Welcome back to Clockwise, the podcast where we've always got time for you. My name is Dan Moore, and I'm joined across the internet by my good friend, my pal, the one and only Micah Sargent. How are you doing today, Micah? I am doing well, Dan. Thank you for asking. How are you? I'm great. Why are we speaking like William Shatner?
It just felt right. Okay, it felt right. That makes sense. You know why we're speaking like William Shatner? I know why it is. It's because we have two fantastic guests this weekend. To my left, one of them is... Star Trek maven and software visionary himself. Guy English, welcome back to the show, Guy. Yours is the most human.
That's a deep cut from Star Trek 2. Yeah, I got it, I got it. I heard you are recognized. Game, recognize, game. I have a close friend who's a Jeopardy champion on the back of answering Star Trek trivia, so, you know. That guy sounds good. That guy, I doff my hat. I have to use that. To my left, podcaster, fiber, artist, And just my good pal, it's Aline Sims. How you doing, Aline?
I'm okay, how are you? Peachy Keen, thanks for asking. Wonderful. Alright, let me kick things off of the four tech topics. I am curious, is there a feature in, you know... iOS, macOS, pretty much any product you use that you feel like man, I am the only person who uses this and or likes this feature. Or conversely, is there a feature that everybody else uses that you are like, I do not understand why people use that. Guy, why don't you kick this off?
The mission control, like where you use your fingers and you manipulate windows. I feel like I do that way more often than most people do. I drag and drop things often and it is amenable to that. One of the things I really love is doing the drag-and-drop sort of dance, and I think that new users don't necessarily do that, and by using the mission control, just so you can see all your windows and all of that.
I feel is sort of an underappreciated feature. And I feel like it's one of the reasons why... People keep reinventing the way to window. Like, we've had answers to this, and they just keep answering it over and over and over, and I feel like that's a little bit of a loss if only people would... sort of pick up the existing window management and
Not just window management in terms of placement, but window management in terms of navigation that's already available in the system. I think for me, it's not that... Everybody else who is versed in technology and uses it the way that we do and talks about it regularly, they probably do this. But among the people that I am around most often... I find that none of them are airdroppers and I'm a big airdropper. So I love to use that tool too.
share lots of photos really quickly, or I mean, even send text between devices and files. And I find that everybody else is like, I'll email this to myself. I'll Slack it to myself. I will do this. I will do that. First of all, with Slack, I'm always giving it side-eye going, are you compressing every file that I upload to your service before I actually get it to you? And so, yeah, for me, AirDrop is that feature that I feel like...
I use, again, with people that I'm around regularly in person that everybody else is just not using. And I'm going, but why? It's so nice. It's so easy. Aline, what about you? I do. I, it used to be called Siri search on the phone. So I don't launch apps by tapping on their icon. Like I don't navigate to the screen they're on and tap on it and whatever.
I launch apps by swiping down and searching for it. Like even the things that are on my first screen, that's how I launch them. And I think that I do that more than most people do. I really lean on that feature a lot. But I'm trying to touch technology less and less and less these days. And so I feel like I'm getting more and more basic as time goes on because I'm just like, I don't use my computer as much as I used to. I don't use my phone as much as I used to. So I just... I don't know.
I thought of a few, but the one that came to mind for me, because I get a lot of puzzle questions about it, is tab groups in Safari. That's a thing I use, and it's kind of critical for me for a few different things. I think mainly it comes up for me in podcasts because I have a few shows like this one where it's like, I need the same tabs open every week. And so I have my little clockwise tab group and I toggle over to that and it loads up our show document and the relay CMS and our ad reads.
And that's great. And then I just, when I'm done with it, I just close the window and I know those things are all still there and I won't have to reopen them.
Similarly, when I'm doing some of the other shows I have, or playing D&D or stuff like that, I just have tab groups for them. And I've made way more tab groups than I probably use regularly because sometimes I'm like, oh, I have a bunch of... like tabs open right now and i want to make sure i capture these so you know i have ones where i do like book research or something and so i just throw all those in and sometimes i forget to look at it again i've got like 20 tab groups i swear um
And I just, I don't know, I like that feature a lot. It occasionally annoys me because it has some weird quirks to it, but... I find it invaluable for just managing my web browsing habit. So there's mine. Thank you all, though, for your answers. Let's go to our second topic, which comes from Guy. Once upon a time. Apple and the Mac were built upon indie Mac apps. What are your favorite independent Mac apps?
I have, there's Mike, and there's also another new one called Mail Maven by my pal, Scott Morrison, who helped me run the Singleton Conference, which is a whole new take on email, an independent email client, if you can believe that. in this economy. What small Mac apps do you find invaluable? Because I feel like that is a cornerstone of our small Apple developer-centric culture. that I feel has been overlooked in the past 10 years.
I love this question. I guess it's not as small as it used to be, but... To this day, it is still the first third-party app. Well, okay. The second third-party app that gets put on my Mac, which is TextExpander. I would be nowhere without TextExpander. I use it literally every day for so many things, and I use it for some wild things at times that you wouldn't necessarily expect.
It saves me so much time on naming folders, on sending emails, on doing all sorts of stuff. And it's just kind of magical what you can do with it. I have used it for so long, and one of my favorite moments, I had a TextExpander shirt on, and I was with my family. and my mom and my grandma were in the living room, and I walked in, and I'm wearing my shirt and looking around, and my grandma goes, can I ask you a question? I was like, yeah, of course. She said, what's Tex Tex Pander?
And I said, oh, you mean text expander? And then I had the fun moment of having to try to explain exactly what. text expander did but now in my head i call it text expander and that's also delightful but yeah it's a delightful bit of software and it's one of those things that seems it seems like guy you're kind of talking about to where
It's these tools that if people give them a go, they're going to be like, I didn't even know that I needed that or that I could do that. And look what can happen with the magic of indie software. Oh, I love it. Love it. Yeah, that's me. That's me. What about you, Elaine? Oh, I have a couple that I really have leaned on lately. I've been teaching some basic web development classes.
Just basic HTML and CSS. And to grade my students' work, I've really leaned on Kaleidoscope a lot. So Kaleidoscope... is an app where it allows you to take two files and see what the differences in the files are. So I could take the solution file and the students file and compare them and see how similar or dissimilar they were. And that really helped with grading a lot. And I also used Coderunner a ton, which is a...
I love CodeRunner Text Editor for HTML and CSS. I just, I don't know. It's amazing, and I loved it. But if I'm just... writing like for my blog where I write approximately one post every five years I really like BBEdit for just like Markdown. So I don't know. I mostly use indie apps on Mac, iPad. ios and i i hardly ever use stock apps hard like
You know, I use the home app. I use, like, wallet. I use those kinds of things, but for anything where I don't want or need, like... system integration or like syncing across the ecosystem i go indie before i do anything else so i love this question Yeah, me too. I mean, I think I also came up in an era where IndyMac apps were one of the big draws to the platform. And, you know, I've been lucky enough to know a lot of developers of these apps and use a lot of these apps over the years.
The ones that I think I would call out specifically, I mean, we spent an entire, we were very lucky to get sponsored recently by our friends at Bare Bones. I got to extol my love of BBEdit, which we also talked about, I think, on our Clockwise Unwound episode last week, which is just, it's great. It's fantastic. It's been around forever. But in addition to that, I'd add...
With apologies to some people who might be on this show, I've never been a Photoshop user. I never learned. For me, when it first started... Do it. It was unaffordable, right? I couldn't afford Photoshop as a teenager.
And even later on when I was starting out working, you know, I couldn't afford it. But then, yeah, our pal Gus Mueller came along with a very affordable image editor called Acorn, which is not only like... inexpensive but is incredibly powerful i have done some really cool stuff in acorn and i am not a graphics person but like i've designed book covers in acorn i've made all sorts of like graphics and promo things and all that and
I'm just, I'm always like, and I still think I probably only scratched the surface of what is possible. And like the fact that Gus has basically done that on his own. is mind-blowing. It is such an impressive software. Yeah, so I throw in, and then I throw in, obviously, Panix Transmit is a fantastic app that I use all the time. Our friend Daniel Jackett's MarsEdit, I still use that on the regular for posting to blogs. There's just too many to name all of them, but it's such a great ecosystem.
It is the stuff that makes me the most excited about using, you know, software and technology is just these like clever little apps that people come up with. And I say little, not to be demeaning, but like. things like they've come up with on their own and they're clearly passionate about. Otherwise, why would you do them? So I've put a bike and mail maven on my list of things to check out. Thank you for that guy. Any last words? Wrap us up.
Check out Acorn. It's great. I love it. I happen to work on Photoshop now, so I'm sure somebody... up the chain is going to be like, what the hell are you doing? Try your corn. It's amazing. I have actually contributed a little bit of code in that. Gus is an amazing person and it is an amazing product. And for all of these apps, I encourage you to check them out. What the Mac is is not just a way to launch a web browser and do webby stuff. You can do that.
The goldmine is in the independent software that you can go and buy and try, not just through the App Store, but through everything else. It's how... We all got here, and it's why the platform has become such a...
Alright, two topics down, two topics left to go, which of course means it is halftime here at Clockwise, and this week's episode is brought to you by Grist. Does your team deal with a load-bearing spreadsheet, one that still technically works, but threatens to collapse, or maybe does collapse, despite being incredibly important? Or maybe one that gets mangled when it's edited by a whole team because everybody has their own unique approach.
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It gives you the benefits of a proper database without losing the interface you and your coworkers know and love. People who listen to Clockwise know we run this entire show on a load-bearing Google spreadsheet. In fact, we've had to remake that Google spreadsheet several times because after a while... it gets incredibly unwieldy because it has hundreds of tabs in it from all of our shows.
So I'm all too familiar with this idea. And, you know, as Mike and I have discussed in the past, maybe we should be doing something that's not a spreadsheet that could collapse at any time. But, you know. We then look at our rickety spreadsheet and think, well, it hasn't collapsed yet. That's probably the wrong approach. You don't want to run your business on that approach, but we're a little piddling podcast so we can get away with it.
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I'm just curious. Do you own a robot vacuum? If so, do you like it and use it? If you don't, do you have any interest in owning one? Is there something specific that keeps you from owning one?
All the questions about robotic vacuums. Elaine, we'll start with you. Yeah, we fell down the robot vacuum rabbit hole, like, six months ago, and we ended up getting a Eufy model, I think, between, like... two humans who have a lot of hair and two cats who are basically hair there's a there are a lot of like tumbleweeds in the house and so um when we run that it definitely helped The issue is we forget to run it. We don't like to automate it because our schedules are kind of erotic.
And so it's like we don't have a set time every day or every few days or once a week or whatever when it runs. And so I've got to go through with a vacuum here pretty soon and go through the house before we can run it again. which is disappointing. Um, but hair, so I have long hair and this is supposed to have like a cutting tool that like cleans the beater bar and gets
you know, the lean tangled hair out and it's okay. It's not great. The other thing is it has, it's a model that has a mop too, which is super nice. for... I didn't think we'd use the mop at all. But it's really, really nice for just like little maintenance, you know, cleanup. It's not good at deep cleaning. I wouldn't expect it to be. But I'm surprised by how much we like it for its mopping capability, too.
Um, you know, I don't love vacuuming. It's loud. Um, it just is not my favorite thing. So having something that'll kind of go around the house and is quieter than our like stick vacuum is really nice. I'm tempted by the robot vacuum. I think the thing that mainly keeps me away from it is, well, there's a couple things. One, my house is just, it feels weird, like it's a mix of like carpets and hardwood and tile and...
I just don't know if a robot vacuum is the right solution for that. So I worry about that aspect of it. We have a two-floor house. Do I have to get a second vacuum for the upstairs? Do I only get a vacuum for the upstairs? The upstairs is often very cluttered and full of stuff. That's the other problem. That's the main problem is I have a small child. And part one of that is small child leaves things. On the floor. All the time.
that are not going to interact well with the vacuum. Part two is small child will definitely try to ride the vacuum. That's probably the biggest challenge. So I, at this point, I think maybe as much as I'd like a robot vacuum, it's not my future immediately. I will say I once had a, I think it was maybe a first gen, one of the iRobot mop robots.
way back when a friend gave it to me because they didn't have a use for it anymore. And I ran it once and it wedged itself under a cabinet and just poured water all over the floor. I was like, well, I'm still smarter than a robot. So I got that going for me. I haven't tried it since then. That was probably a decade ago, but I haven't tried it since then. So I love the idea because I do not mop my floor as much as I probably should. And that would definitely help. But I'm just way too wary of.
robots being robots guy what about you years and years ago my mom and my dad bought me I think it was a Samsung vacuum robot when I was still living in Montreal. So it's a different apartment than I am now. That thing would basically just drive itself under the couch and get stuck there and just keep hitting the wall until the batteries died. And then I would have to fish it out from under the couch.
I'm not a firm believer in what vacuums just from that experience. They're not really my jam. I feel like... Cleaning is something I should be doing. I wasn't raised Catholic, but I am kind of Catholic, I guess, as much as you can be. And that self-flagellation of you should do your chores kind of thing. It kind of sits with me. On the other hand, I'm a lapsed Catholic, so I don't clean as much as I should. I like the idea of robot vacuums. They just haven't worked for me.
And until it's like a Soong-type Data walking around and playing cards with me, I think I will pick up a habit of cleaning myself because I think that that will be the best for me and everybody around. I... Do have a robo vac. I wish that it could be on a schedule because I think then it would run more often.
But because of dogs and our schedules and whatever might be going on, yeah, there's still that issue of You do have to kind of tidy up before the thing can run because it doesn't have the smarts of a human being and therefore might pull up a dog toy or a sock or something. And I will admit, these tools have gotten better over time. They have AI smarts built in that in some cases make them better at detecting when they should go around things. The biggest feature that has been helpful for me...
has been virtual barrier implementation. And so I could say, Don't go here and don't go here and don't go here. And by the way, every time you go here, you run into my dog's water bowl spilling water on the floor, which then causes you to spread water in places where it's not supposed to be. But also, like you, Aline, I do like the mopping feature. I was surprised at how much I ended up liking that. Mine has like the...
auto-empty, auto-dry, auto-this, auto-that, and so it all kind of takes care of itself. And while I love to vacuum, and we've got a great vacuum for vacuuming, I don't love to mop. And so having it do that every once in a while has been very nice. And it's aware of whenever there's a carpet, and so it picks up the mop and doesn't mop over the carpet, which is cool. However, my significant other... If there was ever a magnet for robot vacuums, he is it. and
If there was also ever a person who was more enraged by, he's like gotten misophonia, but for robot vacuums. And so the thing seems to follow him around everywhere and run into him no matter where he is at any time. I'm not even joking. Sometimes he'll be in another room and the thing seems to stop what it's doing and go in the other room after him and he's like, get this thing away from me! Yeah, so we also have to sort of plan around that as well.
Thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from Aline. Alright, well, I have been down in the dumps lately, so I am wondering, in order to cheer us all up, Have you recently acquired any new technology that has made your life better? What is it and how has your life improved? And to demonstrate how completely unserious I am with this question, we recently got a new car. I live in the desert. New car has a ventilated seat.
I'm in love. I'm just absolutely in love with ventilated seats. It's now a requirement for every vehicle I ever own. I'll pick. and one of them stretching the bounds of recency, but most recently, I think I mentioned before, we added solar panels onto our house. which has improved a few things. One, we are compensating for some of our energy use now, which is great.
We have not yet set up our net metering where we will sell our energy back to the electricity company, but I'm looking forward to that. Um, but the other thing, which is also sort of environmental related is last year, I believe I've been before that we got an e-bike. That is great. It's, it's such a, like we live in the city and we do have a car, but we don't.
You know, we don't tend to drive that many places. And so the e-bike lets my wife, who has a very short commute, she can take that and she can drop off our kid at daycare, which is really close to our work, which is great. And then I've used it to run to the grocery store because it's really like capacious as a cargo bike. So you can fill a lot of stuff in there.
And I just use it to, you know, bum around town in nicer weather. It's just really, it's great to have that option because there are some places where it's like, well, I can take my regular bike and that's fine. But like, oh, if I go take the e-bike, it makes it just like a little bit easier.
Some of those, like, in your show, like, oh, God, I'll be so tired biking up that hill or whatever. It's like, no, it'll be fine. You can just zip over there. You don't need to bring the car. You don't need to worry about parking. You don't have to worry about traffic. All of those things are great, honestly. My only thing that makes me sad about the e-bike is that it is not really usable year-round where we are because of the winters.
But like, you know, nine months, 10 months out of the year, it's pretty great. So there you go. Guy, what about you? Oh, I don't really have an answer to this. I think the last thing that could be even at a stretch described as technology that I bought that improved my life. was a whetstone to sharpen my knives. That's good. Yeah, this is caveman level technology, but like, I had one of those knife sharpeners that you can pull.
a knife through and sharpen it and finally just bought a whetstone and learned to sort of do it myself. I don't know. I have been a little remiss in picking up technology recently. There's just nothing that's been inspiring me. particularly recently. So I feel like I don't really have a great answer to this question other than a whetstone and learning to sharpen your knives. If you love cooking and you've got a nice knife, it feels good.
To do. It's one of those aspects of taking care of something and literally honing it that makes you feel attached to the objects in your life that you use all the time. So when we moved to Oregon a little under a year ago, one of the first things we needed to do was go and get a lawnmower. And we went to the store and it was literally at the same time that Oregon's new regulation, I think it's just Portland's new regulation came into place that said, By the way, no more gas mowers. And so...
I looked online, the model, because I didn't know about this. And so I looked online, the model was in stock. I went there and it was not in stock. And I was like, what's going on? And there were only electric motors. So anyway, we ended up getting an electric lawnmower that is wonderful. And recently I went back to the same brand and got an electric weed eater or...
Edge, not hedge, but edge trimmer. There are different names that people call it around the U.S. and elsewhere. And an electric leaf blower. I am living my best life with my leaf blower and my trimmer. And I'm so excited about it. I love them both. They're my children. I have the batteries charged. I go outside. I blow that grass away. I love mowing the lawn.
Even though I'm severely allergic to grass, I have to put on so much stuff just to feel okay. But I feel great mowing the lawn, blowing stuff away. I've got my lawn looking beautiful. And then I recently... also went and I'm waiting for it to arrive. It doesn't come until the end of the month. An electric power washer. Oh yeah. You're in your dad era. I am in my dad era. I didn't want to come out here with all your stuff because my house really could use a little TLC.
Gladly. I will. I love it. If they let me bring it on a plane, I will. So yeah, that's mine. Elaine, round us out. the other delightful thing about uh the car we bought ventilated seats definitely the top second We named it Gluten-Free Avocado Toast because it is green and because we are millennials and we don't own a house, but we own a Rivian, which is not an inexpensive vehicle.
of our money went to gluten-free avocado toast and it just makes me so happy every time we get in the car and we've updated it and it's like here's what's new with gluten-free avocado toast no no It just makes me laugh. That's wonderful. All right, that's four topics down and just enough time for a bonus topic, which I'm going to remind you is sponsored this week by Clockwise Swag, which you can get by going to clockwise.social where we've got t-shirts, hats, mugs, tote bags.
everything you possibly want and it helps support the show and keep the zoom bill paid which we really appreciate it All right. Here's my bonus question for you. What is your favorite summer blockbuster? You know, it could be your past. It could be what is your summer blockbuster, your most anticipating? Yeah, I don't care. Just whatever you feel like. Summer blockbusters. Guy? Are you kidding? Star Wars. That's it. I'm not even going to entertain any other answers.
Do you have another bonus question? That's close. Wow. I choose The Dark Knight. I love that film. I went and saw it in theaters with some really good friends, and it brings back wonderful memories of going super late at night and then going out and having breakfast afterward. And so, yeah, The Dark Knight is my choice. Elaine, what about you? Jurassic Park because
I can remember seeing it in the theater. My grandmother went and saw it more than once, and she never went to the movies at all. So it's got to be Jurassic Park. Those are all great answers. I mean, the guy is correct for all time, but I will say, weirdly enough, the summer blockbuster that I feel like... I really look forward to is Mission Impossible movies. Those are just fun. They're just fun. They're dumb. I enjoy them for the spectacle. I think they kind of live up to the perfect.
encapsulation of what a summer blockbuster is for me. Uh, so I'm looking forward to maybe getting a chance to go to the movie theater and see the one that comes out this year. Uh, but I do enjoy many of the installments of that franchise. It just, it feels like summer to me. So there you go. Uh, all right.
Hey, if you want to get ad-free episodes of Clockwise with a brand new feature that we're debuting for our members called Clockwise Unwound, which is a short weekly topic after the main show wraps up, You can support the show by going to relay.fm slash clockwise and signing up for $7 per month or $7 a year.
Like I said, with the Clockwise Swag, it helps us pay our Zoom bill, and that's great. And plus, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling for supporting the show. So if you want to hear Mike and I talk about a digital topic after the show and get ad-free episodes, all that great stuff, Go to relay.fm slash clockwise and sign up. We appreciate it.
And with that, we have reached the end of this week's episode. And all that remains is to thank our fantastic guest, Guy English. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure every time. And Aline Sims, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for asking me back. And Micah, we will be back next week. But until then, we remind everyone out there listening, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.