642: A Hierarchy in My Head

It's time for episode six hundred and forty two of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, february fourth, two thousand twenty six. Clockwise four people, four tech topics, thirty minutes. To Clockwise, the Tech Podcast, where every episode is a love letter to your commute time. I am one of your hosts, Mike A Sargent, and I am joined across Internet, and my good pal, my dear friend, it is, of course, Dan the Man.

Morin. How you doing, Dan? I'm doing well, Micah. The commute from the bedroom to the office is uh you know About four or five seconds. So I I don't have a lot of time to listen to podcasts on my commute, unfortunately. It would take me a year to get through just an episode of clockwise, I think. I yeah, I would imagine that w yeah, that would take you a while. Yeah. And there's a lot more than a year's w okay. Anyway. While we do those calculations.

Why don't we introduce our wonderful guests to my left, Chief Podcaster at Podfeet.com. It's the delightful Allison Sheridan. Welcome back to the show, Allison. Well, aren't you delightful to say so, Micah? Happy to be here. And to my left it's a delightful YouTuber, the delightful Christopher Lolly. Welcome back, Chris.

Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I like our uh uh w everybody's feeling good today. I guess so. It's uh I am delighted to kick things off. Uh you know how this works. Four topics, thirty minutes. Mine for you is this uh Stardew Valley.

The game just turned ten. It is probably one of the most famous uh quote unquote cozy games. And I was just curious, have you played it or any other cozy games? And how do you feel about them? Uh Alison, we'll start with you. Well, I guess my cozy game is taking terms I've never heard of, like Stardew Valley and asking Perplexity T to tell me what it is.

No, it it it sounds like a lovely game, but I don't really play games. Literally the only games I play are those written by Lex Friedman at Lex.games to do an advantage. Well you didn't pay for this. I can't No, I like games like collec uh collections, lexicogs and buy a vowel, but I I probably play games like that once a month or every other month. So I'm I'm sorry, I'll sit on the sidelines and hear how how lovely these games are.

Wow. Okay. Uh I am not a cozy game player really. I have in the past, I mean, during the pandemic, like everybody else. I uh got into some Animal Crossing for a while there. But I think I get too antsy with cozy games because a lot of times the sort of the just the gameplay loop makes me like eventually sort of

come out of it and be like, Oh my god, what am I doing? Just like f feeding all these weird animals and and just having inane conversations and w how when does it end? Uh and I think that's one of the things I struggle with is feeling like I just get stuck in a loop of doing those. Tasks and it's like I got plenty of tasks I can do in the real world. So I tend to be more of a either a word game, you know, puzzle game player.

or more of a like uh triple A narrative game player where it's like, okay, there's a storyline that I'm following and it's taking me through the the beats of that storyline The cozy games for me just feel a little too time wasty and I I struggle with that aspect. But not to you know, again, everybody has things they like and and wants to do those things. It's just not for me. What about you, Chris?

Uh I am a big cozy gamer. I I love playing some cozy games. Stardew Valley never quite clicked with me like Animal Crossing clicked for me. Uh I love Animal Crossing because of It's it's real time. The big difference between Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing is if it is 8 a.m. in your world, it is 8 a.m. in Animal Crossing World. Whereas Stardew Valley

There is a uh time limit on your day and you can only do so much in a day. And that always kind of gave me a little bit of anxiety because I'm like, Oh, I need to do all this stuff and I'm I'm a completionist. Like, if I'm sitting down to play a game and I start a game and it I'm gonna beat that game. I like I I can't like put a game down and not beat it. Like I have to beat games. So

Animal Crossing for me has always been that perfect like I'ma sit down and watch some TV, I can play it on the Switch handheld, and then even back in the day, like I was big into Animal Crossing with the original one on the GameCube. I put hundreds of hours into that game. Uh yeah, big, big cozy gamer. Highly recommended if you just like you need something to keep your hands busy while you got something else going on in the background. It's perfect for that.

Uh thank you all for your answers on that. I have of course played uh Stardew Valley. I like it. It it's I think Dan and I fall in the same boat a little bit where I don't know, over time I'm like, wow, that was a lot of time I spent Doing the same thing exactly over and over again. I don't think I'm a fan of the cozy games where

part of the goal is to learn the favorite item of each of the people. And you have to do that by gifting them multiple items until you find the one they respond to. But that's a very popular sort of thing between uh multiple games and multiple cozy games. And so I tend to kind of go, uh, not for me as far as that goes. Uh uh regardless, I

have had some fun playing Stardew Valley, but I think more importantly it opened me up to other possible cozy games where it just was a matter of dialing in exactly what worked for me. So Um, unfortunately that's also not Animal Crossing. Uh that I I I love the joy that people get out of that game and I'm also sometimes jealous of the joy or envious of the joy that people get out of that game. But yeah, I uh it's that one's not quite for me either.

Uh in any case, thank you. And let's move along to our next topic, which comes from Allison. Well, you know, I don't want to get political, but I I'm I'm going there, guys. I'm going there. List view or column view? Support your position. Column view? Get out of here. Uh no, I I look, I I've been using Mac OS well, I've been using Mac OS basically my entire life, but I've been using Mac OS ten since the earliest public betas for twenty twenty five years now. Um

And I like column view just fine. This was obviously a thing that that Apple basically took when they took uh next step and turned it into Mac OS X in some parts. But I think my frustration with column view is always that I don't I don't need the hierarchy as much as I need the metadata. Uh for me, list view

with having, you know, the ability to add columns to like, okay, give me the dates. Like I'm I'm always sorting or, you know, figuring out something about like what are the file sizes or what have you and I find I need that extra data and column view just doesn't make that easy enough at a glance. And drilling down through the hierarchies of the folders just isn't beneficial enough. Plus

all those issues which I think have been documented recently, like dealing with column widths to fit file names and not having them truncated. Like I find all those kind of annoying. So I love the idea of column view, but it's just for me, it's never useful enough that it ends up being my default. But we can all agree that the true monsters are the icon view people. Anyways, Chris, what about you?

Oh, I love icon view. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. I I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Please don't hang up on me. Uh no, I okay, so I started off my computing life as a monster. I started off as a Windows user and it it's just chaos over there. It's it's chaos. And, you know, eventually I saw the light, came over to the the Apple side of things.

But I have to say I'm I am a big time column user. I love column view. I I love it. I love being able to m like have the have the the the layers of different columns like be able to move stuff back and forth, you know, click on a file and all the data's right there. It's really helpful if you go in and you add specific metadata for file types, like especially media files, and you do a lot of stuff with video. That's really helpful. Yeah, I love Column View.

I um I don't. I I I yeah, I've always been a uh list view person. I Uh, I think similarly again to Dan, I don't need to see that hierarchy. I have the hierarchy in my head. Um I do use the the bar at the bottom of Finder uh to get sort of an understanding of where I am in in a directory. But I don't need more than that, uh, to be able to see what's going on. And in fact, I find it to be overloading for me. That's the big thing. It's like there's too much data on the screen at one point.

And I'm struggling to remember exactly where I am in all of it and what I'm looking for. It's just Far too much information at once. f that's taking up for me a lot of the screen and therefore is just getting in my way. Um so yeah, I'm not a big Not a big fan of column view. And when it gets turned on, I'm going, why is the what happened? Get it, get out of here. What uh stop. Uh but Alison, it sounds like you might be a column view person. I'm curious to hear more about that.

Well I'm so sad you and n and uh Dan are so misguided. Uh because CommView is the only correct answer. No. Yes. The main thing The main thing I I hate about ListView is watching people have to clean up after themselves, closing all of those little triangles. And I know you can option click if you know what you're doing, but I watch people like that.

Like open up all those little things and then they have to close them all back up and they can open all back up. We just click back to the beginning and we're and we're back in place. And just like Christopher said If you've got uh you're in column view and you turn on the little preview thing, when you click on a file, that's just what Dan described is exactly what I use it for. I use it'cause I can see the thumbnail right there, which you don't get in your in your silly little uh list view.

You get the picture, you can tell how long the media file is, you can tell the dimensions of the of the uh image if that's what it is. You g you know, the creation date, modified date, you got it all. It's right there. You don't have to have half the width of the screen to get all that information in there. And the one thing that I used to not like about Column View was you couldn't sort.

And it turns out if you right click in an empty spot in column view and there sorts right there. So you can sort it by date modified, whatever you want to do. So it's got all the advantages, none of the disadvantages, except for that whole uh column width problem that they've been having. But in Tahoe, there's now a feature where you can click a little button that says resize the columns.

Uh there is a bug though that if you show scroll bars always Then the scroll bar ac the horizontal scroll bar actually covers up the little uh double line icon where you're supposed to be able to double click to resize a column. So there's a bug, but I'm hoping they fix that soon. But I I'm sorry you guys are wrong, but Chris, you you go girl. Yeah.

This did get political. Alrighty, folks. It's time for halftime here on Clockwise, which means it's time for me to remind you about our swag. Head to clockwise.social uh to check out our various items available for purchase. When you buy our swag, you help to support the work we do. You can get a shirt, you can get a hat, you can get a tote, you can get

a phone case, you can get stickers. We've got so much available for you at clockwise.social. So be sure to head there, check it out, and help support the work we do. All right, we are back from halftime, and that means it's time for Dan's topic.

Oh, it's me. All right. So uh this week Apple announced the latest integration of AI tools into Xcode, which is the support for agentic AI encoding. I'm kinda curious. I was I was watching some of the the demos of this and reading about it and it you know what? It's almost Almost got me convinced that I could build an app for myself. So my question is, have you ever have you built or thought about building an app, even if it's just for yourself?

And if so, what would it do? Chris, you're up first. Yeah, so uh I haven't been playing with the new X code, but I have been playing with uh Claude Code. and a few other utilities, but mostly Claude Code. And I've been building building small utilities just for myself that kind of like Help me with particular issues. These are apps or m utilities I would never release on their own because they are definitely not good enough to release to

uh a wider audience or let alone be useful to people. They're very specific things like um Stuff that kind of helps me w when it comes to uploading YouTube videos and stuff with expense tracking and all that stuff that like isn't exactly that interesting, but it helps me in my day-to-day. And what's nice about this is I'm able to make these tools. specific for my needs. They aren't um

something I'm I'm worried about like, oh, is this going to be useful to a general audience? No. They're tools that work specifically for me and I am just using them for me. And I don't ha I they're they're rough around the edges. Like they are they are not good at all. Like th if if somebody saw them, which I will never release and I will never send out screenshots or anything, but if somebody saw them

It's it they're not they're not good. But uh I am uh really happy with these tools and the fact that they give me uh somebody that kinda understands how to write code. You know, I've I've I did stuff, you know, I did a lot of scripting and stuff back in my IT days, but I I was never at the ability to m make my own apps. And now with these tools, they kind of bridge that gap. There they give me the power to build utilities for myself that don't exist, that wouldn't exist.

And I I can make that stuff. But they're they're not quite at the point where I feel like with my base knowledge I can release something to a mass market. Um so yeah, I I I'm excited these tools are here. I haven't played around with the X code one, but Claude Code has been really awesome, especially when you hook it up to the terminal. There's one time of year where I wish I had some sort of app that I could use, and that is when I run a uh D campaign to raise money.

Um for Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital. And I think it'd be really cool to have an app that just keeps track of the donations that are coming in um specific to me where I have it, you know, tied to my players and go, okay, I can see that Dan has three Nat 20 rolls. I can see that this and that. Um, and it's sort of like just a counter. Um that would require tying things into some APIs, uh, and it would require

sort of some some smart filtering based on what comes in and if a person's name gets mentioned. And so it's a little difficult uh to figure out. And it therefore is something that I haven't tried to tackle before. Uh, but All of this AI magic has led me to believe that maybe just maybe it could be maybe possible. Uh Allison, what about you?

Well, I've written two web apps that I use all the time. This gets to the great point that your uh the question had, which is uh what scratches your own itch. The two that I made were one that subtracts and adds elapsed time. Which oddly enough spreadsheets can't do easily. And the other one helps you plan meetings with t uh people in different time zones.

But the one I started working on with AI, I started a while ago and I kinda dropped it. I think uh Micah's gonna like it'cause it's a craft based one. I do a lot of cross stitch and what's fun is to make a pillow out of cross stitch. So it needs to be framed

by some cloth around it on one side and of just a square on the other side. And it's a lot of math to figure out what size to cut the fabric to and how to make the angles and stuff like that. And it it's just math. I mean it's just arithm arithmetic and geometry. It's pretty easy.

But it's tedious and I don't like doing it. So I started writing an app with the the help of Chat GPT a while ago to do that. It was immediately inc incredibly useful and sped me up quite a bit. So I keep saying I'm gonna go back and finish that. I have not done that yet though. Well these are all good. I I

I'm intrigued. I don't you know, I've thought about a bunch of different apps, you know, I've thought about things for like categorizing, you know, stuff in my house, you know, inventorying or stuff like that. There's a lot of good apps for a lot of these things. I think the question is always, like you said, something that scratches your particular itch.

Um, I've spent a lot of time on like my numbers accounting spreadsheet over the years and it like occurs to me that some aspects of that would be probably better in an app form. Um, but I've now tweaked it so much that I find I struggle like with the idea of using a a different tool for it. So I'm not sure what the right answer is for me, but like I have used Claude And ChatGPT pretty extensively in developing some scripts that run automatically on servers and things like that.

Um, because otherwise, you know, while I could make these things, it would just take me much, much longer. And those are just tools that are, you know. very bespoke and very specific to um, you know, the applications I have for them, whether it's, you know, Discord bot integrations or uh live stream detection, you know, all this stuff that is like, you know, super specific and not going to be something that anybody builds an app for. But there's definitely stuff

on, you know, the uh you know the there's definitely stuff that I feel like I I want to do, but it it just doesn't end up uh rising to the level of making an app for it yet. But I now that this option is here I definitely will be thinking more as I run into problems like, hmm, I wonder if I could, you know, make an app to to fix this. So I'm keeping I'm keeping my options open. But thank you all for your thoughts on that. Let us go to our final topic, which comes from Chris.

Yeah, so Apple is rumored to be releasing a ton of new products this year. Uh for example a touch screen MacBook Pro, a low end MacBook, home pod with a screen, foldable iPhone, that just to name a few. Uh is there any of these rumored devices that you would just insta buy? Just you know, whatever the rumor is out there, like you're so hooked into that. Uh what does it need to have in order for you to jump on it right away?

You know, I don't this time around I'm not seeing hearing any insta buys, the perhaps the one that comes the closest is the home pod with a screen, simply because I have tried the other uh brands s screened smart speakers and I am curious to see what Apple can bring to the table as far as that goes. But even still, it doesn't quite

It's yeah, it's not it's not quite there yet. In term for for me as far as just ooh, I gotta have this right away. I I do have to do the Instabu. Um, none of the stuff is feeling uh big enough, important enough that I need to to hop on it right away. So I don't know if there's something specific that it would have to have.

that it would make me go, well, I've got to have this instead of what I have right now. Um, so yeah, I I don't think I can answer the second part. But certainly for the first part, none of it. I'll be honest. Alison, what about you? So I see absolutely zero reason for a foldable phone. And I am a...

hundred percent certain I will be sitting there refreshing my screen madly on lunch day. I d I don't need it, I don't want it. I don't see why the w I I'd see no advantage of it and I bet ya anything I'm gonna do that. But the one I'm actually excited about is uh the home pod with a screen. I want a new home pod. It's been too long. I got home pods. I like'em. They're great. I want I want something different. I would love to have a home pod with a screen. I think that'd be really fun.

Um the idea of a new MacBook Pro with a touch screen is very intriguing. OLED's even maybe more intriguing, but I have zero excuse'cause I have an M three Mac, so I'm afraid if the M five is is that I I'm just not gonna Probably not gonna do it. Sadly. It is M five next, right? Uh yes. Yeah, I think so. So yeah, I mean I think I mean I echo what both Chris and Allison said. I think the two things that do jump out me most are the home pod with a screen, in part because like Micah I've used

the the home pod with a screen from uh the equivalent from Google and from Amazon and they're both bad and I I'm looking over at them in my big box of things to take to electronics recycling right now. Um And the idea I've got stuff so tied into the Apple ecosystem that for me, you know, I use a home pod in the kitchen. I use it every single day for a whole bunch of stuff and having a screen on there that could handle even basic things like showing me my timers.

or showing me calendar or letting me have controls for my media, like all of that would be really nice. So I'm very excited about that. That's probably an instant buy. Um the foldable phone, like Alison said, is up there for me too. I I do see some utility to it and I do I'm just fascinated by it. I love the idea. I love the the fact that they're you know trying this New and and different thing for iPhones. Never done this for iPhones before. And I

The only thing that gives me pause on the instant buy on that is that it's sure to be an outrageous price tag. So uh that might hold me back a little bit. But um yeah, I guess I'll I should start saving my pennies now. Chris, my wrap is up. Yeah. So for me it is one hundred percent the foldable iPhone. I am a big iPad guy. I work from a thirteen inch iPad Pro. I do a lot of my work from there.

Uh I also have an iPad mini that I use for some really specific stuff, but a foldable iPhone would easily replace that iPad mini. Uh and it would just be a nice device to have for reading, watching, video, stuff like that. A few weeks ago, uh maybe maybe a month or so ago, there was um a file being passed around of the leak.

R specs sizes of what the foldable iPhone would be, and the file being passed around was an STL file, so you could 3D print it. And I 3D printed one and oh boy, is it kind of a weird shape. It's like a passport shape. Uh device.

But like when I open that thing up, like I play with it all day long and it's just it's so nice. Like I'm like, yes, iPhone on the outside, iPad on the inside. Uh it I'm hoping it runs some kind of like iPad OS middle ground where like there is like split screen and like a dock and stuff. Uh I I I really want that foldable iPhone. I I will be all over that. I am I'm definitely

like setting myself up to expect to spend like twenty five hundred dollars on that thing and like I'm just going in with that mindset now. Like I'll be happy if it's under that, but I'm setting that price bar high. So that way when it does come out I can just buy it.

That uh brings us nearly to the end of the show. All that's left is our bonus topic. I'm curious to hear what is the coolest animal you've ever seen in person? Allison, we'll start with you. Well, the first day on Safari in South Africa, they told us to get out of the Jeep.

No, no, I paid a lot of good money to sit in the Jeep, not out of the Jeep. And they they walked us into the bush and on the ground in front of us, like I'm talking eight feet away, were three young cheetahs. They were asleep. And they said, Don't worry, they're not hungry, they just ate. Wow. It was the previous tour group, right? Yeah. Uh

Man, I feel like I've been robbed here'cause I was also going to say I saw a cheetah at the uh it was at the San Diego Safari Park'cause and they had this well, I will just say my favorite thing about this cheetah, even though Alison already took cheetahs. Um The cheetah had its own like emotional support dog that it was pals with. That's awesome. And it was so I I still think of my wife and I still use the phrase cheetah dog.

frequently when like you need somebody who's like gonna buck you up and like uh you know help you out through a tough time. It's like, no, I'll be your cheetah dog. Uh so yeah. So that's but I I think about that f fairly frequently. What about you, Chris?

Uh psh it was about twenty years ago that I was in Africa and I did a safari thing and uh uh we stayed in the Jeep, unlike Allison. We we did stay in the Jeep. Uh but it was really cool because we got uh Up close to elephants, giraffes, and hippos. And those things are big. And it was just kinda cool how how close we were able to get. Uh when I was a kid w this was in the before times when we did not care about animals as much, it seems. And so I have ridden on an elephant. Um

I have ridden on camels. Those are more reasonable as riding animals because they are you riding animals in in different places. Um And I think I was on the back of a giraffe, if I remember correctly. Uh, at one point. And that was uh you didn't get to ride it. Like you could sit on it, but you didn't get to ride it. And as

Horrified as I am looking back now at how those animals must have been treated to be able to be ridden by humans in that way, um, it was pretty cool at the time, I will say that, especially the elephant. The elephant was amazing.

Uh, thank you all for your answers on that bonus topic. If you out there would like to get ad-free episodes, that has an extra unwound uh episode every week where Dan and I chat about things you can become a member of Clockwise. Go to relay.fm slash clockwise to sign up, seven dollars a month, seventy dollars a year to help support the show.

Uh, with that, we have reached truly the end of this episode. All that's left is to thank our awesome guests, Allison Sheridan. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you for being delightful all the way through. And Christopher Lawley, thank you so much for joining us. It was a delight. Ah, and it will be a delight for us to be back next week, Micah. But until then we remind everyone listening out there, watch what you say and keep watching the clock. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye.