It's Charlie Chapman's Fault

By the way, am I looking more prime? Prime. Prime. Prime. What does that mean? I'm using a different lens. Oh. I got a new lens. Is it a zoom lens? Sure. It is a prime lens. All right. You look very different. I should look literally identical. Yes, that's what I meant. In a later episode, I should look identical, but it's a different lens. 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 am joined by Matt Bershler. Matt, how are you doing on this fine winter morning? I'm feeling great. I'm feeling crisp. I like the weather outside in the beautiful Midwest. It's so foggy outside. I love it. I love this time of year. And we are also joined on the other side of the globe by Niléane. Niléane, how are you? I'm fine. I, if you're watching the video, I have embraced that.

Because last year, if you remember, when winter came, I was recording all in the night. My lighting wasn't great. And so I thought I would embrace that, the fact that it's already nighttime here. And so I've put up some blue lighting behind me. and yeah it's fully night time we've got some snow outside it's really nice and now it's raining so it's not nice yeah but it's cold I'm jealous of the snow I wish it snowed more here especially considering I don't go anywhere

so I really wouldn't actually have to deal with it oh yeah if you're not going anywhere snow is great yeah like I don't have to go anywhere as soon as you have to go somewhere though yeah I had to go somewhere in the snow but it was by train So it was actually really nice. Yeah, so it kind of like half counts. Like you have to go outside in it, but you don't have to like shovel your driveway and like put like snow tires on or anything like that. I did have to be outside from my place to the tramway station, then from the tramway station to the train station.

That was really hard. Did you have to put snow tires on your shoes? No. I do have those though for my shoes. Oh, do you? What? They're little things for extra grip. For your roller skating shoes? The opposite of my roller skating shoes. They lock into the ice. Mm. Mm. Mm. Mm. Yeah. You have fun with that, Matt. We have a show to do. We have some tiny topics. Is this, first one, is this Neil Leigh-Anne?

Whose is this? No. It says thanks Neil Leigh-Anne on it. I like the idea that Nealian is writing her own tiny topics. I could kind of see that happening. That's why I kind of thought, maybe it could be her. No, this is a tiny topic for me. And it is. Thank you, Nealian. So I have been using Pastebot as my clipboard manager on the Mac for many years, at least 10 years at this point. And recently you were like, why are you doing that? Why don't you just use Raycast?

And I was like, Raycast is not as good. It's not going to work for me. It's going to, I don't know, whatever. Update, it works great for me. I like it a lot. It has good keyboard shortcuts. And I'm not even a paid Raycast user. I just use the free version of the app. And it works great. Yeah, I think the max history is like seven days or something, which is fine for me. So, yeah, works really, really nice. And so, yeah, I'm using Raycast for my clipboard manager now. And it is fantastic. If you're a Raycast user who doesn't use that, give it a shot.

It's quite good. nice told you so yeah thank you so I finally put Tahoe on the MacBook Pro that I have good for you I'm sorry I took Raycast off and I'm just using spotlight and the spotlight I've literally taken so many third party stuff off and I'm just like running this thing as close to bare bones as possible because all I need it for is like uh editing machine for big projects a chrome machine and a hush machine i'm just like so close

guys so close i tried to go back to spotlight on tahoe to like use the improvements and i it's so it's so slow i i can't i it's so annoying uh searching for apps is like the worst experience in Spotlight, even though that's the core feature of the thing. You type a letter and it takes two seconds to find it. If you think maybe you've got some muscle memory, like maybe you type S for Safari, and if you press enter too early,

you're screwed. Maybe it will launch some random file on your Mac that starts with S instead of Safari. Maybe I'll end up going back to Raycast But for now, for the little bit that I've been using it, it's been fine. It's fine. It's fine and good. We have another tiny topic. And this one I know is from Neil Leon. Yeah. Yes. It's actually something that somebody recommended to me.

A friend of mine listened to the show. When I talked to you about my MacBook setup, well, now I have an SSD strapped on top of my MacBook to expand my storage. And they sent me this. So you can click the link. It's something that SanDisk announced just a couple of weeks ago. It's called the SanDisk Extreme Fit USB-C flash drive. And yeah, it's a really tiny flash drive that goes up to one terabyte.

And it's meant as something that you plug into one of your USB-C ports. And it's really small. And instead of being long, it's more vertical height to it. I don't know how to explain, but it's a bit more, like a lot more flush to the Mac compared to classic USB drives. And compared to others as well, it's got quite a bit higher writing speeds.

Actually, no, the writing speed is not great. It's like up to 150 megabytes per second. So that's not great. That's like a tenth of your Samsung T7. Oh, yeah. However, the reading performance is quite higher than similar products in this category. It goes up to 400 megabytes per second. And I was thinking for my usage, like I'm just storing files on there. I'm not working off the thing.

And like currently, it's just my music. I'm just playing music from the thing, from my SSD. so this would be great actually I think this would be great just one turbine on the CyberMarch MacBook that I can carry anywhere and so the thing is I don't trust flash drives I have a deep distrust for these things however I've got a pretty big time machine setup and now I've got an extra SSD that I could add to my time machine setup so it could

back up to two SSDs at the same time, two different SSDs at the same time. So I think I would feel pretty good using this. However, it's out of stock everywhere right now. I'm looking at, and where I am at least, it's got a two to three week back order right now. You can order it, but it's two to three weeks out. Yeah, the only thing that would worry me is the write speeds. That is really slow, but... Yeah, I know.

Yeah, if you're not writing too much to it, I guess it'd be fine. But yeah, that's... I'm only sporadically adding music files to it. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're just listening to 400 megabytes per second, that's more than enough to... Even your most high-fidelity FLAC files. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. If you can see where this is in stock, I don't know, some deep corner of your internet, let me know.

uh this week on cozy zone our members only podcast we ranked apple accessories and this is my favorite episode we've recorded of cozy zone today like we get into it like there is some yelling going on uh when i went back and and was editing this i was shocked i allowed a few things to get past. I mean, that magic keyboard rating. Anyways, this is my favorite one. There's links in the description, show notes, wherever you're listening to this, to go

check it out. Like I said, Cozy Zone, it's our members-only podcast. It's a great way to support the show. We really appreciate everyone that checks it out. Thank you so much. And you guys ready to get into the main show? Yeah. Let's do it. Let's just say we may get threats from our STA choices. uh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's okay i can take the heat i'm looking at them right now and i am now reminded of the one that is giving chris anxiety actually there's two of them that are

insane there's two that are absolutely insane yeah they're they're yeah there are two that belong there and there are two that are insane um yeah uh i don't even um something something main show topic uh yes so last week i talked about how apple brought back slide over and mentioned like oh should they even do split view and blah blah blah blah um if you follow my youtube channel you will

know apple has now since brought back split view it is currently in the developer beta i don't know if there's the public beta for it out at the time of recording but by the time this is released i'm sure a public beta will be out double check with you know all the usual suspects um and then um basically this is an ipad os 26.3 and it was developer beta 3 that it showed up in and this brings basically split view back to the iPad.

First off, have you guys seen how this works? And Neilian, I know you don't have an iPad anymore. Matt, I know you do. Have you installed the beta? I have, and it made me quite happy. Were you one of the people that was like, no, I want the old multitasking back? I, as an 11-inch iPad user, I think the old split screen was far better for me. It's so small. You can't have, I mean, I can have multiple windows, but I can only see one at a time.

So what's the point? So I would always do split screen and I would do the thing you like, show me where you just flick the window. So I figured out how to do that. But I've only played with it a little bit, but my understanding is basically now I can more, the gestures are more it's easier to do a split like 50 50 and then if i want to replace an app i just drag the icon on top of the other one and it flips it puts it there the old app is still another window still open in the background but yeah so i'm actually quite happy with it it's it's gotten me to a better place i think with uh my smaller ipad neilion have you seen how this works what what do

you think of it i mean i watched your video great thank you yeah um i yeah i was telling you before recording that. My first thought was how this is now doing it, iPadOS is now doing this better than macOS. So macOS now has the tiling window since one or two versions of macOS ago, where you can drag and drop windows on the side of your screen, and it will tile to halves,

two halves, and there's a handle in the middle, just like on iPadOS, where you can drag it and resize both halves at the same time. However, now, as you showed in your video on iPadOS, you can drop, drag and drop another app on top of one of those halves, and they will, like, fill that space on the screen, even if you've resized them. Yeah, so even if it's, like, one of the windows is, like, super, super skinny, and the other one's really really big yeah and macwest doesn't do that like it does but it's like half baked like

you can resize it and we'll only do it for one of the two and if you try to drag and drop another window to the other half that's been resized it will not do it it will just snap to the half of the screen that's really weird yeah um that's that's that that seems like a bug that they just haven't gotten to fixing, hopefully. I don't know. It's just like Stage Manager. So many fixes to Stage Manager on iPadOS, and on macOS, it's still in the same state.

It is still in the same state as it was when iOS 16 shipped or iPadOS 16 shipped. Stage Manager on the Mac, please correct me if I'm wrong, still doesn't have the ability for you to shift, click, and icon it, add it to the current stage. That's wild to me. That is absolutely wild. Anyways, but this split view thing, it essentially brings the old split view that was in iPadOS 18 to iPadOS 26.

You can drag and drop from the dock. You can drag and drop from Spotlight, app library, whatever. If you have an app full screen, you can drag and drop an app to the side and it'll shift them to a 50-50 split view, which is something I didn't show in my video. I regret it. As soon as I hit published, I realized I didn't put that use case in the video, and that was a bummer. But you can do that. So if you traditionally have an app full screen, you drag another app, and one will go to 50, the other one will go to 50.

But what's really interesting to me, so this works with the new windowing mode and works with stage manager. But there's still the separate full screen single window mode that was in iPadOS 26, like the base one. That hasn't changed. So the split view now works with the new windowing mode and now works with stage manager. But what's interesting to me is there still seems to be a lot of people that just want the old thing back. And I'm like, I don't quite get that because you can ignore the windowing thing.

And if you're not watching the video, you're missing out. That's showing off his dog. There's a little cat. Weird cat, but still. No, that's a dog. Don't listen to her, Sherman. Oh, that's a good boy. I forgot where I was. Oh, but people still really want the old thing back. Like, they really want, like, the old iPadOS 18 multitasking. But you get that with this, plus you get the windowing. And you can ignore the resizable windows if you want.

If you totally want to ignore that, you can end the window of mode and just use split view. But people still quite aren't. I don't know if you guys are plugged into this. Like, do you know why people? Like, I don't quite get it. Like, I've seen the comments, but I'm just like, you can do this. You can do exactly what you used to be able to do in iPadOS 18. You just don't resize things if you don't want it to resize things. I think I wonder if we're really in the details here of how this stuff works, right? Because in a split view, if you had a 50-50 split in the old system and you wanted to just get out of it for whatever reason, you're done doing the two things at once, you want to go back.

What I remember doing was I would just grab the little divider in the middle, slide it over to one side, and then both apps would kind of be in their own full screen mode. I don't know. Does that work? Or do I have to tap the three buttons, tap the X, and then expand the other app to go full screen? Is it more taps to do that sort of thing? so what you would do to do that kind of thing if you want to if you're like done with your split view and let's just say you want the app on the left uh to go back to full screen you would just tap the three buttons and then tap the green one and it would be full screen okay so okay it's two taps instead of a slide so like yeah there's a little bit of differences here but functionality

wise it's the same plus on top of that you have resizable windows so even if you don't want to make something like a free floating window. What you do get now with the new split view is I can say I got two apps, 50, 50 view and previous versions in iPadOS 18. My other option is I can make one app two thirds and the other app one third view, but now I can, those apps are freely resizable. So I can make it a one quarter and three quarters view, or I can do like a one sixth and five sixth view or something like that like there you you have more fractions and you can adjust things

more like a lot more um granular like you can on the mac like how neilion was explaining their split view on the mac you have that those free sizing windows so in my opinion it's better in just about every way i think the only way that like i i can understand this argument is that with the new slide over there is no separate multi-window picker you can only have one app and slide over at a time i can see that argument i understand that argument but all the other stuff i don't see how it's any different than ipad os 18 yeah i don't know the the impression i get from because i i'm i'm

i'm more on your side i think on this one chris but i do i do sympathize a little bit because i do have the smaller screen so i don't really get much value from them the multi-window um i think it is really just those little things and i think there's people who like genuinely don't want free floating windows on the ipad like they prefer the ipad because it doesn't do that and i think that they whether they're 100 like right or just kind of it's how they feel um i think they they have this kind of feeling with iOS 26 that Apple's kind of given up on them and they're adapt they're adopting more what you and I want um which is a more full-featured more powerful thing um I would

imagine based on what I've like read and talked to other people about uh with this who like have the different opinion is that they probably when they hear you say it's the same system but you also have this they're like I don't want the also I didn't want that the whole reason I got an iPad I just don't want that. So I think this is the challenge with the iPad of like trying to serve so many people and so many devices from like a seven inch, like an iPad mini has multi window. That's kind of crazy. Honestly, it doesn't, it's not terrible. Like I use it, but most of the time on the iPad mini, I'll just keep an app in full screen.

Like I didn't use split view very much on the iPad mini because it was so small too. So like, but to me, like you can ignore the floating windows if you want, but like the benefit of the floating windows is you get the ability to run iPhone apps alongside your other iPad apps. You're not getting this like, like in the old full screen, even the old iPad OS split view mode, when you would run, when you would open an iPhone app, it would still have the crazy

border around it. Now it just floats on top of everything else and you can interact with iPhone only apps or iPhone only layout apps on an iPad. And that to me is a huge benefit of the windowing mode that I'm just like, why are you guys like not wanting this? So maybe I don't see, I don't think I'm out of touch. Like I use an iPad. So I don't think you're out of touch. I think there's people with different opinions on this and have them struggling to make everybody happy, as they always have.

This has always been the struggle, right? But that's the thing is I think there's so many options with this new windowing mode that you can use the stuff that you like. Especially now in iPadOS 26.3 developer beta 3. It'll be nice when it's all out. You can use whatever option you want and you can ignore the other stuff. So if you want your apps to be full screen and then you want to do 50-50 split view, you can do that. And if you want, you know, windowing modes, but you don't want split view, you could do that.

Like, you can ignore the stuff that you don't want. And I think Apple has done a really good job of balancing that out. And I'm over here. I'm just using it all. Like, I am absolutely just, I love it all. I'm like, just keep adding stuff, Apple. Like, I'm loving this. I'm loving, like, every update is bringing something new to the iPad. I do expect that to stop at some point and they'll shift focus to iPadOS 27. I don't expect we'll be getting something new every single point update. I'm shocked we're even getting this.

But it's very clear that Apple is listening to people, which is something that was a big argument against the iPad for years that they weren't, and they're very clearly listening to people. and I have something that I think they could do to listen to people that would make you two very happy. So we talked last week about what do we take for you guys to come back to the iPad. Both of you basically, and I'm going to simplify both of your responses.

Both of you basically said, I need Mac OS. But what I took from that wasn't necessarily that you need Mac OS, but you need Mac apps. Is that fair to say? oh that's a deeper discussion so i watched okay i watched deep silence from everybody yes i i watched a video on youtube from one of your like colleagues uh which called which colleague was us

what's his name again quinn nelson right oh okay yeah yeah okay okay okay yeah i respect quinn okay You respect, okay. He made a video on iPad about this conundrum. And he pointed out something that's really obvious when you know it, but it's not obvious when you don't. It's that iPadOS and macOS have different limits. So like macOS does the... I'm paraphrasing what he said very well, very poorly.

He basically pointed out that macOS, they're making a compromise where you can run everything you want. And the compromise is macOS will scroll down to a call if you do too much. Right? Like, you can go over the performance limit of your machine. While iPadOS will do the opposite. It will constrain you to the limits of the machine. Even to the point of jettisoning apps if they're using too much power, memory, or whatever.

And I think this precise argument is a catalyst for what's going on. You are kind of right that we may mean that we want Mac apps on iPadOS, but that just can't happen in the current state of the OS. It's fundamentally built differently with limits that can't be overpassed unless Apple changes something radically at some point in the future.

So that's kind of where I was getting at is we have iPad apps on the Mac. We have Catalyst apps. What if there was, instead of bringing macOS to the iPad, there was some kind of, I don't want to say emulation layer, because that's not what it would need to be. Fundamentally, both iPadOS and macOS are running on Darwin. They are both Unix-based. Sorry, I got something in my eye.

Oh. And my optometrist girlfriend is in here. Okay. So fundamentally, they're both Unix and the date they they. OK, this is going to get I'm going to oversimplify things. I'm going to completely everyone that knows what I'm everything that I'm going to say is wrong. Just know I'm completely oversimplifying. Apple has smart people. They can figure this out. This is their problem, not mine. I'm just the I'm just the idea, man.

What if they were able to bring over those APIs and those core technologies from Mac OS to the iPad and allow a certain level of Mac app to run on the iPad? And by that, I mean Mac level Safari, Mac level Chrome, Mac level Hush. Get this man Hush on an iPad. Yeah, I know, because I really need Hush on iPad and I really need Chrome on the iPad. proper Chrome, not what's in the App Store right now, which is just a reskin version of Safari, mobile Safari.

So I, like, and I do think there'll be limits because there's stuff like Mac versions of Final Cut that require very specific things that Mac OS needs that I don't think the iPad would be able to do. But that's where the Final Cut Pro for iPad team needs to step it up a notch. And I just put out a video this last week also about kind of like my iPad workflow, what it's looking like these days. And in there, I have a whole section on like where Final Cut Pro for the iPad is falling down.

So I won't rehash all that. And honestly, it's stuff I've said on this podcast before. But what if they were able to take a certain level of Mac app and bring it to the iPad and just, you know, be able to port those technologies over? And I, cause like we used to complain about not being able to do certain tasks on the iPad because it was OS level restrictions. But we've gotten past that. We've gotten past so much in the last 10 years since iOS 9.

Like we have got, we're recording podcasts on the iPad now, people. Now the argument. Are you, are you, are you right now recording a podcast on your iPad? That's a separate issue because I need... We could. We absolutely could record this podcast on the iPad, but I really like using Riverside because it makes my job as the editor a lot easier. But if I wanted to give myself a little bit more work and we could do this the old-fashioned way of recording a podcast.

We could do it. We've chosen a method that doesn't work. I mean, no, you guys are being unfair. Why can't we? and the problem is because Riverside requires a Chromium browser. And their iPad app is terrible. And it's like, why? Okay, then. Okay, it needs a Chromium browser. Then why can't we run a Chromium browser on iPadOS? Well, that's what I'm getting at is what if a certain level of Mac app was literally just being able to be ported over?

What if Google didn't actually have to do anything to bring Chrome to the iPad? What if Apple put in that level, that layer, was able to bring a certain level of Mac app over? I mean, I'm extremely worried when you say a certain level of. I basically mean things that are under like Logic and Final Cut and Premiere Pro and stuff like that. Stuff that's not heavy duty based. Like Blender's working on their own iPad app.

Like, good for them. I'm actually really excited for that. I'm terrible at Blender. Horrible at Blender. But I'm going to play around with that. But I do think there could be something there. But yeah. I think it would be cool. I think it would be nice to be able to kind of run Mac apps on my iPad by downloading a DMG and unpacking it and suddenly it's on my iPad. I think that would be cool. And that would definitely help. I'm, of course, thinking about all the other edge cases that annoy me.

And I do a lot of development stuff this year. Like now, as of this year, I'm doing a lot of development work. None of that's possible on the iPad. Yeah, there's literally not a terminal that I can get into to do some things. I just don't have direct access to the system. Maybe would Xcode run? Is that under or over the bar for things that could work? So, yeah, there's some limitations for me. it would certainly help like for me especially like traveling what i don't necessarily need to do like all that um it would be nice to be able to bring desktop lightroom with me on the ipad

which used to be oh lightroom is it hurts me because that used to be like my go-to example of like the ipad and the mac app are like the exact same thing and the ipad is just it's so great and then they started adding little things here and there and like the ipad app just doesn't have those and so like lightroom on the mac is uh has got a good number of things but anyway anyway um i think it would help it would help me for my like travel stuff um day to day i'm still a mac guy um there's just things about the mac that are immortal to me i think yeah yeah i i i just i'm

just like i'm just so close i see the light at the end of the tunnel i'm so close to there and i I'm just desperate to get over that line. You want to toss the Mac Mini you're using right now into the trash is what you want to do. I would like not to have a single Mac in this house. That would be killer. I've even got Danielle on an iPad. She has my old M2 iPad Pro. Such a kill for her. Why do this to her?

Because you know what the only thing she uses? Her iPhone is her main computer. The only thing she uses a computer for is she does, because she's a doctor, she has some continuing education Zoom calls she does. She uses the Lego Build app as, like, the instructions when she's building Legos. Important question on that. Yes. Does she use the special 3D instructions, or does she use the PDF? I don't know. Okay. Probably, I don't know. The PDF is God-tier.

I really hate the 3D animations even though they put so much work into them they're so cool, they're so hard to follow I'm going to say she probably uses the PDF knowing her she's going to keep it like the paper instructions and there's like a couple other things she uses oh, she packs stuff she really doesn't do a whole lot on it and the iPad is literally the perfect machine for her she has an old, old, old Intel MacBook Pro with the touch bar that we literally lost for like a year.

We couldn't find it. Turns out it was in our coffee table. It was in the table. Our coffee table lifts up, like the top lifts up, and there's like this little sink thing that you can put stuff in. Very nice. Anyways, yeah. But like she is like the perfect use case of like the iPad is perfect today for her. Like everything she does on a computer works perfect on the iPad today. So, yeah. I don't want to wash your dreams, but the fact that Apple has only just added an API to the background tasks, I'm not hopeful that...

I think it's because Apple's taking things seriously now. I think for a while, Apple was considering the iPad as their next computer. This is not what I meant. I meant that they're adding a special API that developers have to plug into to be able to do background tasks. Whereas on the Mac, in any desktop class app, on the Mac, on the PC, on the computer in general, apps don't have to ask.

They can just run in the background automatically by default. And this is part of the reason why Mac apps are so great. And I'm worried that because they just added this API that developers have to opt into by hand, and they can't even do it with their own Final Cut, apparently. It's worrying. I don't see any incoming future where those limitations, they fall, and suddenly Mac apps can run like they can on a Mac.

Yeah. Yeah. Are they going to ask Chrome to opt into that background API so that it doesn't kill Riverside when you switch apps? Yeah. Riverside is a pretty heavy web app. If you switch web app, like right now, iPadOS would just just listen to Chrome. No, if I tabbed over to another app, it would stay open in the background. It's like when I upload videos to YouTube. Like I can upload videos to YouTube in Safari on the iPad and I can tab over to other apps and I can do other things

and it just keeps uploading in the background. Yeah, maybe on your M7 iPad Pro with a billion gigs of RAM. But what about on the regular iPad and the iPad Air? iPadOS is not predictable in that sense. That's a huge problem. You can't just... Whenever I had an iPad and switched apps, I had no way to predict whether the app would still run and for how long.

And that's not changed. Yeah. So, yeah. I'm a pessimistic person. Buzzkill. Really, I'm the destroyer of dreams. I know. I was sucking down the hopium here. Like, I was like, yes, give it to me. It's going to happen next year. No more Macs in my house. Like, this is a Mac-free household. iPad only. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't want Chrome on the iPad if it can't run in the background like any of the Mac app. I get that. No, I do get that. Okay, I got one rant I would like to do. With your permission. Seems fair. I have one rant. Okay. So, iPadOS 26 added the stoplight controls. And I love the stoplight controls. I've seen some people complain about them. I don't know why. It's another thing that I'm like, I don't get why people are complaining. They're like, oh, it takes up too much UI. I'm like, it's up in the title bar of apps.

That space wasn't really ever used. Is it? Hang on. I'm getting to my rant. You're in it. Give me a second. Is it in the title bar, Chris? Give me a second. I am getting there. Just give me a second. You're jumping ahead of me. Okay, go ahead. As Neilion was alluding to, There are some apps that developers have clearly not taken the time to even open up in the simulator and just drag the handle to see what happens when their window adjusts.

And that is where the stoplight controls appear. And sometimes, not all the time, but some apps, the stoplight controls appear over buttons that you need to be able to tap or click on. And they're sitting there trying to do it and not tap the stoplight controls. So here's my rant, developers. If you are a developer of an app, take five minutes out of your day. Yes, I am looking at you, Matt. Do this, Matt.

No, Matt, actually all of your apps. Listen closely, Matt. I would have sent you a screenshot already if your apps were not. You could have sent me screenshots in the past. I believe you. You are like my developer where I can just be like, I want this feature. Make me this feature. Not really. Actually, I have done that. Developers, take five minutes out of your day. You don't even have to go and buy an iPad. Just open up the simulator. Take the drag hit. Put the simulator in window mode.

Take the drag handle and drag it. And if the stoplight controls are covering a button, look up the API that Apple has. Apple has an API about the stoplight controls for iPadOS apps. And basically, it makes a title bar and shifts things over for you. Make sure things aren't getting covered up. It takes care of it all for you. Use it. Thank you. End of rant. Use it. This is the most fired up I've ever seen you, Chris. And I've seen you react to Coldplay.

Oh, God. Can I have a rant as well? Can I finish my really quick? I thought this was something that would get taken care of over the summer, and I didn't really care about it over the summer because I'm like, developers will update their apps, whatever. But then summer ended. We're in the winter, as previously established in the intro of this episode. And a lot of developers have taken care of it. And if you're a developer that has taken care of it, you get a thumbs up and a gold star from me.

Good job. If you're a developer that has it, shame on you. Neilion, go for it. Okay, I think you're wrong. How am I wrong? This is my rant. I agree with you that it's like, I don't use iPadOS. I've only seen screenshots of this and it seems outrageous. So I sympathize with your anger. I think it's misdirected though.

I don't think it's the developer's fault. I think this is like an OS level control that's on top of every single window and like every single app on the OS. Mac OS handles this by default. And if you compare to Mac OS, Mac OS handles this by default because Mac OS has title bars, although Apple really hates title bars.

Do they? Do they? I have Tahoe now, do they? Hear me out. By default, when you make a Mac app, your window controls, they're in the title bar, okay? Your content won't go over it. developers can remove the title bar and do custom things. Like if you want their UI to go all the way to the top of the window and shove the spotlight controls in a specific way, they can do that. And like a ton of developers do that. And that's great.

So you can make more compact UIs, et cetera. On iPadOS, we're somehow in the reverse situation where there's no title bar and there's never been a title bar on iPadOS Windows. There is one, but it's invisible and there's not even a concept of title bar on iPadOS. And Apple has decided that there's now this mandatory spotlight control on top of the window.

And you can't opt out of it. It's there, whatever you do. And you're saying that it's the developer's fault that their UI interacts or interferes with it. I think iPadOS should have title bars. I think Apple should have, like, this is their OS level control. They're adding it on top of every single app. Why, by default, there is no way for apps to handle automatically this thing?

And this is not a new wheel to invent. Windowed OSes, windowed managers have had title bars since the dawn of window managers. I would like to go on a rant. Okay, go ahead. The floor recognizes the comfort zone old guy. I know where you're going with this, Sal. I would like to defend the...

Wait, who am I defending? Apple. I don't think it's actually that big a deal. There are some apps that this happens with. It is an extreme minority of apps. The vast majority of apps have no issue at all. And Apple has done some work to make this work, which admittedly is hard because they have 10, 15 years of iPad app design and history and everything. And I don't think you can add just like a fixed title bar to the top because that's going to take up space. That's going to be annoying, especially on these smaller screens. They had to do this at some point.

Chris is complaining at the 1% of apps that people like us would even use in the first place. I don't think it's a huge deal. So I would say shame on the developers. Apple had to do something. It's Apple gave them the tools to fix this. It's on the developers to test their apps. But that's so easy to say. And most, if you're, the more custom your UI is, the more likely this will happen. That's where I was going. If you're using the native components, then this is not an issue. It just happens when you build for iOS 26.

I actually don't know what happens if you build for the old OS and never do an update for this. So that's maybe a thing. But yeah, I don't know. I could probably test that. But yeah, no, that's where I was going to go as well. If you just use the native components, it's not a big deal. If you have custom stuff, like Apple gave you the tools. You know you're using custom stuff. That's fine. You're using custom stuff. But Apple gave you the tools to make sure your custom stuff doesn't interfere with this new system thing. Take five minutes to check to make sure it's not.

That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to say bad developer or anything like that. I'm just trying to say take five minutes to check to see if your app is working properly. That went way longer than I thought it was. I thought that was going to be a two-minute rant. Just remember that I took the side of the small indie developers who don't have any money and time. And those two guys, they decided to defend the trillion-dollar company because they don't want to add title bars.

I think an essential part of this argument is how many apps have this issue. I am fairly confident we are arguing about something that impacts almost nobody. And none of these indie apps have this problem. Look, none of our indie app developer friends, the Charlie Chapmans, the Matt Birchler's of the world, none of them. Those are the two. Those are the only two indie developers. Sorry, you two were the ones that came to mind on top of my head for some reason.

And the Matt Birchler and even the guy from birchtree. Yeah, birchtree, the guy that makes dark noise. the guy that, look, Greg Pierce, look, I could pull my contact list up if we'd be. I could go on. I need a minute, but I could go on. Look, those apps that are made by the small indie dev community that care about their apps are not the ones I'm talking about here. They absolutely all work fine. Those are not the ones I'm talking about here. It's the ones that built their own custom UI stuff.

That's it. Rant over. We should move on. Because Matt has a topic. We're already 45 minutes in. And Matt, we haven't even got to Matt. We should do this again sometime. Okay. All right, Matt. Man, that's spicy. Not even a tier list involved this time. I know, right? Honestly, that might have been us, like, probably about the same level as the Cozy Zone episode or tier listing accessories that we got at each other. So if you haven't listened to that yet and you like us getting spicy at each other, not the same.

Well, my topic is going to be pretty short because it's a holiday weekend or week over here. I don't really have one, so we should probably just move on to the challenge. You need to do your homework, Matt? You know what? I shamed developers earlier. Shame on you, Matt. Shame on you. It's Apple's fault somehow. At the end of the day, it's Charlie Chapman's fault somehow. Yeah, Charlie. Title, title. All right. Well, I guess we move on to the challenge.

So what was the challenge? All right. Well, Niléane, it was your challenge. Yes. Okay. So the challenge was set up Aerospace. And what is Aerospace? Aerospace is some nerdy window manager. Nerdy is like an understatement. Yeah. I don't even know. I want to use a very specific word, but nothing comes to mind. So, yeah, it's a tiling window manager, but it's an automatic tiling window manager.

And so it's not your mooms and rectangles of the world. It's the concept behind Aerospace is that it will tile things automatically on screen when you open apps and when you close them. And this category of tiling window managers have been around for decades. They're popular on Linux, especially. And so this is just one implementation on macOS. And I thought this would be a great challenge because setting it up is a challenge in and of itself.

So how did we do? How did we do? I can just rip the band-aid right off. Yeah, go ahead. I spent a little over two hours on this challenge. I installed it. And after I installed it, it broke my Mac, which was something I said I was worried about was going to happen last week when Neilion introduced this challenge. It brought an M4 Max MacBook Pro to its knees.

This thing was crawling. I have no idea why. It was so bad. So I watched a bunch of videos on this. I spent a couple hours trying to configure this, trying to figure out what's happening, and I just got to a point in my day where I had to move on. And so I failed. I had to uninstall this. I couldn't get it to work. I couldn't get it to respond properly. It just did not want to work nicely with my Mac for whatever reason.

All I could get it to do was open up apps, and everything would open up in full screen, and it just was just completely broken. I tried. I tried so hard. And I just felt... I'm not sure if it's it was actually broken or you just were just confused about it. Maybe I was confused and I didn't get it. I watched videos on how it worked and I did have a thought. I was watching the videos on how this works and how people were using and stuff like that. And I was like,

okay, this is interesting. And I was like, you know what? Pre-iPadOS 26, I would have watched this and been like, this is the multitasking system the iPad needs. I changed my mind now. I don't agree with that at all. iPadOS is perfect. iPadOS 26 is perfect, and I will not hear otherwise, even though we just spent 45 minutes hearing otherwise. So this is it. It broke. It ran you to the ground. Yeah. Everything was so slow. I had to uninstall it.

I couldn't figure out why. It was bad. It was a bad time. All right. What did you do, Leon? I'm going to go next because Matt is cooking in his corner. And we'll see what he has to say. But on my end, I was really happy to test. Like, this tickled something in my mind that I haven't felt in years. I used to be a Linux head, as you know. And this was my thing back in the day.

I used a bunch of similarly built and working, tiling with the managers on Linux. One very famous one called i3. I used that one. I used one that was short-lived that was called WMFS. I really liked that one. As well as one that was called, I don't remember, Amethyst? No, not Amethyst. I forgot. But anyway, I used a bunch of ones.

10 window managers like this. And I even used to be part of a small corner of the internet on DeviantArt, you know that website, where artists used to post their website before they went all in on AI slop. And at the time, so it's a very old website, at the time it was hyped. the Linux heads would post fancy screenshots of their Tiny Window Manager setups on there and get a ton of stars and likes

and comments and we'd just like be happy with each other like oh how did you do this? Oh this looks cool can I get your terminal color scheme? Because it mostly made of screenshots mostly made of terminal windows with fancy CLI apps CLI command line so like apps that run in the terminal. And yeah, I had a ton of fun with that at the time. And this brought flashbacks to me, like playing with this. And just like these old things, configuring aerospace, it's a task because you have to edit a config file

if you want to tweak it. And you can look up other people's config files. Most people, they posted them on GitHub. So you can just copy and paste somebody else's config file and tweak it to your liking. And so I can already foresee, I could already foresee hours spent on this. And I kind of gave up. Oh, no.

Because, so like I played with it for an hour or two and it was really fun. Those two hours were super fun. And I had fun configuring the way it worked. I changed the keybinds mostly. One really annoying thing is that Aerospace doesn't work well with a French keyboard. So that was very annoying. So what you're saying is they hate the French. They hate everyone in the world, apparently, because they only have two options, which is the QWERTY keyboard or Dvorak.

Oh, come on, Peter. These are the two options you can choose from if I understood this correctly. Maybe Matt will correct me because now he may be, maybe he's an expert now on the thing. But yeah, so with a French keyboard, the layout begins with AZERTY, A-Z-E-R-T-Y. A bunch of keyboard, keybinds were broken and you could not fix it. So that was really annoying. I had to work around that a lot.

Anyway, so I gave up because I thought, hey, I also remembered when I switched to my first Mac and how refreshing it was to use a Mac after all those years of Linux. And yeah, uninstalling Aerospace, it felt like that again. It felt like a breath of fresh air to be able to just move windows around freely on screen. And it looks pretty. And I don't have config files to edit.

So what I'm hearing is Niléane now appreciates macOS Tahoe. Okay, quickly move on. Yeah, I guess. One thing I want to mention is that something I've noticed is that there's a solar system of apps that gravitate around aerospace. small companion apps that people use. And one of those that I want to shout out is called Janky Borders. I've linked to it in the show notes.

And I wrote in our document, this needs to be a native feature to macOS. So Janky Borders, what it does is it adds a thick border around the active window on screen. And it's useful with a tiny window manager because it's easier to tell which window is active on screen when you've got a bunch of windows tiled next to each other on screen. And I'm guessing the reason why it's easier because when you're using a tiny window manager like this,

windows don't overlap, rarely overlap. So you can indeed have a hard time to discern which app is actually active. So this adds a nice highlight around the active app on screen. And I found myself using janky borders without Aerospace, just like that. Because actually, I really like the very distinct border that I can have around the active window. And I think this should be a feature that's native to macOS, maybe as an accessibility setting, because it makes it very clear.

It's really nice. Yeah, this is kind of... I think we're going to say the same thing. You go ahead. Yeah, the accessibility feature increased contrast. It kind of looks like increased contrast, but specifically just around the active window, not around everything. Oh, yeah. I was going to say it reminds me like almost to the pixel what the Apple TV does when you do increase contrast. Yes. Which I think should absolutely be on by default. It's insane to me how the active thing is identified in TVOS.

But anyway, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, and junky borders, you can change the colors, the thickness. It's really nice. So there you go. My part is over. I really liked it for the two hours that it lasted. And I was happy to go back to a floating window mess on my screen. Oh, sorry, I forgot one thing. I realized that aerospace also didn't work quite well on my screen, on my setup, because I have a 3x2 display.

My display is not wide. And I really like this aspect ratio. I'm really used to it. I've been using it for two or three years. And I really like it. It's got more vertical height to it. And it's like it's almost square, but not really slightly wider than square. And with a tiny window manager, it's not great to have two apps side by side or more apps side by side because the apps, they can get really small really fast.

The 3x2 display, it works really well with floating windows that you can run freely. There you go. Nice. All right, Matt. What did you do? All right. Okay. Okay. So, let me say this about aerospace. It really intrigued me. If you roll back to the last week's episode, I was really intrigued by it. Really started tickling my brain in weird ways. It was great.

and then I installed it like immediately after we recorded and I didn't understand what the heck was happening similar to you Chris I was just like it's just opening full screen apps and I can't non-full screen them what is happening and I I watched a video Josean Martinez is that his name the one that's linked on the github page yeah yeah they link to this one specifically that's

like watch this this is going to help you get started and i was like okay perfect i learning how to do this stuff through youtube video is how i learn to do things great so perfect so i watched this video and then i watched like five minutes of it and i started over because i was like i must have missed something because i didn't understand what was happening why he was doing anything i was so confused um and i watched it again and i figured it out i figured more out but i was still kind of confused um and then one of the suggested videos uh for this was um another

video from the same guy who two months after posting this video that's like aerospace is awesome here's how i'm using aerospace here's how to set it up two months later he posts a video that's like ray cast is the best window management thing i've thrown aerospace away and i was like okay so my my confirmed i can just uninstall aerospace i'm going to throw it in the trash because even people who like it are like just raycast and i was about to pull the trigger on a raycast pro subscription because you can do some like preset stuff if you pay for pro and then i don't know what happened exactly i don't know when it happened but i didn't uninstall it i didn't turn it off i started poking

around the config file and tweaking things. And I'm here to tell you, I am in love with aerospace. And the reason I didn't have a topic this week is not because I forgot. I did not forget. I would never forget. I would forget to post the podcast on time sometimes, but I would never forget to do the actual work for the podcast. All I am thinking about is this app. It is incredible. So I don't even know how to describe.

You two have already done a good job of kind of generally describing it. You no longer have free floating windows when you start using aerospace. You cannot resize randomly. You cannot have windows overlap. Well, generally. You cannot have windows overlap. Occasionally they will. But in general, you are making some sort of grid where you have tiles going horizontally, vertically. So I'm using right now a very simple space where the left half of my monitor is my

browser. The right half is Notion where I'm looking at our show notes. I could open another, a third app and have three side by side. I could have four, five, six, seven, a hundred side by side. It would get insane, but you theoretically could do that. You can also stack vertically. So if I wanted to open something underneath Notion and have two apps next to my browser, I could do that. If I wanted to, it's crazy. So it's kind of like Stage Manager, right? With a Mac, traditionally, you click an icon, you launch an app, and the window opens in the most recent size it was at,

in the same position, and you can move it around, you can resize it, do all that. It's kind of like Stage Manager. It's kind of like... Spaces? Yes, it is like Spaces on the Mac. So on Spaces on the Mac, you can have multiple spaces, and you can go between them with uh control and then left and right on the keyboard right you can like and the whole screen like goes between these um stage manager has the idea of stages where you have several apps all together and you can switch between different stages with different apps in what's this app called aerospace

you have workspaces so there's workspaces um where you have which are exactly the same as um what you just talked to spaces on the Mac and stages on a stage manager so it's the exact same thing I have these apps on this workspace I have these apps on this workspace and I can switch between them to go between the different apps so my setup is pretty simple I have three main workspaces that I work from I have space one is just web browsing messaging just general random computer stuff my

workspace two is for work stuff so my work browser slack whatever other things I'm working on over there. I have an Obsidian page pulled up usually. And then I have a coding one. So I have these kind of three different things and I have it set up so that when I launch specific apps, they launch in the right space and with the right size. It is so nice. It is so fast. As you would expect with a thing based on Linux, there's no animations. It's just instant. Everything is instant. So I don't know, Chris, I don't know what it did to your computer. I'm so sorry that happened to you.

Yeah, I don't know either, but I noticed the no animation things and I was like, this bothers? Like, I don't like that. It is a little challenging because like the cool thing with spaces is when you hit those, like to move between them, you get like the whole screen animates and you get this kind of like, like you have a sense of like physically where you are in like one workspace you're in and you see with things moving around. Like, oh, that window just slid over here. This window slid over here. And now I'm here. So I could, to get back to it, I just go the opposite direction.

There's no animations here. you just hit the keyboard shortcut and it instantly switches you over um and based on expose which gets crazy once you start doing this if you have aerospace active and then you use expose expose still works but you can actually see kind of how it's hacking this together we don't get too into the weeds but like effectively it is spreading your windows out enormously and for whatever however it's doing it when x and then it's just like changing the focus of like um kind of like how

you used to do uh video games and some apps would do this where like all the textures would be a single pdf and like you would like to display them you would just like focus on a small portion of that pdf that would be like how you um it's kind of it seems like it's kind of doing that yeah it It moves Windows off screen. Yeah. Yeah. And did you see this? They have a specific instruction in the documentation for the expose thing.

I don't remember where specifically, but they say mission control will break. It will look weird if you don't enable this setting in macOS, and that's the setting where you enable group Windows by app. Oh, okay. In machine control. And that fixes it. It makes it look less weird. Okay. Maybe I'll have to try that. But it's super cool to just be fast. And so I have these Windows tiles and everything, and I launch new apps, and it just instantly tiles for me.

That's all pretty cool. One of the things that's interesting about this is this is made for people who are keyboard fanatics. So if you want to do everything from your keyboard, this does things that macOS cannot do on its own. So for example, I have my web browser focused here. I have Notion on the right. If I was using normal Mac keyboard shortcuts, I wanted to get over to Notion and focus over there.

I would basically just command tab to it, right? I would command tab, hope that Notion is like the next tab. If it's not, I'd go over a couple and get to it and refocus. And then my focus would be on Notion. Or I could use my mouse and just click on the Notion window. And those make sense. Those are very mainstream things. But what if there was a keyboard shortcut that made no sense but totally works? Give it to me. Give it to me. I'm ready. Yeah. So I am on the left window. I want to move to the right. Option L changes my focus to the right.

Of course. And if I wanted to go back to the left, back to my browser, option H. H? Why didn't they use J to go to the left and L to go to the right? So this is where we get into old people and technology. So if you are familiar with Vim, these are old school Vim style keyboard shortcuts. So H, J, K, L, left, down, upright.

Yeah. That was my game at the time, back in the day. Vim all the way. Yeah, so this is not natural. And honestly, when I was in my angry phase before it had clicked with me, when I saw that it was option L to go right, I almost jumped off a cliff. I was like, this is insane. Matt, imagine what it's like, considering what I said earlier, that it's broken with a French keyboard. Imagine. So, H, J, K, L, they are fine, but other keybinds, they are fully broken.

Yeah. Okay. But once you understand this, things get interesting. So, if I wanted to swap position of these, so I have my, again, browser on the left, notion on the right, what if I wanted to switch them? Browser on the right, notion on the left. How would I do this? Well, very easy. I cannot have windows overlap, so I can use my mouse and I can just drag the browser to the right and they'd instantly flip. No animation. No need for that. But if I want to do it with my keyboard, right?

So to change my focus to whatever's to the right of the current window, option L, if I wanted to move the window to the right, option shift L moves that window to the right and up and down work with J and K as well. So you can move windows around your screen with the keyboard very quickly. You can also move them between workspaces. So if I'm in Workspace 3 and I want to move it to Workspace 1, Option Shift 1 moves whatever window I have currently selected over to Workspace 1.

If I want to go to Workspace 1, Option 1. You've lost Chris. I can see Chris. It's really starting to click with you. You're really starting to like this. He wants it now. Okay, you know what this is made for? Those people on the internet that use 40% keyboards that don't have all the letters on there and be like, I don't need this. I don't need a full keyboard. What do you mean? I don't need Z or X or something. I can hit this weird shift binding keyboard and it swaps to another. I don't need all these extra keys.

I don't need to spend that kind of money. I'm good. I can have a keyboard with just 40 keys. I don't need a full alphabet. Not at all. Arrow keys. Ew. Ew. That was a weird mix of Trump and I don't know what else. That was Donald Trump if he was a Linux developer. Oh, God. So that was kind of intentionally to – So a couple hours after we recorded, I was already in the new document,

and I had a quote from the video of that guy. who had the setup guide and everything. I had a quote from him because I was like, none of this makes any freaking sense. This is insane. This is why this app is so stupid. And I have deleted that quote because it now makes total sense to me. And I understand everything you say. And it's becoming muscle memory for me. So all of these keyboard shortcuts, you can customize them in the config file.

And I know this is not nearly as intuitive as a UI of setting screen to set the stuff up. But if you are unhappy with these keyboard shortcuts, for example, if you don't like the hjkl to do arrow directions, don't worry about it. Just go into the config file and set them to arrows. And now you can do that. You probably don't want to do that with the alt arrows because that probably does other things with like text selection. So maybe don't do that. but if you have like a hyperkey, you could do that.

Like there's ways to get around this, but you could basically customize it to your specific needs. I understand this is a very nerdy way to do it, but yeah, you can customize it all in that config file. It's crazy. Yeah. I just remembered which key bind was broken for me. It was the option plus and minus to resize. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I could not figure out how to set those up in the config file so it would work with my French keyboard. I'm sorry. So I've added a quote to our document.

Okay. This may sound a little familiar. This app makes no sense from the guy from that video that Matt mentioned that he put a quote in our document from and then deleted it. Yeah, I just put that quote right back. Thank you. This app makes no sense. But the quote is not from him, is it? I don't. The quote was from him. He was explaining like. Yeah. So I did struggle. I definitely struggled. wanted to have so it's it's it's not really a grid it's more of you have oh god you have like trees of windows and this is where this this is where it got real confusing for me um

trees of windows what are you on like what it makes sense so i i would think about them as like containers and sub containers so like my window my display has a is a container right all the windows will go on this container and i have it set so that they go side by side and so all the windows are side by side but how do i do that thing i talked about earlier where i have slack on top of obsidian well i can't do that if they're all side by side right yeah but i can because i create a subcontainer again these are the wrong words but it's a subcontainer with just those two

apps and those have a vertical split so that's a vertical subcontainer inside my other container and I'm so I know this sounds crazy everyone listening looks like Chris right now is losing their minds, thinks this is so stupid but something happened in my head and I am I'm sure I'll install this in the next, by the end of 2026 this will be uninstalled or this is my life now I don't know, but it is at this exact moment, I am so thrilled

by it, there's tons of other customizations you can do. On top of that, you can adjust the padding. So you can have zero padding between them. You can have some spacing between them. You can adjust how much spacing there is around the edges of the screen. It plays nicely with the dock and the menu bar. So it just works with those. But I actually had to play with some of the padding because I also found another app called Sketchy Bar, which lets you create a custom menu bar for your Mac. Oh, yes. I'm so excited about it.

I saw this one. To every single person that complains to me about iPadOS 26 multitasking or windowing, I am going to send you this segment every single time you bring it up and say, would you rather have this? Okay, tell us about this custom menu bar now, because apparently you need that on top of whatever you just mentioned. But you sent me down a rabbit hole. If you sent us a screenshot, this will be in a show notes, right?

Yeah. It will, yes. Okay. The whole thing is blurred, by the way. You can't even actually see anything. So first, the screenshot is really funny because you blurred yourself on it. I did. I did. Yeah. Instead of opening things that he could show and explain to people like, hey, this is how it works, he took a screenshot and blurred the whole damn thing. I am nothing if not authentic. These are real world examples. I'm not just trying to contrive some sort of use case. I'm actually using it.

I'm a hero. You've got every single confidential thing he could have. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good screenshot, but it'll give you an idea of what I'm doing. The funniest thing is that you blurred yourself. I can't care. You know, I didn't even think about it. I was just like, literally nothing of here can be shared. Why didn't you open something that could be shared? Like an Obsidian document or something and just type, Hello World or something. He's authentic. He wants to share. That's not authentic. Yeah. But anyway, on that screenshot, there is the sketchy bar, like the custom bar.

I love this so much because this is what I had back on the Linux days. I would make my custom bars on top and you would feed the data into them using the shell scripts that run on the cron job. So many. Yeah. So this, I have barely scratched the surface of what's possible here. I just got something that looks kind of cool with my blue wallpaper. And yeah, it's fun. I wish you could click on it. I have to hide the actual menu bar and then bring it up. And since there's no background to the menu bar anymore on macOS, it's actually really messy.

So maybe I should just add the background back if I'm doing this. But anyway, Sketchy Bar is also an interesting app. There's this whole world. And I guess what I wanted to say at the end of the day, this is why I love the Mac. It's crazy stuff like this. I love that if I was unhappy with macOS windowing, I don't need Apple to fix it. It'd be nice if they did. But I don't need them to do it. I can install something insane like this.

And I can have a whole different experience. Genuinely, Chris, if you came over and used my Mac right now, you would scream. You would be so angry. You would be like, nothing works. And I am so happy that I can do that. I would rather quit. so anyway this is i really like it yeah this is my topic this week it's gonna be my topic next week it'll be my topic the week after that i'm gonna teach you guys new keyboard shortcuts every single time your option key is gonna get a workout it's it's great i'm gonna be on vacation for the next few weeks so sketchy by lets you like i want i want to understand the screenshot if you may yeah

So in the top right corner on the right edge, so there's a bunch of indicators. There's date, clock. My cat is scratching my chair. Okay. Because your cat thinks we're insane. And so volume indicator, battery. What's the third one? CPU usage. CPU usage. Not super. I want to replace that with the network usage. I'm much more interested in what the network is doing.

But yeah, that's the one that I could figure out. And on the left side, what is going on? What is this? So it's clearly showing me a list of open apps as well as the app that's in focus. However, it's chaos, and I should fix that. I use someone's default config. I think that's the same guy who did the guide video for aerospace. just kind of a default one that I set up.

I need to figure out how to tweak this because there's a whole bunch of terminals there, but they're not terminals. They're just apps that don't have an SVG to indicate what they are. So it's a whole thing. So this is actually the most Linux-y thing, I think, in this whole experience of, yeah. It's not good to go, but it's cool to customize it. I was able to customize. You could change the font. You can make it a monospaced font up there. You could install a symbol, like a font that has symbols like Font Awesome or something like that. And you could have your own custom iconography up there.

I'm using SF symbols for all this. So anyway, it's just a fun little thing. Yeah, I like it. I really like it. This is the, like the sketchy bar stuff is my favorite stuff. And I mentioned janky borders as well. Like the little aesthetic liberties that you can have with this setup. I love it. So this custom menu bar that you just spent five minutes talking about, not a single thing that you mentioned can,

like there's nothing in there that I can't do with the Mac OS menu bar already. So why? Because it looks cool. Yeah, it looks cool. Have you seen, click the screenshot, Chris. You've not seen the screenshot. Oh, I've seen the screenshot. Well, as much as I can, it's all blurred. it looks cool yeah so i think sketchy bar is probably not long for this world but um i thought it was a fun little thing and i think it's a like if you one of mostly people seen people

do is that uh the sketchy bar it will display which workspace is currently active and that's really that's mostly useful for that because otherwise yeah you can lose your bearings yeah Yeah. Yes, I did. Yes. Full disclosure, while this was going on, I was confused many times. Because by default, like I have like set up for keyboard shortcuts for workspaces one through zero. So one through 10. But there's also letters in the default config. So for A through Z,

A through Z, if you prefer. And I didn't realize that when I was like trying to save an article to readwise reader in my browser, which is option R, whenever I was trying to save an article in my browser, my browser would just go away. And I was like, what just happened? And there's no visual indicator as to like, here's all your workspaces that have windows in them. So it just disappeared on me. And I didn't know where it was. It was in workspace R. God knows how that happened. But anyway, so there's work to do here. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's been so much fun.

And honestly, the pain it seems to have caused Chris and the joy that's brought Neil in. I think that's a good mix. I think that's good. I'm really curious how long you will keep using this. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Sketchy Bar has probably got a couple days left in it, but I'm getting used to aerospace. And honestly, if it makes it more than a month, I'm probably using it for the long haul. I don't know. The last thing I'll say, I sometimes use my laptop and it is not useful on the laptop.

I need everything to go full screen. But there is, I think there's a solution here too, because you can have different rules for different monitors in your config file. Obviously, that's where you would set this up. And so I think there's a way for me to set it up so that when I'm on my main display, I have this tiled interface. But when I have it, when I switch to the laptop screen, it'll automatically switch to a, what is it? A catalog? It's something else. I forget what they call it. Oh, no. But there is a floating mode. Accordion. Accordion. Oh, and there's a floating mode, too.

So you can have windows specifically still float. I forgot about the accordion mode. Yeah, it's nice. So it lays out your windows slightly below and on top of each other. So you can always see a slice of every window. Yep. Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out how to make it automatically do that when I unplug the big monitor. But I'm sure it can be done. because infinite customizability. Somebody's done this. So how mouse-friendly is it? Can you, for example, looking at your screenshot, if you drag the call here, the call in the browser on the left,

if you drag that to, let's say, the rightmost column, does that replace it? Does it swap? It does. It does? Okay. Yeah. I've not tried this. I'm trying to think if it swaps or if it just... I think it won't swap them. It will kind of move them. So as you move the window in real time, it will kind of shove. So in the screenshot, I have arc on the left. If I start dragging that to the right, as soon as it passes slack and obsidian, slack and obsidian will scoot over to the left.

And then granola is the last one over there. That'll scoot over once I pass that. So it's really a drag and drop, pretty intuitive system. system. Okay. That's nice. All right. I'm happy because I finally came up with a challenge that has had a ton of impact on one of us. And, yeah. Oh, it's had a ton of impact on all of us. Okay. And look forward to every single challenge I issue being some sort of aerospace config update. Oh, yes.

You guys are going to need to find a new host and editor. Oh, yes. The Aerospace Podcast. Here we come. Okay. I'll compose some music. All right. Okay. So, Chris is gone. I will take over. Thank you for listening. No, wait. We're doing a new challenge. Unfortunately, I have to come back to the show. Welcome to comfort zone. We're doing all over. Can we just restart and just do this all again? I think we've got all just like, yeah. Okay. No, no.

Welcome to Uncomfortable Area. We are a podcast all about getting out of your uncomfortable area. Yeah, I... This is probably the nerdiest thing we've ever done. It lit a fire inside me. What can I say? You know, I'm glad it worked for you. Will there be a YouTube video? A blog post? I want all of it. I think there has to be. I think I need to understand it better.

I feel like just I'm an idiot muddling my way through it right now. I feel like all I can express is joy, which is I think what I've done in this podcast medium. I think for a YouTube video, I need to be able to show here's how you do it so that people like me in the future don't come to this video and it's like, why is he so excited and why is it broken on my machine? You got to start the YouTube video off by like, this is going to break your machine, but I will walk you through it. unless you are the more you mentioned this Chris the more I think you really just did not understand what was going on

and thought it was broken but it was working as it ended 100% that is what feels like happened the slowness is interesting though that is probably exactly what happened but I just I I didn't have the time or the patience and also like the Mac isn't my main machine anymore so it's like I don't Like, I don't want this crazy multitasking system for, like, when I need to edit a video or run something through Hush or record a podcast.

Like, I don't know. Do you want to get into, like, service mode? So you go into service mode. So we have a new challenge for next week. The challenge next week is my challenge. You guys can go ahead and click the little spoiler thing in our document. Okay. And it is to find a good Black Friday deal on a piece of tech or tech accessory, something like that. then bring it to the show and there will be a winner of the challenge and how you win this challenge is whoever gets their co-host to buy the new thing so if you get like one of your co-hosts

to buy something you get one point if you get both of them to buy it you get two points you kind of get bonus points if you already have the product in hand when we record next which will be on black friday so i don't know how well this will be for our listeners like if those deals will continue Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But we are recording on Black Friday. Black Friday deals are already happening. Search your tech bag. Search your things. Search your feelings, young one. You know it to be true.

But yeah, yeah. There will be a winner. And so basically you need to tailor your pick for what you know about your co-hosts. Okay. So glad Aerospace isn't something that is on Black Friday sale. You can't buy it. It's always free. Thank God. I mean, I talked earlier about this flash drive that I want. So you can find that. Yes, I just bring the flash drive. Yes. I mean, that's the thing is you would get one point with that, but I'm not interested in that.

If there's a deal on it and it's available in stock, you'll get a point from me. I mean, that's not really how it works, but okay. no what I mean if you if you're gonna buy it already so you'll get like if Matt was to bring that and he had it and and was like hey this is the thing and you ordered it right then and there then you would get a point but there's no way I would order that so Matt would get one point if he brought oh and you can only bring one thing but you can only bring one thing yeah you can only bring

one thing and the idea is try and bring something that you can get your other two co-hosts to buy both things. So if I bring something and only you Neelion is interested in it and you Neelion order it but Matt's not interested in it then I get one point. But if I bring something that you both are interested in and you both order it then I get two points. This is more complicated than aerospace is configured. It's literally how many people buy the thing and you get one point per person that buys the thing. I'm so angry. With a maximum

of two points. I actually totally get it. It's fine. So I need to Google dad things like what's about your dad for Christmas? Yes. The Father's Day gift guide something. I'd like a new barbecue. There you go. All right. Thankfully this brings us to the end of the show because oh boy do we need to wrap this one up but we have an end of the show question. This one was sent in via feedback form. Feel free to add whatever you want in there.

Play along with the challenge. follow up on topics, but especially if you have questions for us, like if you want to know something about us, our history, about aerospace, whatever, no, nothing about aerospace. I will delete those. We have a feedback form. Please feel free to send in questions and anything else. And this question says, hey, y'all, what is your tech educational background for each of you? And then they go on to mention, by the way, thank you for roasting my desk setup, which was a Cozy Zone episode.

So if you want to see our dust roasting, where we roast our listener setups, go check out the Cozy Zone feed. So what are your guys' tech education backgrounds? I have none. Yeah. I have none either. I went to the school of hard docs. Not really. Pretty much self-taught. We talked about our computing history and like our first computers, and that informed a lot of mine. but then in high school we had it's kind of a separate school it's kind of hard to explain because it's one of a kind but it's this place called CART it stands for Center

of Advanced Research and Technology and basically your junior and senior year of high school so for those outside the US your last two years in high school you can go to this you can spend half your day at this place so you go to your normal high school for half a day and then the other half of the day you can go to CART and they have different programs there. They have law programs, biology programs, computer programming programs, but they had a video production program. So the first year I went to this video production program and that really informed a lot of my tech background.

And then my second year, they started an advanced program where only like a couple of people got into it and it was really like hand-picked, really hand-crafted kind of thing and that really informed a lot of my background. But I've never done like traditional computer education classes, stuff like that. I just kind of taught myself a lot of everything. Yeah, same. When I was talking about how I was a Linux head, yeah, I was 13, 14 barely.

I was in middle school. I remember setting up my first website and just because I thought it was fun. like uh nobody taught me uh just watched a lot of i mean not even youtube there was not much youtube not much but not much stuff on youtube at the time um i remember a french website that was called le site du zero and if french people are listening they will get that reference it's a it was a french website that would um like basically teach people how to develop things

And from scratch, basically from really well-made tutorials and to get started from scratch. And it was really popular at the time. I read a lot of that, set up my first website, then got really deep into Linux. I had some skills, sysadmin skills at 14 years old somehow. And I was completely useless, by the way. And yeah, and then I moved on. And then I got a geography degree. I went to university and did a geography degree, got my diploma and could not find any work with that.

So it turns out useless to have a geography degree. All the land had been discovered. Yeah, exactly. When you need to eat food, that will not cut it. So in the end, I got a job as a technician and to work on computers and stuff because I knew that. I knew how to do that. And here I am now. Nice.

I, in high school, designed my first website in Dreamweaver. Nice. Did not enjoy that. Oh, yes. I remember Dreamweaver. Oh, my God. A year or two later, I took my one computer science class I ever took, which we worked in QBasic, which is horrendous. That's old. It's dinosaur. It was old at the time. It was not great. I think it was just like, here's the concept of what a function is. Here's an if statement.

That's the level we were doing. But it was very boring and I hated it. How was the asteroid impact? How did you survive that? What did they feel like? Anyway, I should have just mentioned Dreamweaver. But I got my first job in technology, actually, because of my blog, which was an unusual thing, I guess. So I got the job at the company I currently work at now, where I've done product owner, designer, product manager, done all the things.

But I got in the door because they wanted someone who knew technology and for their integration support. And I did not have the resume for it, but I did have this blog that showed that I was interested in technology and knew some stuff, and that was enough to get me the interview. So, yeah, that's how I got it. Nice. Yeah, I guess I should say how I got into IT stuff, I literally just faked it until I made it, and I might have massaged my resume and lied a little bit in my interview. Heck yeah.

Yeah. So the conclusion is education is a scam. Yep. don't put your children in school. Yep. Let them roam in the wild. 100%. Yeah, and get them to install aerospace. That will teach them. No, don't do that. You'll learn so much. Don't do that. No, don't do that. So I need to go and lower my blood pressure after this episode. So we should probably wrap up here. An all-timer. I think this might be our longest episode ever.

Oh, my God. And I got to bust out the editable. Okay. All right. We really got to wrap up. thank you all so much for listening big thank you to MacStories for having us though this will probably be the last episode ever on MacStories because they'll kick us off because we talked about Aerospace thank you all for listening have a great day bye Bye.