Mine is Free and Open Source, Baby!

Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your hosts, well, outside of their comfort zone. I'm Christopher Lolly, and each week I am joined by two incredible co-hosts. As always, I am joined by Mr. Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you doing? I'm doing great. You might be able to see that I'm in the sun this week. I feel like I've been in darkness for a while, but the sun is coming out. Spring is happening. I'm so happy. Boo. I miss the winter already. And we're also joined by Nelian. Nelian, how are you? I am not happy that the spring is coming because I am now sick with allergies again.

Yay. See? The spring is racist is what I'm hearing. I did. I thought of you, Nelian. A couple days ago, actually, I think allergies hit me because my ears felt weird. It was just like they were clogged but not clogged. And I was like, oh, this is what she's talking about. This sort of thing. And eventually it was okay. it's very annoying. My hearing issues on my left side are worsened when I have allergies, I guess because it's inflammation or something.

Anyway, I have an appointment with a surgeon at the hospital. I mean, just to check it out. I took that, I booked that appointment a few months ago. So the medical system is doing well. Have to wait months to get an appointment. Yeah, we have no comment on that here. Yeah, no comment. It's not that comment. No comment.

Yeah, I'm not paying for anything for what it's worth. Yeah, no, something like that here would bankrupt you. Anyways, we got a few tiny topics. Actually, I think I have all the tiny topics this week. So first off, a little bit of follow-up to our challenge. I talked about I would keep using Vivaldi because Neelion gave me some pointers and some stuff I would like. And while I did like that, I'm not still using Vivaldi only because it doesn't work with passwords very well. And I need a good password manager.

And it's been too busy of a week to move to a different password manager. So maybe I will try this again in the future when I have some time to move out of passwords into something else. But the problem is I don't really want to move out of passwords. So Safari it is for me. Oh, we did have some feedback, and I didn't put it in the show notes. We had some feedback that came in yesterday. One piece was for me and one piece was for Neelion. I only remember the piece for me. Sorry. But the piece for me was about using the sidebar in Safari because that has the tabs on the side.

And why I don't use that because I complain about Safari not having a sidebar. What I'm complaining about that is if you enable the Safari sidebar, if you turn that on, the tabs at the top don't go away. They're still there. So you have your tabs in two places. And that's just one place too much. I don't need my tabs in two places. One place is fine. I would like to just have them on the side. But if I can't just have them on the side, I'm just going to have them at the top. I'm not going to have them in both places because that's ridiculous. Yes.

I'm looking at the feedback now. So they said they are Hannes from Austria. I like this name. This is a nice name. Hannes. Right? This is how you pronounce it, right? Sure. Why not? Sure. It's how it's pronounced now. Legally, they have to go by that now. Even if it's not how it's pronounced, legally, they do have to go by that now. And they said they moved to Vivaldi, thanks to me, and they really like it. Some of us are perfect. Some of us are not.

Somebody else, Bastion, because you said I got a piece of feedback, I just looked. They said they would like to give some appreciation to Niléane. That's me. And they appreciate me. See? Guys, don't inflate Niléane's ego. And they said for spreading the word for all of us who speak English as their second language, the only thing that is worse than a missing localized version is a bad localization forced on me. Yes, I will keep saying this. Yes, yes, yes. So what I'm hearing is I should be turning on the YouTube auto-dub AI feature that changes my speaking words into French or Italian or whatever.

I don't know. You know, I have an army of user scripts in my web browser. Some of them I have written myself just to get rid of all of that bull crap on YouTube. So the titles, auto-translated, the auto-dubbing being turned on by default, all of that drives me insane. The fact that I'm paying for YouTube and having to write user scripts to get rid of this stuff. You know what's funny is if you talk to YouTube, they think that's the greatest feature in the world.

They're like, oh my gosh, we're bringing all the videos to everyone now. Anyways. And then I have one more tiny topic. For those that have AirPods Pro 3 and are having fit issues, because I've been experimenting, Matt Birchler. Do you still have yours, Matt? I do. I have them right here. This is for you then. This is for you and your people. So I went back and I tried the AirPods Pro 2 again, and I was like, oh, my gosh, these actually do fit way better, and they are more comfortable.

Yes. So, I went looking and I found a company I've worked with in the past. They've never sponsored me. No disclosure, but they have sent me stuff. But I paid for these myself. I ordered these myself. They're the Chargin Air Foams Pro version 30 ear tips. And what these are are different ear tips for AirPods Pro 3 specifically. And they are way more comfortable. They don't feel like they're going inside your ear as much. They don't feel as much pressure. So, check these out. They're a little pricey. It's $40. but they make them work and now you get all the benefits of airpods pro 3 and uh and they're more comfortable so i'm kind of curious man if these would works for you okay i will take a look at

these because i am infinitely disappointed that i my ears just don't work with the uh the new tips they so i mean my ears work with the new tips but these are way more comfortable than the new tips And they have foam on it. They kind of do the thing that... So Chargin did the thing first before Apple did where they put foam inside the tips and stuff like that. But their foam is a little different than Apple's foam. And I think these are more comfortable. $40 worth of foam.

I mean, you already spent $200 and something bucks on headphones. Why not spend $40 to make them a little bit more comfortable? That's not the cost, baby. I just, in general, I'm speaking to the world. I got some new ear cushions for my headphones. For real, I got some new cushions for my headphones. Has there ever been a week where you haven't changed your headphones in some way? I'm on a quest to find the perfect pair of cushions. Anyway, this will be a topic maybe. Chris, I've already ordered them, so we'll see when they arrive. Sweet.

I'm super curious if they work for you. I would suggest playing around and trying out the different tips and doing the ear fit test. They come in three different sizes. So just, yeah, check that out. And this week on Cozy Zone, we discussed our backup situation. And we discovered, surprise, surprise, one of our co-hosts is a monster. Is an absolute monster. Well, yeah. We'll let you figure out who that is. Yeah, the same one who had perfect cable management.

To be fair, we are kind of a spectrum on this episode. So depending on your opinions and philosophy, any one of us could be the monster. But it's Matt Birchler. Matt Birchler's the monster. All right. You all ready to get in the main show? I think, Matt, you're first up in the doc, but you don't have anything here. Speaking of the monster. I did not put anything in there because every once in a while, I bring a topic that will make nobody happy. Oh, man. Do I need to leave for this one?

Today, I have brought the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. Oh, yes. And the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro. Unfortunately, the last generation ones, not the new ones that just came out. So this is less relevant. So I'll spend more time on the phone. Oh. Comfort zone, the timely tech podcast. So let's talk about the phone. This is the sequel to, famously, my phone of the year last year.

One of my topics last year was ranking all seven phones that I used in 2025. And to everybody's chagrin, I said the Galaxy S25 Ultra was the most exciting to me. I had fun. I had fun going back to high-end Android. It was cool. And so now the sequel's out, and it's purple. That's not purple. That's not purple. That is not purple. I would say this is... Leone's sweatshirt is purple. That is dark purple. Similar purple to when Apple did a purple iPhone.

It's a little lighter. Anyway, it's a fancy phone. What are you going to do? Have colors? There's a little color here. I kind of like it. This is a weird little upgrade. In some ways, it's worse than last year's phone. Okay. Of course. Which is tough. So, for example, and this is not a thing that's going to be able to come across in any way. The S Pen at the bottom is still there. It still exists. You kind of, like, push it in, and it clicks out and is great.

I don't use it a ton. But it's nice sometimes. And it's a nice little fidget toy to kind of pop that in and out. So that's kind of fun. Kind of the way you used to, like, flip the ringer switch back and forth on the iPhone before the action button. That sort of thing. It's not flush with the bottom anymore. So it kind of bumps out a little bit, which is strange. So a weird little thing. What I did like about it, though, is I described the design of the last phone as made by someone who hates other people because the edges were so sharp and the corner, the border radius

on the screen was so sharp that it would just cut you. would like you would just have bloody hands after using it it was it was rough so they sounds like a good time yeah best phone of the year um so they softened it this year so now i would say it's better but it's still not as good as the iphone uh it's i would say we are in kind of the iphone 12 13 14 generation of sharpness where they had the stainless steel and like the kind of hard edges before they went titanium and then the super soft aluminum that they have now um And also, funny, I know Apple fans will like this.

Apple was like, titanium is the thing. And then two years later, they're like, we're done with titanium. Samsung did two years of titanium. And this is no longer titanium edges. This is aluminum edges as well. Well, yeah, Samsung just command C's command V's the iPhone. Like, let's be honest. Whatever. I mean, they make fun of the iPhone for not having a charger in the box one year. And then the very next year, they take the charger out of the box. I mean, you can't write this stuff. boxes. There's no charger. Yeah. They couldn't, you couldn't afford to put a charger in there.

Yeah. I, for the record, I do think it's ridiculous that phones don't come with charger, charging bricks. I absolutely think it's ridiculous. I, all companies, it's not just me shilling for Apple. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, it is. I, my theory is that someone just had a lot of titanium. They offloaded it to the whole, the whole tech industry and then they used it all and then went back to what is better. Anyway, this is a thing in laptops. The Mac MacBooks were for like two years and then they're like oh aluminum is actually better and so we keep doing this in tech where we're like titanium oh no maybe not the titanium books were so cool i wanted one of those i never had one i wanted one yeah maybe that was the problem nobody actually got them um

but anyway um the cameras mildly upgraded uh one thing i will say is worse is i am so spoiled by recent iphones with the wobble that they have especially with the the plateau thing that they my phone barely wobbles when i have it on a surface which is great this thing i don't know if you can see i don't know if it'll come across on video but like the camera bump is so thick and all the cameras are focused right in the top right corner and they go down so like the height the max height is all the way down here so like it really i literally cannot show this but like

it is hilarious how wobbly this is like you if you wanted to like be in a meeting and just like subtly like just like hit a few keys on the keyboard impossible you everyone will know what you are doing because it is so loud when it's rocking back and forth and that's the phone that comes with the pen too so like you're supposed to be able to draw on this thing oh you would not yeah you would have to have it in your hand to do that you have you would have to hold it you wouldn't be able to like put do it like with it like an ipad and apple pencil or anything like that

huh um interesting i have one more rough thing and then one really good thing that makes it all worth it uh the second the last rough thing is the screen so this the big uh thing with the screen is that it has the privacy display where if you tilt it uh you can hide your hide your stuff which is cool. And it's in software, so you can have it go for just individual apps. You can have it go for just parts of the screen, like your notifications for specific apps. Very cool. I don't personally need this, so it is kind of wasted on me. But what I will say is the way this works, if you haven't

been following, is basically an OLED pixel structures is weird. It's not just like a one-to-one. It's not just like a square grid. But effectively, half the pixels on this are wide-angle pixels. So these are the pixels we've been doing on phones for forever, where if you look at the phone way off angle, you can still see it pretty clearly. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It could light off as wide an angle as possible. The other half of these are very narrow band pixels. So the light goes straight forward, and that's why you can't see it when you're off angle.

What this means is that when I'm looking at my phone dead on, it's fine. And it's totally indistinguishable from last year's screen, which I said was the best screen on any phone I've used, including the iPhone. Awesome. Super bright, super crisp, amazing. However, because half of the pixels are narrowband, you can never see them at an angle. So when you're using the phone, even without privacy mode enabled, when the phone is at a slight angle, you do lose visibility to it.

It's okay. It's not the end of the world, but it is worse. And I immediately noticed that it was worse than the phones I was used to. So if you were in an instance, say, like you're in your kitchen, you're cooking a meal. You're a big business boy, Birchler. You just came off of a meeting. You're making yourself lunch. And you put your, you prop your phone up to watch a video while you're, you're making lunch and you're off to the side. What that affects the, the viewing of the video, right? Like it would be a worse quality than if you were looking at it straight on.

You would still be able to see it to be clear. It's not like it's invisible, but it definitely feels less like a modern premium screen. If you're used to those, it would be invisible. If you enabled the privacy mode, which turns off the wide-angle LED stuff. Okay. Yeah, so this just seems like a gimmick to me. I don't know in any instance why I would use this. I don't know. I mean, I don't personally use it, but maybe if you're on public transit more often than we are, maybe this would be a thing.

Maybe Neelian would be more interested in this than we would. I recently revealed to Neelian, I don't think I've been on a train. I've been on two trains in the past decade, I think. And they were on the same day. Does the Disneyland train count as a train? No. Then I haven't been on a train in probably like 20 years, if not more. But I was about to say, so my partner, I showed them the news when this was announced and showed off. And they were really excited about it. And my partner, they have a privacy screen protector on their MacBook.

Oh. It's the most horrendous thing I've ever seen. So bad. And I understand because they work in stuff where it's often sensitive stuff on their screen and more often than not, they're using their MacBook on trains because here we take the trains really often every day. And yeah, so that was something they wanted. I actually had to look for a good privacy screen for their MacBook.

It turns out they're all the same thing on Amazon, dropshipped or whatever. Oh, yeah. They're probably made by one company, and then they're sold by a bunch of different companies. Some of them are smarter than others because they don't just stick. You can have just magnets, so you can easily remove them. Yeah. So they were really interesting about having this feature on the phone. That was something enticing to them. Yeah. I could actually see. We have people at work who do that too, usually like executives and leadership folks.

And they often do it because they get messages that they don't want everyone to see. So it would be kind of cool on like a Mac display if you could just have like Slack blacked out and then like the rest of it. Anyway, I think it's really cool tech and I think it's really interestingly done here. But I do think it is a bit of a bummer that the screen, which was like, I was like, oh, it's god tier, it's incredible, is slightly worse, even though I don't use the feature. And if you do use the feature, you are getting half the pixels, so it's kind of a 720p screen. It looks a little better than that, because again, the pixels are weird.

But if you don't use the picture, you don't have any downsides, right? The viewing angles are the one downside, is because half the pixels are narrow all the time, because they literally physically are. The angles when it's like on my desk, sitting next to me, it's a little harder to see. These are champagne problems. This was a phone seven years ago. I wouldn't even complain about it. Hey, that's a Taylor Swift song. Oh, it is. Champagne problem. All right. Then we sing it on three. One, two, three.

Champagne problem. My phone's ringing. I don't know what to do. My phone's ringing. My Mac's ringing. Everything's ringing. My second phone is ringing. You don't use Do Not Disturb? We are professional podcasters. Oh, my goodness. Okay. I'm going to wrap up this segment. The best thing about this phone is AirDrop is coming to it this week, so that's great. Lovely. Pixels got it a few months ago, but now Samsung's getting it.

So, lovely. Actual AirDrop, I should say. This is literally AirDrop. It will show up as a device on iPhones. It's something you can AirDrop to. No third-party hacks. The other thing I want to talk about is the ProBuds, which are fine. They feel better in my ears, but they do not noise cancel as well as Apple's AirPods Pro. They sound about the same. But the one thing that is annoying about them is that if you have your AirPods handy and you open the case and you look inside the case, these things are brilliant.

Because you can stick the stem anywhere in that hole on either side of it. And because of the way it's sloped, the stem of your AirPod will find its way where it needs to go. And they're circular, so any angle works. And it all just kind of goes in very smooth. And they're magnetic, so they, like, snap in. Like, they pull in. Yes. The problem with Samsung's case is they separate. There's different cavities.

There's where the earbud goes, and then there's also the bit where the stem goes. And the stems are triangles, so they do not go in very easily. If you stick them in the big hole, they won't go in. So you have to very carefully line them up and get them in. They do magnet in once they're there, but it just needs to be a little different. Also, AirPods, the earbuds face each other like they are in your ears, So you just take them out and put them in, and they're at the same orientation.

These, the earbuds point out in the case, so when you take them out of your ears, you have to rotate them 180 degrees and put them in. These are very minor things, but it made me appreciate the AirPods case more, so I wanted to shout it out. So Chris, something made you laugh? About? When Matt said cavities, you laughed. Oh, because I'm a 13-year-old boy. That's right. Yeah, yeah. yeah yeah this was a test and you failed yeah no i i yeah i have the maturity level of a 13 year old boy so that's it um i think the phone is is very very nice uh but yeah the screen is touch and go

very cool tech so i hope i don't know it's probably one of those things like the temperature sensor that like disappears in a couple years but it is it is very cool and very interesting if you are the sort of person who does use a screen protector because you don't have to use it all the time because those make the screens dimmer they're harder to see at all times and if you're at home and you don't care then it's annoying so anything to get people to stop using screen protectors when they don't need them yeah yeah yeah i i agree i mean that's that's kind of like the whole nano

texture thing that apple brought to the ipad the macbooks and the studio displays uh it's great like So I have it on the MacBook Pro, and it's fantastic. It makes such a difference when you have either a big window behind you or fluorescent overhead lighting, or if you're like me and you film your devices and you have big lights pointed at them, it makes your job a lot easier. So, yeah, that's it for me. All right. Neil, what do you got for us this week? I have an app that I discovered, a Mac app, That could have been my submission for the challenge later,

but I want to proper talk about it. This one is called Forklift, and it's a famous one, I think. Maybe Matt has heard of it. Chris, have you? I am... Oh, that's a video. I clicked the link in thinking that was going to be to the app. Is this the one by... That's the wrong link. Did I just spoil your challenge submission? Probably.

That's okay. I didn't really see what it is. That's my fault. That's the wrong link. Forklift Mac. There you go. Here's the correct link. Oh, yeah. I've seen this. Didn't John write about this recently on the club? I'm not sure. No. John covered Bloom, right? That's what it is. That's what it is. So Forklift is kind of a finder alternative, except it's so much more.

And Bloom is also kind of a finder alternative with more features. So the thing with Forklift is it's a file manager, right? That you install on your Mac. You use it to navigate your folders, through your folders, see your files. on the surface, it works and looks like Finder. With the column view, icon view, list view, all of that.

You have a detail pane as well that you can unfold. But with Forklift, you can have two panes side by side. And that's really nice. It's an old school concept, but it still works really well in 2026 because it's useful to have two panes side by side at all time. So you can, in one pane, navigate to a folder, in the second pane to another folder, and you can do things between the two of them. With drag and drop, it's super easy instead of having to juggle windows.

It also has some smart features with the pane thing, the dual pane thing. For example, if you're navigating into maybe a duplicate folder that lives on a different drive, you can pin the navigation so that when you navigate into one pane, it also navigates down into the other pane. So you can easily compare the two views side by side and do operations like this.

Another feature that's really cool in Forklift is a feature called Sync. And what this does is you, for example, I have my music. It always comes back to my music library. My music library, it lives on an external SSD and I back it up to my iCloud drive. So iCloud Drive is not the source of truth for this. It's just someplace where I put all of my music so it's backed up in the cloud as well.

But the thing with iCloud Drive, you can't easily automate anything with it because it behaves weirdly on the file system. Files are offloaded when you can't predict them. And when they're offloaded, it's hard to read the metadata. Apps can't really do that reliably. So with sync, I can set up a routine that I just have to click one button. I can set it up and save it and run it when I want.

And tell it, okay, take the files from this folder and sync everything into that folder. So I can tell it, okay, look at my music library on my SSD and sync it all up in the same state to this folder in iCloud Drive. And this is amazing because you just have to click one button. And it shows you a nice preview. It shows you which files it's updating, which files it's removing in a destination. It shows you what's changed, the size is different.

And you can tweak all that. You can tweak to say, okay, only keep the files that are newer. Only keep the files that are older. Only keep the files that the size is different regardless of the modified date. You can tell it to never remove files and folders in the destination so that it's only incremental, but it never deletes anything. This is the best feature of Forklift. It's amazing. And I've set this up for a bunch of different things.

Music is just one example. I use it to back up all of my app configuration files. I have a folder that I keep regularly. I export everything from my favorite apps. I export the configuration files and I back it up using this as well. Forklift is also really well done in terms of remote destinations. So you can use it to connect to Samba drives, SMB. For that, it uses the regular Finder backend.

So no exceptional features there. But it goes further than that because you can add Google Drive. You can add an S3 destination. This is awesome. So in my case, I have a bunch of S3 buckets, one for my master's server, one for a new project I'm working on, and other S3 buckets that I use for work. All of that I can save the info for in Forklift, and I can easily just connect to that and view everything that's in my bucket from there.

This is awesome for admin stuff. Like if you need to quickly check on a file in a bucket to see if it's fine, if you need to delete stuff. And it also has really good permission management. And if you've ever dealt with S3, you know that this is having a GUI for this, dealing with the permission management on an S3 bucket with the terminal. It's every time you need to look it up. It's a nightmare. Forklift has the GUI for this.

In the detail pane, you scroll down, there's a bunch of checkboxes. So you know the checkbox grid with RAID, WRITE, and whichever is the third one. But it's easily editable that way. So this is really nice. So not just S3, you can connect to SFTP destinations as well. So if there's a server that you're only able to connect to via SSH, you can also use those credentials to connect via SFTP

because it's just over SSH. I may be speaking Chinese for some people right now, but if you know, you know. Yeah, this is good. This basically discovers everything that I use it for right now. The remote destination stuff, the seeking stuff, and just in general, it's such a reliable app. Like in the way it works and looks, you set it up once and it's not like Finder where it changes its size on you randomly.

It reorders things in a sidebar for you every time there's an OS update. No, Forklift, everything's consistent. It's really nice. You can customize the sidebar really neatly. You can give your shortcuts and favorites there special icons, and you can create categories to organize everything in that sidebar. This is awesome as well. And that's pretty much it. I really like this app. You should check it out. There's even a way that with a terminal command, it's on their website.

You can set it as the default file viewer on your Mac, which means it replaces Finder in most situations. So if you, I don't know, anytime you click Reveal in Finder in an app or on a Mac, it will open in Forklift instead if you do this. But it does not replace for the fact that if you have stacks in the dock, those will open in Finder no matter what. Same with the trash bin, the trash slash bin.

but yeah I did this initially but then I reverted it because I think I want to go into forklift when I'm into and still going to find them in most instances so yeah do you have this on your iPad Chris you know I have files on my iPad which is basically the same thing because I can add Google Drive and S3 and all that stuff to the sidebar so basically files on this If you have an app that can work with S3, I think Working Copy can do that, right?

Okay. And then you can add, because you can add Working Copy to the side. I don't know. I haven't had to deal with Amazon S3 stuff in five, six years, something like that. So I don't know. I don't have that. But yeah, I know, right? But yeah. Oh, my gosh. I used to have to deal with Amazon Glacier. I don't know what that is. It's S3, but it's the slow, cheap version of it. It's so bad. It's so bad. Like the long-term storage. It's the long-term, like, cold storage.

Like, if you're doing, like, you're probably never going to need this stuff again. And if you do need it, good luck downloading it because it's going to take, like, 30 days. This is, like, the Backblaze thing where, like, you can download your whole thing, but you can also pay and we'll drive the hard drive to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Nelian, this is very cool. And I must be impressionable today because I have installed Forklift now. Oh, yes. Just tell me what to buy and do and I'll do it.

Ooh, okay. Hang on. What's interesting about this is that I use transmit for FTP and AWS as well. But it doesn't do finder stuff. It's not a good – I guess you could technically use it as kind of a finder, but it's not really that sort of thing. Yeah. So having, and I can have to go to those things separately. So it is interesting, this kind of the sidebar where I can have just like my normal local file system and browse it just like it's the Finder.

But then if I need to go to my NAS, it's here. That's in Finder, obviously. But also if I could get my couple other things over here too for quick access, it would be nice to not have to go to a separate app for that. Yeah. It's well designed as well. So it's using the liquid glass stuff. But the default theme, I think, works well to add back some contrast to, like, the sidebar and the toolbar. It's contrasty. This is refreshing to see.

Yeah, this is a really good app. I just added something to our group chat. And we can put a link in the show notes. But since Matt's being impressionable, Matt, I need you to buy this. It is the Ford Mustang GTD. It is the high-performance supercar Mustang that has DRS, and it's only like $300,000. So go ahead and put your order in for one of these. Okay. The trailer that plays on the top of the page says it's street legal. Barely. It is. It is barely street legal, but it is street legal.

Okay. Wow. You can drive the car. Incredible. Well, I mean, you can get like a racetrack version only of it if you want. But, you know, I figured I'd get Matt the, or Matt can get himself the version he could drive. You know, Chris, if you could get it for me. Sure. You know, we can expense it to Mac Stories. How about that? John, John, we have an expense coming your way. In regard to Forklift, it's not expensive.

Like, it's $20 for a single user license. You can get a family license for $30. And what I liked about it is the free trial. The free trial is you just get the whole app for free. And it will simply nag you every time you launch it. When you launch it, there will just be a pop-up. Hey, maybe you should buy the app. But you can X out of that and keep trying it.

Okay. Yeah. And I think this is really nice model because it meant, so I've been using this app for more than a month, I think. I've been using it for a while. And I just finally paid for it because I'm like, okay, I think I will stick with this. I will pay for a license. But I've been using for a full month, yeah. And that's okay. Every time I launch it, I just click out of the dialog. And you can use it entirely. I noticed it has command line tools as well.

So that's interesting. I've not looked into that, but yes. Interesting. This looks pretty cool. I saved this for later so I could download this when I have some time to play with it. Because if I download it now and install it now, I'll forget about it. But if I have some time later, I can download, install, and I'll play with it then. I just saw that it has Git support. I had no idea. Let me check. You know, files has Git support. If I go, okay. What does that mean? Do it through working copy. Sounds like working copy is the real MVP here.

It is. It really is. I don't know how it has Git support. I don't know what that does. Because I'm in the Git repo right now with Forklift. Forklift knows Git and will show you the status of individual files. You can add commit, push, and pull. Where? I can't see it. Maybe it's something you have to add to the toolbar. Oh my God, there's a million things you can add to the toolbar. Oh no, it's Vivaldi all over again.

Now we're cooking. Oh yeah. We're cooking, yes. Okay, I don't know where the Git stuff is, but apparently it's there. I will check this out later. Anyway, I'm done. This is Forklift. You should get it. I think it's a really nice app. It's well-made, and it's powerful, and it's not too expensive. All right. I like it. Let's move into the challenge. And the challenge this week was mine, and it was something we haven't done at all.

Find a new Mac app. You know, because the MacBook Neo came out, and I've been playing with the Mac more, so I figured let's get some good Mac app recommendations. So I can go first if you all would like. Okay. The app I want to talk about is Moonshine. And not Moonshine like the drink or Moonshine like the game streaming thing. This is a utility that the developer emailed me. And it's actually really interesting.

So, basically what it does is it lets you set up profiles on your Mac. And the profiles will adapt your Windows depending on what monitors you're using. So if you're using a MacBook like the three of us and you plug your MacBook into a monitor, it will rearrange your windows automatically to a position that you have set up via a profile in the app. So like you can have like mail on the left side and Safari on the right side and then like messages in this particular spot and just on and on and on and on and on, which is pretty cool.

And then when you unplug your Mac, or you unplug your MacBook, and you open up the lid and you're working in laptop mode, it will rearrange the windows to be in your laptop profile. Pretty cool utility. The developer emailed me about this, and I've been playing around with it. And I really like it. You can go really deep with this. Like, you can do things like, if I'm plugged into an external monitor, show the dock. But if I'm in laptop mode, hide the dock. you can do things like specific audio routing.

So like when I'm plugged into this thing, make sure my audio always routes out of here and stuff like that. And then you have unlimited profiles. So even if I had a laptop mode profile, but say I wanted a laptop video editing mode profile, I could have that. Or a laptop photo editing mode profile, I could have that. So specific apps would be open in specific spots when I enabled that profile. But yeah, it's pretty straightforward. There's a really good seven-day free trial that gives you full access to the app, and then a license is $30.

But ultimately, I've been playing around with it this week, and I think I'm going to buy it. And just the developer offered me a license, but it's only $30, so I'll just buy it. But yeah, I like this. You can set it up so you have writing mode or something like that, And all of your windows just rearrange to be in the proper spot. You don't have to constantly rearrange them every single time, which I find to be very frustrating. This is interesting. I can't help but think about aerospace when you talk about that.

Yeah, but this isn't annoying like aerospace. This was really easy to set up and not frustrating. And I didn't have to watch 10 billion YouTube videos and still give up on it. It took me like, I don't know, like 15 minutes to set up if that. this is this is a lot um this i can so looking at the features i can see audio routing it can automatically switch the audio output and input per profile so like if i get this correctly

so if you have like a laptop profile and desktop profile you could have it switched to your audio interface maybe when you plugged in automatically or you could take it even a step further and be like i have a podcasting profile so here go to my audio interface and make sure my mic and my my headphones are my output but when i'm not in podcasting profile you can have it go to my desktop speakers interesting yeah this seems this seems really like yeah i guess it definitely seems like a compelling app for someone who's docking and undocking their computer

on a regular basis and yeah kind of like i guess if you're used to setting up um focus modes like on the ipad it is it seems kind of similar to that i'm in this mode and now my screen changes and different things are set but just like a hyper-powered version of it this is cool i've literally never heard of this app this is yeah yeah no the the developer emailed me about it and i was like this is awesome this is really cool uh i'm planning on making a video about it at some point but um i think this is a very interesting utility and like you can and it does things like it

remembers your window position and stuff like that so no matter what profile you're in and what monitor you're using and you know maybe next week i might have something to say about monitors i don't know okay um i i don't i you know maybe maybe not but uh and then like it also works if you have multiple monitors or something like that or like say if you're somebody that works from home and you also like matt you work from home but you also go to the office too sometimes i'm sure you plug into an external monitor there but it's probably different than your monitor at home so you could have this remember the window positions

and like set things up particular depending on what monitor you're plugged into. It's not just like oh I'm using an external monitor no it knows what external monitor you're using. Yeah I will check this out because this is 90% of this I already do with Moon but I'm curious about the extra features that are there. So what I what I'm hearing is I win the challenge already we don't even have to get to your guys' stuff I win. Wow. Okay. You win if you still use Vivaldi.

I don't see how those two things make sense, but this is what it is. That's not connected at all. Alright, Neelian, what do you got for us this week? Okay, I have a launcher. I will reveal it immediately. I have a launcher for the Mac. One more alternative to Raycast and Alfred. This one is called tuna and you may have heard of it. I actually have not. You have not? You don't read my text messages. I see. Oh, wait.

This isn't... No. I'm confused now. This is made by Michael Malberg. I think they're Norwegian or something. You might have texted about this when I was in my iPad mode and I was like, oh yeah, I can't do anything with this. Yeah, this was before the Neo era. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. If I wasn't in my Neo era, I probably agree with that. So this is the guy who made a leader key. I think this is also something we mentioned before. So anyway, Tuna is a launcher.

And when you look at it, does it remind you of something? Just looking at the web page, the screenshots. It's Quicksilver. Quinto boxes? Yes, exactly. Oh, it's 100% Quicksilver. Yes, it's the spiritual son to Quicksilver. So Quicksilver used to be this launcher on the Mac, like, I don't know, a million years ago. Hey, that was my first launcher. It wasn't that long. It was my first launcher. I had it as well, yes.

That was fun. So the way it looked and worked is it showed up on screen, had two big tiles. And so on the left, so you type something on the left, it shows your result. And on the right, you can take an action on that result, basically. So for example, you can type SAF. So Safari shows up on the left and you have some actions related to Safari on the right. And you can tab over and do stuff like that. So this is basically the same UX as Quicksilver.

But it goes further because it will support extensions in the future. So this is what they're working on. And it has some... So this is not very convinced that it's well done or that it suits me. It has modes. So it has the regular mode where you type stuff and do stuff. And it has, what are they called? The leader mode. So this is inspired by the previous app that was called LeaderKey, where basically you can set up keystroke shortcuts.

For example, you can tell it to, you type C, A. So I don't know how to explain this well. For example, you set up a browser category, right? And you map that to B. And in that browser category, you set up Vivaldi and Safari. And Vivaldi, you map to V. Safari, you map to S. So now you can do B and S. And I will automatically open Safari. Or you can do B and V, and I will open Vivaldi. So this is how it works, the leader key system.

That's some BS. See what I did there? Yeah. No wonder I mapped that to Safari. You see? All makes sense. So this is really nice for, like, if you're an advanced user, I guess this is nice to have. But it also has text mode and talk mode. And text mode is basically where you can have it be so that the left pane, instead of searching for something, you can interact or enter text. So, for example, you can simply invoke to now in text mode and start typing something.

And on the right, you can perform an action based on that text. For example, you can tell it to, I don't know, make it bold. Make it bold or make it italic or, I don't know, do something in the text. I don't know what were the examples. I guess that's nice. And when extensions come, there will be some really good, powerful use cases for this. I could see one where maybe you could use it to easily wrap some text in fancy quotes, like in the correct typographic quotes automatically.

This is something I do right now with Pastebot because Pastebot has filters like that to integrate with your clipboard. But here you don't need the clipboard. yeah and talk mode is basically the same thing but you you you use your voice as they input it your your mic opens up and you can start talking to it so in general my idea about tuna is that it looks really nice it's really fast i really like it the quicksilver ux i'm not a fan of i remember I really like in Quicksilver back in the days.

But the issue with launchers, I have the same issue with, do you know LaunchBar? It's another launcher. Yeah. This is the same issue I have with LaunchBar where you can't really see well what you're typing because there's no like a text field, there's no regular text field into which you're typing or your search. Here, you start typing and the result is all there is on screen. So there's only your result.

And maybe it highlights the letters that you've typed. But you can't easily press backspace a bunch of times to go back or select a bunch of text in that field. Same issue in LaunchBar. In LaunchBar, it shows you the result and there's no regular search field to interact with, if that makes sense. I don't really like this UX. I prefer the types of Alfred and Raycast and regular Spotlight, where it's just a regular text field. You can do what you do usually in a text field with it.

Yeah, but this is nice. If you like Quircle Silver, you should check it out, I think. Nice. I think if you find all the other launchers too much and you just want a fast launcher, it looks like it could do the trick, even if you don't use the other stuff. this is a good poll tuna so we have two good apps in a row is Matt going to keep the streak alive oh you know I am

because mine is free and open source baby so I am using wait a minute just because you have brought something to the show does not mean I have not used it this is a scam This is not a scam. This is me using an app that I haven't used on my Mac before. Okay, go ahead. The app is Thaw, and I just found it on my own. It had no help from anybody. Just me and a real influencer figuring it out on my end. No, Neil Leon, I think, brought this a few. I can't believe this.

Thaw is a menu bar app that's almost exactly like Bartender. Very, very, very similar to Bartender. And it's great. I've been using it. It works reliably. It does the thing that Bartender does where that was Bartender's like big innovation a couple years ago when the notched MacBooks came out where you have like all your hidden items. And then when you click or like hover over, they'll appear in the menu bar. But if you're on a screen with a notch, it actually shows as a second line underneath, which is super cool because you don't, as I talked about last week, the notch gets in the way.

You literally can't see things. So it's very nice that it does that. It's literally bartender with the customizations. You can change how the menu bar looks. If you don't like the completely opaque or not opaque, completely transparent menu bar of Tahoe, you can give it a background again. You can have it blur the background. You can have it be a specific color. We should really just replay Neely on session where she talks about this. That would really kind of. Yeah, we should. But it's great.

It's really good. The link to the site is a link to the GitHub page. That's the sort of app this is. And yeah, it's by Stoner L. Gotta love that. And it's good. Stoner L. I swear to God, I'm 13. I like it. So, yeah, this is, to be clear, this is a fork of an app called Ice, which I think, Milan, you also brought.

Yes, yes. Nilion wrote a whole thing on Mac stories about it when Bartender got bought. So the story is Ice got abandoned because, I mean, yes, abandoned. I wish Ice would get abandoned. No longer developed actively because the developer of Ice, they announced it. They had to go on a hiatus because of work and life. And so, yes, this new developer forked it and made Thor. And now they're actively maintaining it and adding features.

Nice. Super cool. Or should I say ice? I think I made that joke already. That sounds really familiar. All of the jokes you've already made because we've already done the segment. But it's new to me. I think Matt broke the streak nearly on. What do you think? No. I think I win. I think I get two points because I've brought two apps here. But my app works in multiple profiles with different monitors.

So depending on how many monitors you have, I get multiple points. So there you go. Isn't moonshine like a way to describe illegal alcohol or something? Oh, yeah, it is. It's like pure ethanol, alcohol. It is. Fuel, you could run a car off of it. Okay, okay. Yeah. I can tell you about it off air. Sure. Anyways, so that was a good challenge. I think two out of three of us did a pretty good job. You can figure out which ones those are.

You know, whatever. Matt, it is your challenge for next week. What do you got for us? It is my challenge. And I'm a little worried we've done this before, but I don't think we have. To be fair, we've done find new Mac apps before. So as long as we can put a new spin on it, it's fine. I think we should, maybe we should talk about it. I think it should be fine to just redo challenges. I think so. As long as we have a different outcome, yes. Yeah. I agree. And maybe we should be aware if we've done it before.

And perhaps maybe, Matt, you could do some notion magic. Yep. Figure out when we talked about it. Because it could be fine if we compared to the previous outcome of the same challenge that we've done before. Okay. Well, the challenge I had in mind was not do something. This is just think about yourself. Have some introspection. I think about myself all the time. I'm not used to that. I don't have a problem with that. I think about other people. I just constantly am thinking about myself.

Okay. I'm the greatest. I think about the world. It's in a state right now. I just think about myself. So what I would like you to do is think about if you got a new Mac from the Apple store. You just got it home, and there's a hard limit. You may only install three apps on it. What three apps would you put? Pages, numbers, keynote. This is the challenge for next week.

So pre-installed apps don't count, I take it. Pre-installed apps do not count. Apple apps that are not on a fresh MacBook do not. So Final Cut would be one of your three. Okay, okay. Wait, it has to be Apple apps? Any app. It could be Raycast. It could be a clipboard manager. It could be your video editor that pays the bills. These are things. But just a fresh Mac install, what would you install if you could only install three new apps and had the defaults for the rest?

We'll think about it. We'll think about it this week. All right. I like it. All right. So that brings us to the end of the show. And I have an end of the show question for the two of you. But if you all, dear listener, would like to send in a question to ask us, we have a feedback form. You can follow up with the challenge, send in stuff for us to do, talk about whatever. Or if you have an end of the show question, watch out. Neelion doesn't need a bigger ego boost. I do. Please tell me I'm great. Please tell me how great I am. But Neelion, you know, she's good.

She's good. She knows everyone thinks she's great. I know everyone, yes. But I have an in-the-show question for the two of you, and I want to know how do you name your devices, like your computer names? You know, like if you go into system settings, about, and you change the name of your device, how do you name your devices? Oh, mine is so boring. It used to be fun, but now it's boring because I'm a stupid tech person and I have a lot of devices. Mine is Matt's and then the name of the product.

So Matt's iPhone 17 Pro. Matt's MacBook Neo. Matt's MacBook Pro. That's boring. Niléane, bring us some excitement. Yeah, same. Oh, okay. All right. So I do something. Because most of my devices are in French, they come with the default name, which is Niléane's something, but in French. So it's reversed. So in case of iPhone, it says iPhone de Niléane. So I do something, I reverse it, and put it in English.

That's something. Oh, that's how you stick it to the man. Okay. In fairness, I do something as well, because my phone will say Matt's iPhone, but I put the 17 Pro at the end. Whoa. Calm down, Matt. No, I'm not a man. Calm down. No, calm down. Okay, speaking of the fact that I'm a 13-year-old boy, I named, if they are my personal devices, So if they're review units, I don't bother doing this. But if they're my personal devices, I name them after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

So my MacBook Pro is Donatello because he's the smart one. This has all the power. My iPad Pro is Leonardo because he's the leader and he's got all that stuff. My iPhone is... No, no, I'm sorry. I'm blanking on what all the devices are. That's not a confusing system at all. My Neo is Raphael. It's Raphael because he's the fun one. And then my iPhone is Michelangelo because he's like the serious one and stuff like that.

And then my backup iPad that my secondary iPad I use for like other stuff is Splinter. What if you ever get another Apple device? Then I would start naming them after villains. But mostly, I don't think I'm going to need more than five personal Apple devices. I think I just swap out. If I'm going to replace my iPad, it's just going to carry over the Leonardo name. Okay. Teeny Mutant Ninja Turtles. Teeny Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I hear some people do fun things with their names, but I don't know. I can't be bothered to think of something. I used to do them after Iron Man armor, but that got boring. and really confusing. I did not anticipate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was thinking Star Wars. I thought you'd have a Death Star. You'd have a Millennium Star. Well, my Wi-Fi network's named Death Star Wi-Fi Network. But no, I think naming them after because each device has its own personality and I realized they fit perfectly

in the buckets of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So out of curiosity, if you're ever out somewhere and you need to like, somebody needs to airdrop something to you, are you like, I'm a Rafael? Raphael. Yeah, Raphael. Michelangelo. Michelangelo. Michelangelo. We're going to see. Does that mean when you turn on internet sharing, what is that called? Hotspot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do people see that? Yeah, Michelangelo's Wi-Fi or whatever it is, whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I don't care. I don't care. You can judge me if you want, but my devices are named something fun.

Wow. I'm thinking maybe I should move on to Dune system. Like if one of my devices is called Lysan and Gaib. Lysan and Gaib. Yes. Yes. And then one can be Paul, and then another one can be... And then... I probably should believe that because that's a spoiler for them. That's not a thing. Yeah. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. Oh, I was going to name them after fellowship characters.

If I ever got that many, I think I can name them after fellowship characters. But the fellowship characters. I just watched Dune 2 over the weekend, and now I want to name one of mine. Austin Butler, but from the black and white scene. He's so good. Oh, yeah. Daniel doesn't like Austin Butler for some reason. Oh, WWDC just got announced. Did it really? Yeah. I thought they should go. I can't go this year. The first full week of June, like always? It's tomorrow, actually. June 8th to 12th okay breaking news here on Comfort Zone yeah interesting alright well and it's late but

wait alright well gotta go deal with that alright cool alright well thank you all so much for listening watching however you appreciate the show huge thank you to Max Stories we're a Max Stories podcast after all be sure to go to the website check out all the other shows there's a lot happening over there and all the other writing um thank you all so much for listening have a great day Bye Moonshine Mm-hmm.