked about it. And I kind of had, I had a very loose concept of what comfort zone would be eventually. And then we said we needed a third. And that's when we reached out to Neelion. And we wanted her. And Neelion was like, literally, you guys were all like the first choice. Like, there was never like anyone else that were like, I wonder if we could get this person to do it.

Like, you two were the people I wanted to do this show with. So, yeah, that's kind of how it all started. And then Neelion reached out to John and Federico. And that's how we got on MacStories. Yeah. Yeah. That was a great call, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Big business lady doing her things. It didn't even occur to me at the time, like, oh, we could maybe make this a Mac Stories thing. It didn't even occur. Yeah. At that point, Mac Stories was expanding their podcast library, the family of podcasts, like Federico says.

And yeah, I thought we would be a good match, and we were. Speaking of, there is a new podcast on Mac Stories that I really want to highlight. Yes. Jonathan, First Last Everything. It's really good. He's interviewing different creators, different people, different developers. It's not just YouTubers and stuff like that. He's interviewing different people about their experience with technology. It's very good. I'm really excited about it. So that's a new show on Mac Stories. They didn't ask us to highlight it, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Yeah, it's really nice. And you can tell Jonathan knows what he's doing because it's got really high production value, I find. Much higher than this show. Much better. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. Do you guys have anything you want to promote, say, mention? I believe this week, by the time this episode is out, let me make the calculation, the time calculation in my head. Yes, I believe this week I will have been on another Mac site, on Cult of Mac, for a live translation demo.

Oh. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. Right. As of now, it's not happened yet. Ah. Yeah. Nice, nice. That'll be fun. Yeah. Nice. For me, please download my apps. seriously they are really good apps like i really have been enjoying besto masto over the summer and uh quick subtitles has been kind of my go-to place for getting subtitles for videos now so uh if you haven't already go check out my ipad os 26 walkthrough um i spend a ton of time on it i'm really happy with the reception and how it turned out and i i think if i could pat myself on the back

for a second i think it's the best video i've ever made um yeah yeah yeah i think my review i posted about it a day or two ago and my review is basically like this feels like a like a breakout session at wwdc like what apple would do i saw that thank you that that meant a lot that that was like oh yeah thank you all right well thank you all so much for listening have a great day bye Bye!