Big Things Have TinyStarts

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, we are joined by Matt Birchler. Matt, how are you? Chris, I'm doing great. You're lucky I don't have a topic this week because I'm in the process of installing the Android 17 Beta 3, and I can't talk about it today. I don't have a topic. Nope, I can't. Thank God you can't talk about that. Niléane, how excited are you that he can't talk about that today? I'm excited.

He just showed us to the camera the squiggly line, progress bar. That's exciting. On Android. What if your UI was fun and not transparent? Yeah. No thanks. I'm good. I'm good. I like transparent UI where I can barely see it. But anyways, that is not our topics today. We have a tiny topic, and I think one of these was a feedback thing that was put in here. I don't know. It's probably directed at Niléane considering the subject. No, no, I put it in there.

Welcome back to the Browser Podcast. Pew, pew, pew. Pew, pew, pew. There you go. We don't have time for the whole thing. Okay, sure. We don't. Yes, Vivaldi announced something big, boys. It's big. Big news. They have announced that... Is it his biggest big business boy, Birchler? No, as in big news for the browser industry, their iOS version of Vivaldi now has double-decker tabs as well, just like the desktop version. Yes.

So now you can stack tabs on iOS just as well, and they stack on a two-level UI kind of tab bar. Why? It's amazing. I just thought you should know, and the world should know about this. I have so many questions, but we don't have time. I have so many questions, but we don't have time. This week on Cozy Zone, Matt's put together a little game for us where we had to figure out the YouTube channel based on a single thumbnail. And I got some good YouTube channel recommendations.

I am now following quite a few people that I wasn't following before. So, yeah, go check it out. Cozy Zone is our members-only show where you get a whole extra episode of us every single week. I think I'm going to listen to this one because I don't even forget recording this. I don't even remember. And there is a video version of this one too. So if you do listen to it, some of them we have video versions for. So you get the episode and your podcast player, go to the show notes, and there's a link in there to the video version. So this one benefits from the video version. I would say definitely go watch the video version. Yeah, I will.

As the person who edits the audio or creates the audio file, I will say I will have chapters. There are 48 chapters and they all have images. I have created a nightmare for myself, but it's fun. You don't need to worry about that. It's already done when you're listening to this. I'm already through the pain. Oof. Wow. Okay. Well. Indication. Yeah. All right. Let's get into the main show because we are tight on time this week. So, Neelion, you're first up in the dock. What do you got for us? I'm assuming it's another web browser or headphones.

Since we have time, I can talk very slowly. No. Get into it in a smooth manner. Smart speed is making you sound like a regular person right now. All right. A few episodes ago, I mentioned that I uninstalled Raycast. And I wasn't being truthful at the time. I did not uninstall it out of... Because when you remember on that episode, I listened back to it yesterday.

You asked me why, or one of you asked me why, and I answered because it's too cringe. And I stand by that. But there was one more reason. And that additional reason is that I have a new launcher that I made myself. Yes. I made it myself. I'm just kidding. I've known this. I've been using it. Yes. I'm releasing my first ever Mac app. As we're recording this, maybe it's already out. It should be.

Officially out, I will have made an announcement on the Don's, on the Mastodon. And so I have things to say. Like, I've been trying to do this for the past few weeks. And every time I talk to you about this in our group chat, I say it's been three weeks. It's been four weeks. And actually, because time passes when you're into something and you just keep iterating on something. And actually, I checked my first commit dates from late January. So it's been actually over two months.

It's actually been over two months, but it feels like I got started two weeks ago. So it's a launcher for the Mac, and it's called TinyStart. And this is a cute name that I think is cute because I wanted the app to look cute. It's meant to be cute on screen. It's small. You can make it bigger because already my early testers have told me you should allow people to make this bigger.

Because some people are old and have terrible eyesight. So I hear that. And you have an option to make it bigger. So, yeah, you guys have tried it, right? a little bit. Yeah. What do you think? So I've been using it on the MacBook Neo, and I've been waiting for you to release this so I can start working on my MacBook Neo setup video because I want to include this in it because it's like the perfect launcher for this computer because it's lightweight.

It doesn't use up a ton of background processes or RAM or anything like that, and it's super, super quick. I'm sure you'll get into the specifics of everything it does, But it's not just for launching apps. Like you do a few other things with it. And everything it does, it is very, very quick and snappy, like Safari. Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. That's the main goal, really. It's meant to be snappy. You type, results appear immediately. Because when I let go of Raycast and went back to Spotlight, I suffered.

I suffered gravely from Spotlight's two main things with Spotlight. that I really suffered from. It's slow as heck to show results. And when it shows results, there's so many things in there. Yeah. Unless you go in system settings and disable everything, but then, did you know, if you disable some stuff in the spotlight settings on macOS, it will actually affect indexing in other apps as well,

such as mail, and it does weird things. Oh. So the goal with TinyStart is it lets you launch apps. It lets you open links that you have saved beforehand. So you can save a bunch of your favorite links and open them with TinyStart. You can do that with folders as well. If you need to, there are some folders that you often want to open in Finder quickly. You can add them in TinyStart and now you can just type the name and open them very quickly.

And I think the major part of this is that there's an emoji peeker. And it's actually the Genesis story of this app. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know... In the beginning, Neelion created a Mac launcher. Well, an emoji peeker. An emoji peeker. I'm saying this is the first Mac app that I'm releasing, but it's not actually the first that I've made. I've experimented with making apps for, like, actually, it's been years.

Sometimes I get obsessed with something I try, and then it sucks, and I never talk about it and never show it to anyone. But one of those included the fact that I found, actually, I found on GitHub an abandoned emoji picker written in Swift and SwiftUI. And I just thought, hey, that's too bad that's sitting on there last on GitHub. So I forked it. I iterated on it. And that made me get familiar with Swift and SwiftUI.

And at some point, and that was in January, I was like, okay, maybe I feel comfortable enough to do my own thing. like a tiny launcher that just does the basics because I don't have years of experience doing this. So just the basics, basic launcher that works well, that is fast. And this is what I've done. And now I can show it to people. So, yeah, it's an emoji picker. And you can save links, save folders, launch apps.

And there's a bunch of tiny things that you would expect from a launcher as well. You can do 2 plus 2, and it shows you equals 4. That's good as well. That's covered. Does it do unit conversion? Yes, it does. For now, I have added length, math, and what's the third one? There's a third one. I forgot. Temperature. Oh, temperature. Yeah, currency is one I need to add. And there's also another one I need to add. Volumes I need to add.

It should go up to an 11. That's a reference for old people. Okay. Matt gets what I was going for. Thank you. It's a reference for old people. I have no idea what that is. I don't know what the aura scale of that is. The aura scale. Is that what that means? You don't know the raise level on this? I don't know what that means either. And that's it. That's the bit of news. I'm releasing my first ever Mac app and let me know if you have questions, but I hope people will like it.

This is my first time actually like going further than just experiment, experimenting doing an app. So this is my first experience dealing with getting authorized by Apple with a proper developer ID certificate and all of that. and figure out how do I distribute this? Do I go with the App Store? Do I distribute it myself? Turns out if you go with the App Store route, so you need your app to be sandboxed, that's well known,

but you don't realize until you get into it what that entails in terms of technical limitations. And in my case, TinyStart, it allows you to launch apps, but it also allows you to quit apps. That's one tiny feature that I really like about my launcher. So if you search for an app and you select it, you can press Command Q directly from Tiny Star and it quits the app. That's so useful. And Tiny Star displays a tiny, like a small dot next to the running,

the apps that are currently open on your Mac, just like the dock. I took inspiration from the dock. So you know if you are able to quit an app or not. And this feature is so hard to make it work with a sandboxed app. There are ways, but I struggled with it and I gave up. I was like, this is not worth rewriting this entire part of the app just so I can ship it in the App Store and so Apple can take a bigger percentage from the price that I'm going to set it for.

Yeah, this is definitely a thing for me. the sandbox is usually fine for the sorts of apps that i've built but whenever i make like a personal app that i'm never going to release externally i immediately go into xcode and just trash uh app sandbox go away everything just works if you take that off it just works remember wasn't apple trying to do the whole thing where they lessen the sandbox requirements for mac apps like didn't like panic get to release some stuff or maybe it was like bb edit got to like be in the mac app store

because they lessened their sandbox control and it seemed like they were going to give up and then turns out they never did yeah i mean they they didn't get rid of the sandbox control but you you can do things you just have to request the permissions and you have to use them the right way and it's basically i mean honestly i don't think it's a bad thing necessarily um i don't think people need to buy their things from the app store anyway um i love apps outside the app store but um yeah i don't know it's okay but it is just if you're building it for yourself it's just get rid of the headaches yeah and with a launcher like yours you're interacting with the

system in like ways so yeah but i was surprised building this app to see that it's not like it's not invasive to do a launcher like it's not that invasive on the system to do a launcher because especially if you're doing something lightweight like this, that's focused on... This is the tagline of the app, focused on the essentials. That's just focused on launching apps, opening links. It's okay. It's just indexing folders, some specific folders for your apps.

There's only one system permission needed by the app, and that's the accessibility permission. This is for the emoji picker. So my emoji picker, so this is different from the one I found on GitHub a while ago. So this is an emoji picker that's built into TinyStart. The emoji picker is my favorite thing about Raycast. So I really wanted my own launcher to have one as well. And just like Raycast, I wanted it to be fast, easy to search for emojis with a bunch of different aliases.

So it's not as strict as Apple's default emoji picker with keywords. For this one, I made sure that the sources that I fetched to build the emoji database, there are multiple ones. Like I'm fetching from sources in English as well as a bunch of languages out of the box. So even though the app is not localized, but the Emoji Picker, you can search for emojis in your language.

It fits among those that I included. I included about eight or nine. So I can search for emojis in French, which is really nice. But yeah, you need the accessibility permission because you can simply press enter when you're in a text field to insert the emoji. And that's really nice. I love the emoji picker. It's really good. Ah, thanks. Yes, I really like it as well. Yeah, it's fast, too.

Like, you can just, you hit, so, like, I have it set up, just like how I had Raycast set up, so I can hit hyperkey. Wait, no, no, I'm sorry. No, I take that back. I'm sorry. It's just the command control space. Command control space. Hit that. And I had to think about that, too, for a second. Command Control Space, and then I just start typing whatever emoji I want, and it's instant. It's so quick. Yeah. And I learned some quirk about this. So when you install TinyStar, the default, there are two default hotkeys that are set for you.

Option Space is the one to just invoke the launcher. And Control Command Space, like you said, is the one for the emoji picker. And the funny thing is Control Command Space. So that's Apple's default keyboard shortcut to invoke their emoji picker. And if you write an app and assign a keyboard, like observe that keyboard shortcut to invoke your own emoji picker, it just overrides Apple's one. Which is nice.

Yeah, which means you can just install it. And if you're used to the default emoji picker shortcut, you don't have to do anything. It works right away. And that's not the case with Command Space for Spotlight. Yeah. So that's why Command Space is not my default keyboard shortcut because it will not override it. If you do Command Space in TinyStart and you didn't disable Command Space for Spotlight, both will appear on screen at the same time. You can still use Command Space,

but you will have to disable Command Space for Spotlight in your settings first. That's what I'm doing. I've disabled regular Spotlight keyboard shortcut, and I'm using TinyStart as Command Space. So you are the Spotlight on the MacBook Neo. I'm the Spotlight. I was going to ask for, I guess, Chris, I have your answer. I use Option Space. I've used it for TinyStart, Raycast, Alfred, Quicksilver. Whoa. For 20 years, I've used it,

but I have never unassigned Spotlight from Command Space. so it's still always there yeah i never use it but it's always there i've done that since using launch bar alfred like all of those like but do you replace spotlight what's i've never i i don't think i've ever really used spotlight because when i got into the mac there was launch bar and alfred which were both faster and had extensions and more things you can do with them and then raycast became a thing.

And then, yeah, the Raycast became a thing. And then now I have TinyStart on the MacBook Neo. Oh my God. Okay. So I've never been a big Spotlight person. Like, I take that back. The first Mac I ever used, which was not my personal Mac, it was assigned to me in my film school program, that I used Spotlight on because I couldn't install third-party utilities. Oh, yeah. So I did use Spotlight for that. And I did use Spotlight over the Tahoe beta just to see how it was. and it's not... Neilion, first, I would like to congratulate you in being

in my circle of developers that will now get text messages when I want feature requests. But instead of sending you a text message for this first feature request, I will just ask right here on the air because I know you're going to get it. I know people are going to ask you for it, so I figure I will just give you a chance to say it. I gotta go, sorry. Oh, okay, alright. Flipboard history. Is it possible? Will we see it in TinyStart? Do you want to give people an answer? So, yes. I have. So, I put up a website for like a land. How do you call this? A landing page. A landing page. Yeah.

Tinystart.app, if you want. By the way, if you want to buy the app. Okay. It's definitely out. Yeah. I mean, yes. By the time this episode is out, I think, yeah, I will call it released. But even right now, as we're recording, the shop is already up and you can already buy it. So on tinystart.app, I have a frequently asked questions section. And I have addressed your request, Chris. Oh, okay. I'm actually looking at it right now. And it says, for now, TinyStart is focused on apps, links, and emojis, and does not include clipboard management features.

In my opinion, clipboard management is often better handled by a dedicated app. My favorite ones over the years have been Pastebot. And how do you pronounce that? Maccy? Maccy. Yeah. Maccy. Okay. I did a dramatic reading there. I hope I did you justice. Yes. Yeah, this is my answer for now. I think a lot of people are going to ask this is why I included this. This is why I said this on the air. Yeah, I know. You're doing well. The money's in the mail, right? Yeah. I mean, you got the app for free. You're paid like this.

I'm still going to buy the app. In fact, I'm going to do it right now. Oh, okay. Nice. Thank you. I appreciate you. No problem. Yeah. I think this would be out of scope for what TinyStart is meant to be. It's meant to be like a launcher that feels fast and that's focused on what's essential. And yes, emojis are essential. But I think going down that route where we add entire app categories to the launcher,

this may get overwhelming very quickly, at least for me. Maybe not for the users, but at least for me. This is my first Mac app that I tend to maintain and make sure it works well for people who buy it and run it. For now, that's why it says for now in the FAQ. I'm not going to add one because if I do add one right now, it will not have as many features as you would expect from a clipboard manager. It would be very basic, and I'm not sure that would fit well. I think that's fair as well.

We will talk about this later in the episode. We talked about this, I think, briefly when you started discussing it, that this is kind of like recently at 1Password increased their price. And they were like, look at all the value we added. Look at all these features we added. And you were like, I use none of those. Those bring me zero value. What I want is a simple password manager. And I think Raycast is a power user app that can just launch things for you, but it also

has a clipboard manager, has emojis, has extensions, has like a full third-party store. Like it's crazy. It's an everything app. It is free. So that's, I guess, a little different. But like, but TinyStart is just like, I will be your app launcher. I'll be your emoji picker. That's a nice bonus. But like, I will let you launch things quickly. If that's all you use these things for, this is a lighter weight, cuter version of Raycast. Yeah. You have a very different aesthetic from Raycast as well. The website is very delightful. I was like, oh, this is nice. Then I scroll down and the window escapes the normal body.

And I'm like, oh, she did it. That's cool. That's nice. I still have some CSS in me. Yeah. Yeah. Assuming that's not a mistake, but it's angled. No, it's not. Yes. But no, it's super cool. And I just wanted to say, as someone who has been on this Mac development journey for a little over a year as well, it has been very cool to see you go through a lot of the same feelings and, like, the excitement that I recognized.

From, like, once it starts to work, it's intoxicating. It's super, super cool. So, yeah. Huge congrats for getting this done and making something so cool for your not first Mac app, but first big public one. Yeah, thank you. And yes, if you want to know, I'm pricing this at five euros. So sorry, US people, it's in euros, but your payment method will still work.

Your payment method is compatible with euros. So, yeah, it's five euros and it's one time purchase, like, obviously, because I think if I stop maintaining this in one year or before then, it will still be working. This is something that you can get once and does not require necessarily that I keep going, keep working on it constantly. However, as a bonus, you get three updates. And that means I will keep updating this in the future,

including in the near future and probably later as well. And those updates you will get for free. Nice. Yeah. And no free trial. But if you're not satisfied. Five bucks. Like, five bucks is about. It's like, it's not going to have just this five bucks. It would also have meant that I needed to make a specific free trial version of the app. And it's annoying. And, yeah. Yeah. You were running into why my Mac apps are on the Mac App Store because I was like, oh, now I need to do licenses

and I need to do all this. This is complexity. And don't need to get into it. But this is one of the reasons why I actually have more respect for the App Store now than I did like two years ago. There is some value. It definitely brings. It handles a lot of things. Like I had to set up an update, app updates delivery. Fortunately, there's a very popular framework a lot of Mac developers use. That's called Sparkle. And I set that up. That was fairly easy, although I had to wrap my head around it for the first few hours because I did not get how this was supposed to work

because this is a pretty secure thing. So it needs you to set up keys so that your updates are always verified and there's no man-in-the-middle attacks when your app fetches updates. So it's very well made. But yeah, I had to set this up. So that was a whole rabbit hole just to get updates to work. So I can see the value in just getting it into the App Store. And the App Store handles updates for you. But yeah. Nice.

Nice. Well, congratulations. Thank you. I'm very excited for you. And I have already purchased it the proper way. Oh, thank you. Yes. Yeah. Well, I intend to pirate it. so. You do you. Find a way. I guess I'm a better person than Matt. These selfish developers, I tell you. Ask him for five dollars or five euros. I don't know. Here's freedom money. What is a euro actually right now? I don't even know.

One reason as well is that I picked to price it in euros and in US dollars is because that's fluctuating a lot. Everything's fluctuating. so I will keep it steady with my euros also makes it the European alternative for folks oh that's right that needs to be on the website let me pivot my entire marketing right now the European spotlight yes Raycast? no it doesn't matter alright anything else on that? that's it if you have ideas, feedback

Just write to me on Mastodon or over email. I will be happy to keep working on this. Okay. All right. Well, I have something new for the two of you. I have a brand new monitor. And would either of you like to take a guess at what monitor I have? Because it's like a computer monitor? Yeah, a computer monitor. Oh, wow. You went all in on something. Maybe. You know. Hmm. You know me. Should I guess or just read what it's written in our document? Yeah, I was hoping you wouldn't say it like that.

So I have dramatic reading. Yeah. Asus ROG, Republic of Gamers, Swift 32-inch 4K OLED. Look, guys, I couldn't do it. I've been waiting for a studio display update for years now. I have been like, look, mini LED OLED, like, give me something. And then the studio display update came out. And for the studio display XDR with nanotexture, it is $3,600 for a 27-inch monitor that is mini-LED.

And that is way too much money. I will get into it in a little bit, but you can buy three of these monitors that I bought for one of those XDR nanotexture displays. So, and the other thing is, my needs have changed. I need HDMI in, and I wanted OLED. I was like, mini LED is fine, but I really want OLED. And just about every single one of my monitors, displays, TVs in my house now is OLED. So I'm just like, I really wanted this. So let's get into some specifics of this monitor.

First off, it is a 240 hertz monitor. And 240 hertz on macOS is wild. I was about to say, like, this is an insane number. Matt, isn't yours 240 hertz? Yes, I believe. I'm looking at the specs now. I believe we have the same panel, just different manufacturers. But yeah. And the reason why I went with this one, John Voorhees told me about this one. And the reason why I went with this one is it was on sale. And I got it for a lot cheaper than what it normally is.

Can I just say? Can I just say, this is the most gamer thing I've ever seen. I'm going to get to it. I'm going to get to it. I have fixed all the game replays. Okay. I fixed the game replays. I have not Googled it yet. I'm worried. But let's get into the specifics of the monitor first. It is 240 hertz and a macOS that is wild. Like scrolling is smooth, but you know what's great? The final cut timeline because I have the feature enabled where the scroll bar goes automatically.

So when I'm editing comfort zone, I just let it play in like the scroll bar goes. And before on the studio display on 60 hertz, it was choppy. This is what it looks like. Hang on. I'm going to get to that. I'm going to get to that. I fixed it. I have fixed it. I have fixed it. So it doesn't look like that. I'm just saying mine looks a lot less gamery than this. Okay. All right. Let's just get to it now because these two aren't going to let it go. They're ruining my topic. It's ruined. Okay. So the monitor stand that comes with this thing is already like, no, it's already. No.

I bought a Visa monitor stand that mounts to my desk. I put a link to it in the show notes. It's the monitor arm. It's just a pole. So the monitors do it a pole dance. And it's just right on there. It's just a single pole. It goes straight up. And then I have my monitor stand right in front of it. So I don't even see the monitor pole. I don't even see it. But the monitor stand is gone. Now, this thing has a bunch of RGB lights on it. The monitor does. You can go into the settings and you can turn them all off. everything is turned off there is no rgb coming from this thing whatsoever there's a front facing

logo it is right it is covered it is covered up with black tape with black but that you could turn off the logo light you can turn off that logo light that's a light so okay but like it's because it's an rgb light like you could turn so there's rgb all over the place you can turn it all off and it's really easy it's not that big of a deal okay chris i'm looking at the amazon listing and And below the stand, it looks like it's projecting the logo onto the desk as well. Is that a thing the stand does? Yes.

Oh, you're right. It does. Yeah. Again, another thing that is turned off. You could turn all of this stuff off. But oh, boy, does this thing go hardcore. I'm a 360 no-scope, bro. Like, I'm fortnighting for my work. Yeah. No, that's what this monitor is. You could turn all of that off. Thank God. Because if you couldn't have turned that off, this monitor would have already been sent back already. Absolutely. But John told me, because I was talking to him about it, and he was like, yeah, you could turn all this off.

So this is the 32-inch version of the one Federico has. This is the same one John has. It is Dolby Vision OLED, and the panel is gorgeous. So, Matt, it sounds like you and I have the same panel. So yours is Dolby Vision. It's technically 31.5-inch monitor, but let's just round up to 32 inches. Yep. Having that extra space is great. Like, I really like that. I'm using the DisplayPort out into my CalDigit TS5 Plus hub.

I did a bunch of research. Basically, DisplayPort is the way to go. It's the best, highest quality while getting the highest refresh rate. It's the best way to go. And I can go right into the DisplayPort in the CalDigit hub, So that gets me an extra Thunderbolt spot back on my CalDigit hub. So that's kind of nice. OLED panel looks beautiful. It's great for editing photos and videos. But here's the thing I was really hung up on that really took a lot for me to get over. It is 4K at 32 inches.

Which is not Apple Retina PPI. Pixels per inch. And I can tell the difference from going from the studio display to this. I can see there is a difference. And it's going to pain me to say, it's really not that big of a deal. Chris, welcome to the resistance. Oh, there you go. So I set the, so I went into system settings display and I set the, you know, you have like the five options of what you monitor resolution. I set it to the middle one.

By default, it was set to the largest one and everything was massive. And I was like, oh my God, if I can't change this, I'm sending this thing back. It was, everything was massive. It felt like I had a 24-inch monitor on a 32-inch. It was way too big. I set it to the middle one, and it's perfect. It's like everything's the right macOS size. Okay. It's fine. I was curious. I use the one all the way on the left, which is the perfect pixel. Whoa. 1080p to 4K. And it makes it extremely crisp. So you use the one where everything's super big. Yeah. The UI's pretty big. Okay.

Interesting. So I landed on the one in the middle because I just couldn't go with all the UI stuff being that big. Yeah. No, I get that. I wonder if now I'm thinking about this. Can I go into accessibility and shrink everything, but then have everything that's technically the 4X resolution, so everything is more retina-ish? It seems like I had to play around with that. Hmm. Interesting. All right. I'll play around with that. But you know what? It's fine. It looks great. Like, everything is fine. It looks great. I'm very happy with this.

I've been editing videos on it. Like I said, the timeline is super smooth at 240 hertz. It's also beautiful quality for editing photos and videos. It's great for writing text, too, I guess. Yeah. That cursor moves. So smooth. Yeah. So smooth. So smooth. The blinking light of the insertion point, or the, yeah, whatever that's called. Beautiful. And then dark mode looks really good on this, too. Yeah, really good. Dark mode looks really good.

But I mentioned I needed HDMI. So I am moving my PS5 into here because I just, you know, sometimes Danielle's playing the Xbox or she's using the TV, and I want to play a game. So I'm going to move my PS5, which as of this morning just got way more valuable. I was literally wondering if I could sell my PS5 for the same price I paid for it. Because I bought it like a couple months after it came out. Why did it get more valuable? Oh, you didn't see Sony raise the price of the PS5 starting April 2nd. It's the digital.

That's one of my predictions for the year. The digital version is like 600 bucks now or something. Or like, I don't know. It's gone up. It was $400 originally, and it's gone up quite a bit. Yeah. No, I think U.S. and some markets. I don't know if it's globally. I know it was U.S. and some markets. But yeah, the PS5 Pro is like $850 now. It's $100 more. And what games actually support the PS5 Pro?

That's a whole thing. But anyways, I have the PS5 digital-only version, so I'm going to move it in here. I'm going to 3D print a little stand and mount it underneath my desk or maybe mount it to the wall, haven't decided. Because it's the digital only version so I don't have to worry about putting CDs in it, so cool. And you know, I I just want a little place where I can play games. I'm excited about this. The only thing I need to figure out is how to hook up my studio monitors, so that like my big KRK monitors, so

So I can use those when playing games. But those require an audio interface. So I don't think that'll work right. So I might just be using headphones, which isn't that big of a deal. Gotcha. Yeah, that's the one thing. I have my PS5 plugged into my monitor as well. But I have not figured out a good audio solution. So I use headphones when I... Yeah, I have a feeling I'm going to be a headphone. So you just plug headphones into the controller and just call it a day. Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to be doing. Do you guys need recommendations for earpads, for headphones? I have many of those.

For now, I will probably just use my podcasting headphones until I find something that I – because these are really comfortable. I really like these headphones. They're very comfy. But, yeah, and then, like I said, I got a monitor arm, so I'm not using the Gamer-y gamer stand. All the LED light stuff turns off. All the RGB turns off. So, yeah. But yeah, overall, I'm really happy with this monitor. I'm glad I got a 32-inch monitor. You just get a little bit more space with everything. Like I said, I did have to change the display stuff

to really feel like I actually got more display stuff, or space to work at. But yeah, pretty happy with it overall. Can you tell me again the numbers of the virtual resolution that you... I don't remember what it is off the top of my head, and I'm not sitting at it. but it's like 3,000 something by something, something, something. So the setting you set in the middle is that? It is the middle. So there's five options, and I pick literally the third one, the middle one. Okay. Yep. It's 3,008 by 1692. Yeah. Classic resolution. That classic resolution. It looks fine. It looks fine.

I'm also 35, so maybe it doesn't look fine and my eyes are aging, but who knows? Yeah. But yeah, I'm disappointed that the new studio display is as expensive as it is. And it's only a 27-inch monitor. And I couldn't justify spending that kind of money on that display. It looks gorgeous. All the reviews I've seen, everyone that I know that has one, I've talked to a few people that do have them. They love it. But I'm just like, I can't justify spending that kind of money on that monitor when there are other options.

and especially because I really need HDMI in. And Apple refused to acknowledge this device outside of the Apple ecosystem exists, even though they have computers, which I am sitting at one of them right now, has HDMI on it. This MacBook Pro has HDMI on it, but they don't make a monitor that I can plug into the side of that, into the HDMI port and plug into that, along with the Mac Studio and doesn't... No, I don't think the Mac Mini has HDMI. The Mac Studio has HDMI, but the Mac Mini doesn't.

yeah well i'm glad you made the jump i was a little nervous you were asking about this a few weeks ago and i was a little nervous to give it a full-throated recommendation because i was worried about you dropping from 5k to 4k and increasing the screen size so the pixel density was going to be even worse um so i'm glad that seems to be okay with you but like oled is great especially if you're not doing computer stuff entirely if you're watching videos and playing games on it that It helps. The HDR on this is really nice. It doesn't look like yours has it, but I would love to show you this actually one day.

On mine, you can hit a button on the back and it switches it to 1080p output, but the refresh rate goes to 480, 480 hertz. And that is, you've never seen anything like that. It looks great. That is wild. It's blurry as heck, but it is, it's a cool little thing. But yeah, I'm glad you seem to like it so far. This is great. Yeah, it's a good monitor. Like I said, I talked to John about it, and the reason why I went with this one over the one you had, Matt, was this one was on sale. That's why I got this one.

This one was on sale. I think literally it was on sale this morning, too, again, and it was like $900 on sale. It's like regularly like $1,200. But again, the regular price, you could buy three of those for the same price as the XDR Nano Texture one that I was looking at. Yep. Yeah. All right. Anything on this or should we get into the challenge? Challenge. All right. Challenge, I guess. Challenge. Matt, it was yours. What did you got for us? It was my challenge.

And my challenge was if you bought a brand new Mac and could only install three apps on it that didn't come pre-installed, what would you do? This is pretty tight. You have to make some hard choices if you do this. So I went for efficiency. I went for the most bang for your buck. Now, Nelian, I didn't know you were going to announce your app today. So my first app is Raycast. Treason. I think, okay, I'm going to give two versions of this.

You're allowed to say Raycast. I chose Raycast because app launcher, that's fast. Emoji picker, that's fast. And clipboard manager, that's good. So it gives me those three core things that I literally cannot use a Mac without. The second app is MimeStream because I cannot live with Apple Mail and I cannot do my email from the Gmail web interface. I need an app to do it. You should try having an IMAP address. I left that life behind. And then there's CleanShot.

I do so many screenshots, so many screen recordings. I tried, I recently got an upgraded, I upgraded my work Mac. I got a new Mac after five years and I tried not using CleanShot and I wanted to scream. So I need a really nice screenshot app. I use it so often and Apple's is just not good enough for me. So CleanShot would be my third app. I need to buy another license, a clean shot, because I only have one, and I need one for the MacBook Neo now, because I'm running into the same thing.

I genuinely just did that as well. I had to get a third license, because I needed the Neo as well. Yeah. Even though I do videos for those guys. Anyway. Wow. I would be emailing them. I didn't ask. I didn't ask. Wow. It's ethics and all that stuff. Calling out. Anyway. If I had Tiny launch. Wow. Are you going to take this, Neelion? My brain broke. Wow. He already gave the money for it. If I swapped in TinyStart for Raycast,

I think my two apps would be CleanShot and Pastebot. Yeah, you need to keep on my email. Yeah. I literally cannot use a computer. I mean, you could always use the spotlight clipboard manager. Don't punish me. I will need to talk about this. We don't have time today. We don't have time today. I have fun. We're going to keep it tight. Okay. So that's it for me. I think that would get me. I can't do app development. I don't know what code editor I'm using at this point. Text edit? Jesus. Why do you hate yourself? I'd have problems.

But that's what I could do, like, other stuff. There's VS Code in the browser. There you go. There are ways. Yeah. All right. Chris, what would you do? I'm really curious about yours. So I did two lists just because there's the realistic one where I have to be able to get my work done. So there's Final Cut, Pixelmator Pro, and Hush. That's pretty boring. But, like, I need those to get my work done. And Hush makes me really nervous because it hasn't been updated in two years

and the developer has moved on to extensions. And Matt Birchler refuses to make Hush for the iPad and Hush for the Mac. Yeah, I know. Neely on. Now my new Mac developer. Hush for the iPad when? I have no idea where to begin to do this. Cool. So I'm going to give you like what? A month? You got this? Like a month? Okay. Okay. But I created another list in this hypothetical situation where somehow the Apple Creator Studio is included. I know that's not the prompt. I just want it for the sake of discussion and for the sake of our audience, I wanted to give a more interesting answer.

Hush, Claude, Notion. Okay. Because I think I could do all, because Notion, I could do all of my business management. And I think I could do writing in Notion. And the situation where non-creator studio isn't included, I guess I'm writing in Notes. That sucks. So I wonder, both you and Matt, you would use Safari as your web browser? Yeah, I would use Safari. I mean, I already use Safari. I already use Safari. It's fine. It's great.

I mean, I can't record my podcast with you guys anymore because Riverside doesn't support it. Yeah, the podcast is over if we do this. I got to quit the podcast. The technology does not exist for us to podcast like this anymore. I can't podcast, but, you know, whatever. I mean, technically with Matt's setup, he can't podcast either. So, you know. Yeah. Interesting. But yeah, that's kind of like my two situations there where, you know, one where the Apple Creator Studio is included and one where it's not.

But yeah, unfortunately, I have to have third-party apps in order to get paid. Yeah. Not unfortunate. It's great. but I was wondering the workaround because when you're buying a new Mac, you can like include creator, the creator studio. I was wondering if it came like pre-installed, but probably not. It's probably just like, no. So I think they've changed that now that the creator studio is out. I think you just buy a license for it and you still have to go and download it. But there was a time where it did come pre-installed back in the day when like, I think like, I don't remember,

but like, I think I believe there was a time where it did come pre, like you could get like final cut and logic pre-installed. Okay. Okay. Nice. Nelian, how did you approach this challenge? Easy. Vivaldi. First choice. I'm a shock. So, first thing I thought with this prompt is I need a web browser that's good. Because when you got a web browser that's good, you got a working computer. I mean, that's a good point.

That is a good point. Yeah. You can do everything. You just mentioned, Matt, what text editor you would use. You have some on the web. You can find. And Vivaldi, I'm sure, has a... Visual Studio Code is in the web. Yeah, that's right. And there are many other options as well. And also, like, video calls. I would still be on the podcast. So, I guess, in this alternate universe, I am alone on this show.

But we'll make do, I guess. I'll just promote my app every episode there you go so Vivaldi is great have you heard of Vivaldi? it's amazing my second app is Swinsian which is my music player no surprise there it has reached this point I don't think I can live without this I need my Swinsian on my Mac and the third one

I was struggling to find which one to include because I was like that's 99.99% of my mic already music and browser what else do I need like looking at my doc everything can be in the browser I just use the apps because they exist but like this I'm seeing like discord slack that can be in the browser mime stream so that's my email I agree with you Matt that is the best email app but I can live with Gmail in the browser. So that's fine. Calendar, that can be in the browser as well. Like, even podcasts. So anyway.

So my third pick is just a bonus. It's an extra. It's the icing on the top. It's ivory. Mastodon client, because I'm a lone IRL. I don't have friends. You can see, if you're looking at the video version, there's nobody behind me. Like, I have no friends. Like, no one likes me. Technically, nobody's behind him. Yeah, but... Yeah, but... If there's someone behind me, I got nobody right away, because I'm about to be murdered. But my walls are more white and plain, so I'm more alone than you. So, yeah. So I need my online friends.

It's all I need to say. Okay. Okay. I'm kind of surprised none of us said Xcode, and then we can just build all of our own apps. I was literally just having that thought. I was like, why wouldn't I just play Xcode as mine, and then I can just make all the apps that I want. It'll take me a while to get up and running, but give me enough time. And neither Niléane or Matt picked any of their own apps. Listen. I would just like to point that out. That's true. Mine are nice to haves. Same. I'm not saying TinyStart is essential. I'm just saying it focuses on this.

What are you going to launch? Just put them in the dock. That's true. You can have your entire computer in the dock. That's true. On the desktop, you max out the icon size in Finder, and you have three big icons on the desktop. All right. Well, that was interesting results. Kind of basically what I expected from Neely on. I think we should. Vivaldi, I knew it was going to be your number one. Yeah. I think maybe at some point we should do another thought experiment like this where we stay in the same universe and expand on that. So like we commit to this and we have three more,

but just three iPhone apps. I don't know. And just keep limiting our lives to three of everything. Oh my goodness. Interesting. Okay. But that's not my new challenge, by the way. Okay. What is your new challenge? This is your challenge. So I'm picking the new challenge for next week. And the new challenge is we will back up our entire photos library. Okay. and the best method wins. Okay.

I've heard of this kind of stuff. So, Matt, backup is when you take your data and make a copy of it onto separate storage. Oh, okay. Usually into a different location or definitely a different device at the bare minimum. Yes. Okay. And Chris, you already have something set up for this, right? You backup your photo? I do, I do, but I can do something different. Exactly. I was about to say something new. I will do something different. Yeah. And in my regard, I don't like, it's just in iCloud. And I have no idea what I'm going to do.

But hopefully I will find apps. I don't know. I came across recently some apps that would do this. I have no idea what they're worth. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to try some of them out. Okay. All right. Interesting. Okay. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of the show question. and my question for the two of you is what is your dream job today? No need to worry about qualifications, resources, or education. We're living in a fantasy world. You can do anything you want to be. What do you want to be? Yeah, president of the French Republic. Okay, I knew you were going to say that. I mean, obviously.

I knew what you were going to say. Give me a job where I can change the world. I will take it. I mean, I would take emperor of the world, but that might be a little unrealistic. So if I can't have that, then a race car driver. Specifically, probably in the GT3 Cup, so I could drive a Mustang in a race car. You know? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You guys thought bigger than me. I was just going to say a solo developer who can work full time and be comfortable. Oh, wow. Yeah. Sure, that works. But I don't need fame and power. It's fine. The fast cars would be nice.

That would be fun. Fast cars. Yeah. I don't want the fame and all the power either. I just wanted to say it. I mean, clearly you want the power. You clearly want the power. That's right. I want the power. The fame, I don't care. I want the power. You're right. Yes. Okay. Okay. You more want to be like a behind-the-scenes puppet master. No. No, no. I want to be. Because then you don't have the fame, but you have the power. You don't understand. I want to be the master of the puppet masters. Okay. Okay. Yes. All right. Okay.

Well, that brings us to the end of the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you to MacStories for having us. We are a MacStories podcast. Be sure to go check out all the other writings and shows and stuff on the channel or on the website. Sorry, YouTube brain. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great day. Bye-bye. And don't forget to try out Vivaldi for iOS with the double-decker tabs. Why didn't you promote your own app? And TinyStart. All right. Use TinyStart, people. I have an app as well.