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Hello and welcome to Connected episode 563. Today is Wednesday, July. 30th, 2025. This episode is made possible by our sponsor, Century. My name is Stephen Hackett and I have the pleasure of being joined by Mike Hurley. Hello! And I have the pleasure of introducing the Ricky Benchman, Federico Vatici. Ciao, Federico. Hello, hello, hello. Hi. Welcome back from London. We spoke all about that in the Pro Show. Thank you. If you'd like Federico's review of London, go to getconnectedpro.co.

I like how we talked a lot about London, but none about the Oasis show. I just realized we sort of skipped over that. I'm sure that that will be covered on many Mac stories. That's true. That's big unwind. This is where we get the London part, right? That's to be me. It has to be me. Fair, yeah. Well, this is connected, so we do follow-up. Correct. Scrolling in iOS 26.

We spoke about the camera selector interface, that little thing at the bottom of the camera in iOS 26. We spoke about how it's basically backwards for what you think it would be. David wrote in to point out that...

The tab selection screen in Safari uses basically the same user interface, but it scrolls the correct way. Yes, because that one is an existing UI, right? So they haven't... changed it right so you can go between tab groups and stuff like that and it goes the way you would expect it goes the natural way

Chadwick wrote in and says, I agree with you that the camera app switcher feels backwards. What seems to be happening is they place one of those glass loops on top of the selections and that loop is your finger moving left and right over it.

We're used to manipulating the selections directly, but they've added the loop in between. So this made me think, what they're doing is the camera selection thing is actually operating more like... the text selector right which is just wrong like it's wrong like it's not the way that it should work i don't know why they've done it and i and i hit upon something funny the other day um

Like I was just like playing around with the camera settings. Would you like to know how you take a spatial video? Oh, actually, no, never mind. They've put it. Yeah, would you like to know you get a spatial video? You have to go to photos and then spatial and then you can get the video. Huh. I am not impressed.

with the camera app redesign. I understand wanting to simplify things, and I do like that you can change between the various formats more easily now. Like, I want this to be 4K or 30 frames a second or 60 frames a second or whatever. But... The core thing, I think what most people do is switch between camera modes. And this particular control is far too narrow. You have like no context of where you are in the list, even if it's scrolled the correct way.

I know people want to jump on this design and be like, oh, they're putting everything in junk drawers. It kind of feels true in the camera app. I think they've had a good idea here, but I think they've kind of missed it in execution. Yeah, I appreciate what they're trying to do, but I don't think they landed it. I agree with you. I appreciate what you're trying, which is like hiding stuff. And again, it's like one of those things where I'm sure they know that people aren't switching the modes.

So they hide it. I get that. But for the people that want to, it is now worse, like significantly worse because of a strange way that they've made the decision. But yeah, I just wanted to restate this. I don't think I did a good job earlier. I wanted to. a spatial video the way that you do this is to scroll along the photos area to spatial and then press a button to change it to video but the spatial

Both photo and video live in the photos side of the selector. They don't have a separate one for spatial video and spatial photo. Maybe the camera team forgot that the Vision Pro exists. Do, I mean, there have been rumors of like a more pro camera app. Do you think it's possible that they have taken the regular camera app and I don't, this is.

they've made it simpler or like kind of watered it down for maybe like what you said, they know what people do and don't do in it. And the pro version will be like buttons everywhere. I just, I don't. I don't know. I think the reason that they've done it is the sensible reason, which is the camera app is too complicated, right?

There is too much stuff in the camera app as it stands right now. And so they're trying to make that easier. But yeah, I just don't think that they've made the right decisions. It also, I think, shows that... liquid glass in particular I think really shows this that Apple's various teams are kind of working on this separately and they have not

Doesn't seem like at least there's been a lot of like cohesiveness between the various projects. And that's been true for a while. Like we've talked about this like in notes, I can use an emoji. in front of a note folder, but it's just a text field. But in reminders, like lists have things and I can have some random SF symbols they allow or an emoji. But in maps, I can't favorite things with emoji.

stuff's kind of all over the place but liquid glass seems to really highlight that for me and i think that this is an example of it like different teams have gotten access to it maybe different times or there's not like a There's not like an internal, this is how you should do things. And so you end up with things that kind of look the same, but don't act the same. And that's something they've really got to tighten up before this is done, I think.

Continuing about iOS 26, talking about gestures, Doug wrote in, you can get to the multiple email selection mode in Apple Mail and iOS by swiping left or right on the message list with two fingers. Yeah, I would also like to thank Ben, who told me that you can also just swipe up and down on the list of two fingers and it will just begin selecting them. Yeah, that's been around for a while.

Yeah, and so I will also just, now you said that, I'll say this too. Gabriel wrote in to say about how in Safari you can swipe up on the tab bar to get to all your tabs, swipe left and right. This has also been a thing.

that has predated iOS 26. The thing about both of these gestures is they are less reliable than just having a button. Like, I knew about all these Safari... because that's what I started to do before Federico told me about the different mode, which I've loved the different mode that I've set it to, not the compact mode or whatever they've called it in Safari settings.

because I just like having the buttons. The gestures are less reliable, especially the Safari gestures, because you're doing the same gestures you're doing for multitasking millimeters away from the area in which you're doing multitasking. They're too close to each other in such a way that they're not reliable. And then I also second guess it a little bit and sometimes don't get it right because I'm trying not to access multitasking.

And the same thing, people were writing into me to be like, it's so much easier in mail now to just like, all you got to do is press and hold and just not let go and just move your finger down to select and let go and you can select. There is no world. which that is a better...

than just having the button. But it's so much easier. What are you saying? It's so much easier. This is great. Because as well, that button that definitely belongs in that spot along with the mail view settings to also press the select button to select multiple messages. Right. Just real... real smart UI design now. It's not discoverable, nor is it all that accessible. Oh, logical. It's just an illogical thing. It doesn't make any sense.

It's frustrating. I mean, this actually, like, talking about mail, I still cannot believe that... Things like print are underneath the reply symbol, but only one of the reply symbols in mail, right? The reply icon, if you hit it at the top of it, it will just open an email to reply. But if you hit it at the bottom of the message, it will open the share sheet kind of thing where you can then have other options. Like, I can't believe that that has remained all these years in.

why it's not a three dot why is it a reply I don't know who could tell it's a real mystery for sure I had breakfast with somebody today. My college roommate was in town and he's pretty big into Apple stuff, but he doesn't ever run the betas because he's a smart person.

He's like, hey, can I see iOS 26? And so I slid in my phone and I showed him the thing where you bring the lock screen down and like the glass around the edge is like really like reflective and like distorts the icons as it goes over.

which is really cool he's like oh that's awesome and then i showed him the photos app i was like pay attention to the buttons as you scroll through my photo library and he was like oh i can't read this half the time i was like yep yep and that's the liquid glass thing right that's the liquid glass thing sometimes

I get a notification and it pops down while I'm already scrolling and I'm like, oh, that looks so cool, right? Like, oh, it just looks fun. Like, the colors are changing. And then I open an app and I can't read anything, you know? And it's the same thing. The same thing that I find cool, I also find difficult. But it's just dependent on the context that I'm in at that moment. Yeah, very complicated. It is.

We have some follow-out. That's where we talk about things that happen on other podcasts. Federico, you were on Mac Power Users this week. Oh, yeah. That podcast. Wow. You had a good time. I did. I did. It was great. It was great. I enjoyed it. I listened to it already. It was really good. It's philosophical in the middle, as you'd expect from Federico. I enjoyed it. It was a good episode. Yeah, it was really good. So go check that out. MPU 807.

And this is not the notes, but I'm going to say it on upgrade on Monday. Y'all summer of fun chapter with you trying to identify sounds from media services was so good. I loved it. Jason did a good job of that one. He did. Really good. So an iPhone has gone out for a walk. I saw this on threads. I didn't believe it. And then I started seeing people reporting on it. So I'll put some links in the show notes, one to a piece from Richard Lawler on The Verge and one to Parker Ortolani's blog.

There have been images going around. It started off on X, apparently, of somebody in San Francisco taking a photo with an iPhone 16 of what... Would appear to be an iPhone. Was it San Francisco or Los Angeles? I thought it was San Francisco. Maybe it was LA. Who could tell? Let's just say California. In America. It's all the same. America, California. It may well be LA and I just misread that. But okay, so somewhere in California, someone was taking pictures of an iPhone.

What would appear to be an iPhone 17 if you were to believe it, right? I'll put a link in the show notes. They have the images in them, right? So you can go look for yourself. I'll read a little bit from Parker's blog because he does a good job of summing up why you might believe this.

So in addition to the chunky case, you can see that the device appears to have a privacy screen protector on it, while the iPhone 16 does not. The person holding the two devices is clearly using that phone to test some sort of feature of the new model. phone appears to show one of Apple's internal testing tools. I will say Parker sees a lot more in these images than I do. But I also have not really dug into it.

But Mark Gurman has also said that he thinks that this is real. And this is just like a realistic thing that could happen, right? And like the two images that you see, like one of them that I find interesting is that...

looks like there are two people together and I wonder if one person's looking out for the other person. But the other thing is that we're paying a lot of, I think the internet is paying a lot of attention to this right now because this is hot on the heels of the John Prosser situation. spoken about on a bunch of other podcasts, but I'll put link in the show notes to something if you're not familiar with that.

But this must be happening all the time. Like it has to happen all the time. Like there are things that need to be tested, right? And so they put these phones into cases. Like you can't see what this phone looks like. It's been put into some weird case. The only reason that this is obviously a new phone is that the case clearly is hiding the new camera bar. It's a big, chunky case.

So it doesn't show off the camera bar, but it goes all the way to the other edge is where the LiDAR sensor goes. So you can see. Like if this was the iPhone 15 taking pictures of an iPhone 16, you wouldn't know. But this one is clear enough that if somebody takes a picture of it, you can see because there is something visually different about it. But it's just interesting and it's also funny how things like this can kind of just circle around. I just thought it was funny.

Yeah, these things happen every few years. You see somebody, you know, like I think one year someone was on a train in California, like a commuter train, and they had a phone or a watch or something. My thought was they were taking pictures. The person with the phone were taking pictures to compare the two, but Parker read more into the tea leaves there.

You know, after the Prosser thing, I just hope this guy doesn't get in trouble for this. Like, that's the only thing I worry about now because people get fired over these things. So hopefully he's okay. I saw someone talking about that. I don't remember where. It might have been in Parker's blog or somewhere else. This person's doing their job. Hopefully. Right, but you know...

You would assume that if they're doing some kind of testing thing, this is what they're supposed to be doing, and they're doing... In theory, what they have been told to do, which is keep it in the protective case, like don't let anyone see it in a way, like use the privacy screen. If some stuff has to be tested outside, there's kind of no way you can get around it, right?

And, you know, you figure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing the best that they're able to do it. Well, I'll be this guy soon. Taking pictures of our iPhone 17 with our iPhone 16? Yeah. Yeah, probably. He's under the curve on his review. Yeah. Maybe that's it. You know, it's like a Verge person right off screen.

Speaking of the new iPhone, we got a lot of stuff to talk about with new colors. So, Mike, do you want to walk us through this? Because I just need to sit on my hands until we get to the orange one. Because I have thoughts. Yeah, so we're touching this a little bit in past weeks of, like, with the potential colors for the iPhone. And there's just, like, more dummy cases now. So these came from...

Sonny Dixon, who has a pretty good track record with this stuff. And essentially what we're looking at is three different sets of phones. So you've got the regular iPhones, like the iPhone 17, which is black-white. blue, green, and a purpley pink. None of these colors are anywhere near as good as that ultramarine one, it seems, right? But I will say at least the green and the pinky purple, they are somewhat...

vivid colors. Where the blue is super light, that's not really much of a color. It looks like the old Sierra blue from the 12 or 13 Pro or whatever it was. But at least the green and the purple you can clearly see above green end. like purple or pink, whatever this color is. I mean, lighting is always a problem. Like if you look at the, there's two sets of images that are in the show notes. They're both from Sunny, but they're in different articles, one from 9 to 5 and one from The Verge.

One is a set of top-down images, and one is a set of kind of like... images at an angle and the colors of the phone just look completely different in both sets of images. But that is also the problem of just trying to take pictures of things. Then you've got the iPhone 17 Air where it's black-white.

It looks like a similar blue to the regular iPhone. And what appears to be a very bad gold. It's kind of like the desert titanium color. Yeah, I was going to say sand. I don't know how to describe it. But all of the descriptions, the color descriptions that have leaked have said that this is a gold. So, like, that is a bad gold. I mean, yeah, I don't know what to say about that, but...

The big money is in the 17 Pro phones, where we have a black, we have a white, we have a blue, and at this point, what just appears to be orange. Yes. orange. There was questions of what is this? Is this gold? Is this copper? These images really make it look like an orange iPhone. Sunflare Orange or something, right? They'll have a name for it. If it's sun, anything orange, I get points, like I did for the Dynamic Island.

Well, no, you actually have to pick it to get points. You can't just like... No, no, like light, like the Dynamic Island clearly is credited to me because I said that thing. Ah. What did you say? It was like something in a sea of... Yeah, like in a sea of pixels, and then they called it the Dynamic Island. And then as soon as they announced it, my mentions exploded.

Yeah, these colors on the pro phones, the navy, the blue, whatever, is kind of boring, but I think people will like it. The orange, though. The orange, though. Okay. I'm a connoisseur of orange. I like orange a lot. I've got a lot of things in my life that are orange or highlights of orange. Orange and gray really go well together. Orange was the 512 pixels color until recently when I kind of moved to the 90s theme I have now.

This orange is pretty good. I would like it to be more vibrant. They're never going to do it. So for a pro phone, I'm happy with this orange. I think it's really fun. I think in person, as long as it's not too washed out and kind of like coral colored, I think it's going to be really nice. And what I hadn't really considered until I saw this.

and the previous topic with like the guy in California with the phone is that I think a lot of cases are going to have like a huge opening at the top for the camera bar. And it made me think of the iPhone 5C, right? It very famously was a plastic phone. And you could get the rubbery case for it that had all the holes punched in it. And it said non because they didn't line the holes up with where it said iPhone on the back. Truly embarrassing on Apple's part. But...

There could be some of this this time too, where like more of the color of the phone shines through the case because of these camera bars. I mean, right now, like if you have... really basically any iPhone case, the only color of the back of the phone you see is just the Mesa or the island or whatever they called it for the cameras.

They didn't call it the Mesa. That's the one Federico doesn't like. Don't do that to me. Thank you. Isn't it Plateau? Was that it? Yeah. We went round and round on the follow-up. Just see previous episodes. Pretty sure it's called The Great Plateau, I think. The camera. in planes on Spain. And, uh, so I think from like a color case kind of perspective, this could be a really fun year.

And I like the orange. I hope that most case manufacturers do what you're saying, right? Where they actually leave a cutout. I would just be... wonder what it will actually be like like will they want to cover will they will try and cover it or will they leave it open like i wonder if like the amount of space yeah uh yeah it would be but like i just wonder if like you know like we leave the camera bar

the camera kind of plateau open now because it's like it's just a smaller amount well increasingly growing space but this is the whole way across like I wonder like I don't understand these things well enough does it Does it impact the structural integrity of the case to have such an open space? Does that matter? Probably not. For me, the blue and the orange, I would love an orange phone. These images are not the orange I would want.

I want it to be punchier. I want it to be more like the orange on the side of the Apple Watch Ultra, the international... I think it's safety orange. Safety orange or whatever it is. But there's also like four different shades of that I found out. Or like pen addict orange, right? Like the orange that Brad uses. This is a little washed out from that. But again, like...

I'm happy we're in the ballpark. The part that hurts me is that I was really gearing up for the iPhone air this year. I really wanted to check out the thin phone to consider it in advance of the. folding phone that the year after probably. And Apple now has put me in the space where like, I'm basically obligated to buy the orange phone, but I really wanted the thin phone.

Yeah, but you're going to put a case on your phone anyway. Yeah. I mean, I do use a case during warm weather. In cold weather, when I'm wearing jeans all the time, I go caseless. And I think if I had an orange phone, I might go caseless all the time. It may be really tempting. So we'll see. For a clear case, you get a clear case. I don't like clear cases. All the gunk gets in there.

You know, you get the little flex. The gunk's getting in anyway. But I can't see it behind a black leather case. In a clear case, it's like all my schmoo is in there for people to see. It's gross. I think it's going to be fun. I think the orange phone, the orange pro and like a black leather case would look sick. And it's probably what I'm going to do. And cause I got, I have to, I have to, I have to reward Apple for taking a risk on orange.

Because this phone is not going to sell well. The white and the black and the blue are all going to sell better. And so I need to vote with my dollars and be like, Apple, do more orange things, please. You could...

I have a Tangerine iBook in sight. I can see it across my office. Like, do more orange things. You could be to this phone that people want to the iPhone mini. Mmm. You're like, oh, I'm going to buy it so they'll make more of them. And then only you bought it so they don't make any more. Yeah. And I'll hold on to it for years.

The only thing about these dummies where I will question something is the pro phones. The Apple logo is not visually centered like the rest of them. I don't know if that makes a difference, but like that was the rumor and the other phones are. If you look at the images, you can see that there's a visual center. And they've not visually centered. That's also been rumored, that they're bringing the Apple logo down into the center of where the charging area is.

And I agree with you. It's like inconsistent between these photos, but I also just think it looks very good on the pro phone. It looks bad. I'm warming up to this look, I gotta say. Where's the two-tone thing, actually? Wasn't that the whole rumor? That was what I was going to ask you. Why do I keep seeing either these images, but if you go to macro rumors...

MacRumors, they like to use the two-tone thing. So is the two-tone going to happen or what? Here's what I say. These dummy things, they may just be sizings and not... is what would be my expectation. But I don't know. I hope the two-tone thing happens because I'm pretty jazzed about that. I think that looks real nice in the concept imagery.

Who knows? I like that even... Well, I mean, I say this close. We're not actually that close to the iPhone event, but there's a lot in the air about how these sounds are going to look. I'm looking forward to September more than I have in most years, just because... there are more questions than normal. Like even just everything about the air phone, like what is going on? What is that? What does it do?

What has it got? What hasn't it got? And kind of how that phone stacks up. It's going to be an interesting thing to dig into. I saved somebody from the 16E. Did I tell you all this? I had a family member who's on a... 12, maybe an 11, an older phone. They were going to buy a new phone. They're mid cycle. Like they don't care. Anything new is coming. And they texted me not in advance, but they're standing in the Apple store. I'm like, Hey, I was going to get a 15.

but what about this 16e? And I was like, no, like you buy a phone and hold onto it for five years. Like, yeah, it's one processor newer, but I started listing the features it doesn't have. I was like, they're like, yeah, I'm going to go. I'm going to go with the 15. I'm a hero, basically. 15. And the colors are better on the 15, which I think pushed her over the edge, too. You're going to hear from all the 16 e-apologists now. Are there 16 e-apologists?

I think OTJ is one of them. Come at me. Yeah. Okay. That's what I say. Please send this feedback directly to Stephen. Don't put it in the feedback form. None of us want to see it. We didn't taunt you. Stephen taunted you. I guess his email address is like steven at 512pixels.net or something. Sure. Turn that one off. I delete. Goodbye, email address.

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and all of Relay. It's time for a roast. Roast me, daddy. Roast my macOS dock 2025 edition. It's here. It's time. Now, I was looking this up today because I know we did it before. I wanted to do it today, but I was like, I hope we haven't done it too recently. I think the last time we did this was 2021, which doesn't seem possible. I'm sure we've done it since.

but I couldn't find any other... We've done other roasts, but... i i can find august 2021 we did a we did a doc roast uh maybe there are there are times since but that's the only time i could find and i was like searching around like a madman today and this is the best i could get you okay

Mike, let's start with you. All these images will be in the links in the show notes. Doc images are just kind of weird or like they're all super tall or wide or whatever. If you're on your phone, sorry. Just kind of. Zoom in. Zoom in. Zoom in. Pull over, order an iPad. When they deliver the iPad to you, open the link.

Or use CarPlay. I'm sure CarPlay will just show you the image these days. That's not true at all, actually. I can't believe you can. Can you tap back while driving? You know, I haven't tried. Yeah, sure. Listen to this guy. The truck's in the driveway. Do you want me to go... Yeah, you got to go take it for a spin.

It's like, oh, me? I never use CarPlay when I try. It is Federico. You're supposed to believe this guy. I will say, with Beta 4, every time I get in my truck, and it's really hot here, like it is in many places right now. Plug my phone in because I use CarPlay wired in my truck. And then I get out. And my phone, which is basically warm all the time on Beta 4, is so hot. It's like the phone doing CarPlay and being in the hot truck.

It's like iPhone charging will resume when the phone is cooler or whatever that error message says. It's like, no, I really actually need you to charge when I'm driving because... The phone battery is so bad on beta 4 for me. It's like, please work. Federico, how was it for you traveling? It was horrible. The phone gets so hot and I don't know why. It gets hot and it eats through the battery. We constantly had to use portable batteries and keep them on us like we always had two.

Going around London, it was really, really bad. I turned on that adaptive battery mode thing and it has improved. So I don't know if I'm going to keep it on. Because I think sometimes I can feel that it's low. Sometimes I feel like maybe the 120Hz is being lowered, but then also I'm not sure if it's just... the system's just like chugging yeah it's hard to tell it's pretty stuttery i mean i i have promotion off but like if i switch to low power mode

It is so, like, the animations, everything just, like, chug to a stop. It's rough. There's the new battery screen, right, which is actually really nice. And... I went from like 150% battery usage every day to like 120% after I turned on the adaptive power mode. I recommend it for people using the betas. It does make a difference. I do love that screen where it's like you use 150% of your battery every day.

I understand what you're saying, but logically that is hilarious. It's pretty bad. So anyways, back to our roasting our docs. Mike, we have yours. Use your doc on the right side, which I approve of.

Do you want me to go through my apps and you can stop me? Yeah, yeah. Wherever you feel necessary. All right, Finder. Who's up there? App Store. I gotta stop you. 30 updates on the App Store. 30 updates. Also, why is the App Store in your dock? I don't know. No, that I understand. I also keep the App Store next to Finder. Yeah, but you're Federico Vatici. You have a podcast called App Store. I'll tell you what. Finder and App Store, for me, is like when people...

keep the default first home screen on their phone and they're like, this is the way Apple intended. And then they use the others for that. That's it for me. Like, this is how the Mac came and I've just left it that way. Like, I haven't touched it. Just how they go. They're supposed to be updating on their own. I gave up. So years ago, maybe like a year ago, I put on all my devices. I mean, I was always like a manual update person because I wanted to see what was new in apps.

I can't be bothered anymore. So I just have things auto-update. But every time I open any app store, it's like... Like the iOS app store, I've got like 60 updates or something that need to happen. And I know it's like it stages out, but there's always loads. That's why that's there. They should be updating. I don't think they ever do, but they should be.

The Mac also as well, I don't like doing updates on the Mac because it has to close all your apps, you know? And that's annoying. You don't have that on the other platforms, right? Because it just does whatever it's doing in the background and it's fine. It doesn't matter. Like if the iPhone updating an app, like it's not updating ones that I'm currently using at that moment. But on the Mac, it's like.

You have to close this. You have to close this to update. Close this to update. And I find that really annoying. So I also put it off. So there you go. Okay. Safari. Sure. Music. Sonos. He does have a lot of Sonos. He does have a lot of Sonos. I witnessed this myself. Like when you go to Mike's house, you basically turn and in every corner you will find the Sonos. It's kind of creepy, to be honest. Like you think you're like, I'm just going to grab this from the kitchen.

and you just reach with your hand and accidentally you're touching the Sonos. And then you're walking around the living room and there's like three Sonos speakers waiting for you. And then you go upstairs and you're like, oh, finally, I'm in a Sonos free zone. And no, there's more Sonos. It's like you're haunted by the Sonos in Mike's house. And so I'm not surprised that we get to see the Sonos. Beautiful icon, I should say, in the dock as well.

Sonos Stale Icon is one of those, I don't remember what it's called, where you can turn it upside down and it's the same. Which is just a genius design. Upside down-a-gram. Yeah, you can also read it. in the two directions. They did a good job with the naming. Not just the naming, but the branding. That the font looks the same both ways up. It's very clever. I have a Sonos speaker in every room.

except my downstairs bathroom. And in the downstairs open plan area, there's like six. Wow. Because I have like the TV set up thing and I have one for my record player. Anyway. I love Sonos. Messages, Slack, Discord. Sure. Notes, Ulysses. Okay. Is this because you're a fancy? He's a blogger now. He's a blogger. He's a blogger with opinions. He's a blogger now, so he uses an app for blogging. He uses opinionated software now. You haven't blogged in five days? What are you doing?

Wow. I will always give you one post a week. You know what I mean? That's what you get out of me and you're going to like it. Well, look. You have to have a post like, I'm back. I'm back to blogging. And then it sits there for six months. I have to quit first, and then I come back. I'm not like you, Federico, all right? I ain't blogging from Notion. I ain't blogging from Notes. I'm blogging from a blogging app, and that's how I blog. Steven, you probably use an app that was made like...

crafted by stone or something. Mars edit. There you go. You proved my point. Which I love. That has been around for a thousand years. I found out recently when I was talking to John Gruber that Daniel Dragcutt did not develop that app in the first place. I did not know that was the case. Brent Simmons started it. He bought it from Brent Simmons back in the day.

Yeah. As long as I have known it, it has been made by Daniel Jaocot, which I think kind of like says just how long that app has been around for like a long, long, long time. Yeah, I like Ulysses. I picked Ulysses because it works with the blogging platform that I use, Ghost. And they have a pretty decent... Yes, yes, that one. Haunted blogging platform. It actually is a haunted...

blogging platform. That's the one that I use. I like Ulysses, though. I also like the way it does markdown stuff. I know not everybody likes that, but... I like that it does a pretty decent job of keeping some formatting but hiding links and stuff. I don't need to see the full hyperlink in my text. I just don't need it. That would drive me bananas. And I think it would drive Federico bananas.

Yeah, because I mean, you guys, I know that when you're reading, you love like HTTTPs colon slash slash. I just want to make sure I put the right link there, you know? Yeah, but I know that I've done that. Especially in the final editing pass, you got to make sure that everything is looking... Yeah, but you know how I do that? I click the links. Right. Right. Yeah. Because you got all the time in the day. Yeah. To click links. I mean, I blog once a week. I have the time. Sure. I got the time.

I got the time to click the links. I click the links, you know, and I click them, click, click, click, and they all open, and then it's great. So Ulysses, I like it. It's good. It's a good app. Notion. Notion Nation. Notion Nation. Cannot complain about that. Nope. Craft. Now, why? Why? I like in my various roles. as a professional, to try and keep things separate where I can. I don't like crossing the streams. So like all of my relay stuff is in the Apple Notes app.

Except for this podcast, but that's enough. That's the Stephen thing. Cortex Brand is in Notion. Cross Forward is in Craft. Okay.

So the more jobs you're going to have, the more apps you're going to have? Is that how it works? Well, eventually I can't have any more jobs because there are no more apps, right? That's the problem. Did you join CrossFord with me just so you could use Craft again? I've been intrigued about Craft, you know, so it's like, I've got to get it somehow. There are easier ways to start trying a new note-taking app.

I'm not sure there are. I'm actually, I don't think so. Right, right. Now, let me tell you. Now, Mike, now, Mike, let me tell you about all the baby apps that you can find on the App Store. You got to have some more kids. And he has a thousand.

only one way to do it yeah my kids are old enough one of them was for Evernote you know yeah Kraft is really nice now it is like they're doing a lot of really interesting work and they're getting ready to launch their web version too which i'm excited about an android mobile

beta as well maybe i'm not something maybe they're doing something on android i've struggled to understand what that is exactly um but they're they're doing something i think they might be i think it might just be the web version but like It's not available. It's weird. I don't know what they're doing. But the craft app is really nice. I mean, it is still kind of like what it always was. It's like, what if Notion but native? I like it. It's nice.

I've been enjoying my time with it. Reader. I guess this is classic, right? Reader classic. I don't know if Reader is called, like if they have that new version. Is it on the Mac too? Mm-hmm. It is. He's going to take it away from me at some point, right? I'm going to lose this. I'm convinced. And it makes me sad because this is what I want. I don't know what I'll do in that scenario. I'm sure someone will do something else. I have found it increasingly buggy.

Especially on iOS. Oh, don't say that. Don't say that. I like it. Readwise Reader. Boys, let me tell you. There are things that are just building up in there. It's happening. Yeah, I mean, now you get our problem. But, read voice reader on a Mac? As a web app in the dock? Yeah. Okay. Are you reading on your Mac?

It's not, I mean, it's a web app in the way that Slack is a web app. No, I mean, isn't this Readwise Reader that you saved from Safari as a web app? I mean, who could tell? I don't know anymore. Right, right. I don't know. Is that what I did? Maybe you should go work there and find out. It's the only way to know. They have a...

It says desktop, but what do you think? They think it's a web app? Well, I'm using it somehow. You know, I don't know. I don't know how I'm using it. Okay, as long as it works. I'm using it. It works. I mean, I don't really use it very much on my Mac, like realistically, but I have it there. It's like an aspiration. And it's open. So, you know, there's...

That's the joy of stage manager life. You can just have a bunch of apps open and you don't see them. They're out there somewhere. They're on their own stage. They're just doing their thing. They're living their life. Their best life. They're just off. in the sunset somewhere. They're doing their thing. And someday you'll bring them to the front and you can use them again. It's great. Yeah. Todoist. Okay. No badges? No badges on Todoist? No.

How do you know how many things you have left to do? I open Todoist. Terrible. The badge doesn't help me in any way. It doesn't help anything. I'm not like, oh no, I better get back to work. No, like I know I have work to do. And I'll open Todoist to do it. This is also a thing for me where some tasks, they're like aspirational in my day. Sure.

Right? So it's like if I... Like Readwise Reader for example. Like Readwise Reader. I have a task that says Read, Readwise Reader and maybe I'd get to it. But there are some tasks where like maybe I could do them today if I wanted to. Right? And because I like to...

do that kind of task management, a badged app is not realistic because it's not actually telling me how many things are left to do today. It's telling me how many more things are available for me to do today. And that's not, to me, that doesn't really work for...

badging like I was always finished I finish every day and there are tasks that are not completed all the things that need to be done are done but there are things that maybe I've progressed a little bit rather than complete and I just don't need that badge numbers sitting there anymore. So I just, I don't want the badges anymore. Okay. Reminders. What goes in reminders? Family tasks, shared tasks. Right. Grocery lists and house.

projects and stuff like that. Put a pen in that because I'm going to come back to that. Okay. When I get to mine. Okay. Mail. Timery. Okay. ChatGPT. Claude. Oh, boy. I don't know about Claude. Oh, boy, what? Why? How many apps do you need? You've got to try them out. No, you don't. Do you get them to talk to each other?

No, you've got to try that. You've got to know what you're doing. Do you want this one or that one? I think I'm going to get rid of Claude. I don't really use it. I don't pay for it. And therefore, I don't think it's super good for me. JGBT is basically all I need. Limitless, which is one of those... Now, this is interesting. Do you have the pendant? No, no. I do not want the pendant. Are you sure you don't have the pendant?

I absolutely don't have the penalty. Come on, reach in your pocket now. You sure you don't have the penalty? Oh, what's this? No, it's... Do it. So I used Limitless. They're just their app, their Mac app. And it's one of these things where you can record calls and it will do transcriptions for you and sum them up and stuff like that. It works pretty well. Do you think Casey's mad about that company's name? Well...

I'm sure you have made this exact joke before. Yeah, because his company is limitless. Yes. But that's his problem. It is his problem. No, it's everyone's problem around him. It's everyone's problem, yeah, because we have to hear it. To be fair, it's also our problem because then Steven makes these jokes.

That's true. You're as bad as each other. I do like this app. It is helpful because sometimes you have a meeting that's like an hour and a half long and you just forget everything that was said. But the thing is, since this app launched... Now everything does this. Everything does this. There are a thousand options now. Every conference calling software does it.

And Notion now wants me to do it every time I open any app. It tells me, do you want to? And I can't turn this notification off and it's driving me mad. But everything does this now. But I do think it is actually a genuinely good... feature to get a real-time, decent quality transcription that then can be summarized. It can tell you what was spoken about and give you the action items. I just think that is a really good use of these AI systems. Real-time follow-up.

Notion, preferences, notifications. Desktop meeting detection notifications. Off. I turned that off today and it still bugged me. So I don't know what it's, I don't know. Maybe I hadn't given him enough time. I don't know. Also, seeing this portion of your doc reminds me of that article that went around in the spring of why all AI company logos look like butts.

Yeah, but I have like a whole thing about that. All right, so just real quick aside. Please, please. That was a video that Hank Green made. Okay. Hank Green has a couple of companies. The logos of his companies all look like butts. It's just a thing. Also as well, when you start looking at it, if you think about it, so many logos.

look like elements of a butt. Yeah, it does. Just look at the new Relay logo. No, it's this thing in the center. That's the problem. Well, no. Well, look, there's a certain scenario in which it could look like that. Right? So many logos have the ability to do that. I hope not. Which one? The Max Stories logo. I think you're free, Federico. I think I'm good too. 512 pixels is okay.

Little computer. What are we in the dark? It's a very fun video, though, but, you know. Okay, we're leaving AI land and going to your audio apps. I mean, we're not completely leaving AI land. Descript is the crossover. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're not leaving, Stephen. So I use Descript to create... Descript? Cortex... Descript. Cortex transcripts. with speaker detection. That's all I use it for. That's okay. Because they then go into this...

an app later on, or actually no, this one's not in the list here, is Notebook LM. Those transcripts then go into Google's Notebook LM so I can search back through the history of the Cortex. transcripts if i want to that's a pretty good use of notebook lm i think for your own content i like it

Yeah, it's a project that is nowhere near complete because it takes ages. It's just like a lot of clicking and it's like slow work. And so it's one of these things where like if I have a free afternoon, I'll do a bunch. But it's also a thing that... It doesn't require any kind of speed. It's just a thing that I'm doing slowly over time. But it is a fun thing. Once I'm done with that, I'll stop using Descript. It's not really an app that...

I use it. Oh, then I guess I got to keep doing the forever. So they got me forever. Anyway, then we have Zoom. Right. We're using it now. Yeah. Yep. Can't wait to do it. Logic Pro. Okay. Adobe Audition. Okay. QuickTime. Okay. I thought I was going to ask why I have QuickTime there, but I'm going to keep going. You've got three apps here that all record audio in a row. Why all three?

Okay, so I don't record audio in any of them. You do an audio. I mean, sorry. I mean, QuickTime, Audio Hijack, and Piezo. Sorry, I skipped ahead. Oh, okay. You're going ahead. I'm sorry. Sorry, but I'll go back. Logic Pro is for audio editing. Adobe Audition is for audio mastering. Yep. So like loudness and stuff like that. QuickTime, I use...

to check that the URLs that we upload to Libsyn work before I put them in the CMS. Because you can open QuickTime, press Command L, and you can paste in a link. You don't still do it in Safari? Safari's UI is bad compared to QuickTime. I mean, that's true. I don't like the way it works in Safari. I've just never considered doing it in QuickTime. Like, 15 years in.

I have done this forever. Like this is like an old, going back to like QuickTime seven days, I think I was doing this. Audio Hijack, that is actually the app that I record in. Piezo. is an app that I realized today I don't need in my dock anymore, but I didn't remove it yet, but I will. Right. You got to be honest with the state of your dock in these things. Exactly. Fission.

Fission is the only app that I've ever used. This is from Rogue Amoeba. All three of these apps are from Rogue Amoeba. Big shout out to Rogue Amoeba. They make the best audio apps. Fission is an MP3 editor where you can open an existing MP3 and change something and just save it. Yep. Every other app wants to remaster it, wants to convert it to something else or export it as something else.

You can just go in, tweak something, and sometimes I'm like, episode's all done, but something got missed, and I can just go in, I can delete it, and all the chapters stay where they're supposed to. Everything is fantastic. It's really good.

Like I had to change something before I posted upgrade on Monday. And then I didn't, that way I could just change it. I didn't have to ask Jim to like change it and rebounce it and all that stuff. Like. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get it. You're good. You're good. You're a good podcaster. Okay. Forecast. I mean, it's a roast. I'm not supposed to be nice. That's true. That's true. Forecast, which is Marco Arment's chapter making.

tool and metadata tool for podcasts that use Logic Pro. Fusion Cast, which is by Guillermo Rambo, which is a very easy way to turn a... podcast audio into a video of a static image. So I use this for Cortex. Photos. Pixelmator Pro. Things.

Numbers. Wait, wait. For which company you're working for is that? I use things for two things. I use things as like an app where you have a long checklist. So I have two shortcuts that... We'll put a checklist into things. One is my packing list. So things has a great system where you can like basically create a project and like hide it. then they have shortcuts to let you duplicate those as then active projects. So every time I go on a trip, I press a shortcut and it creates.

a new project of a long list of everything that I could possibly need to take on this trip. I will then whittle it down to the things I actually need and then start my packing. I then also have this for the Cortex posting because posting the Cortex podcast is very complicated. There are many moving parts and I do it once a month. It's not like the other stuff that I do where it's like all my other shows are much more simple.

But there's loads of things that I have to do. Plus, it's one of those things where I really don't want to mess anything up because... The impact of follow-up, of like feedback, of people telling me I did something wrong would be significant. So I have a checklist and I go through and do that. So that's what I use Things for, just those two. I love Things so much. I just wished...

that it worked the way I wanted it to, and then I could use it for everything, but it just doesn't work the way that I wanted it to. Numbers. Okay. Mango Baby. For my one baby. Mango Baby. Go baby. Go baby. Go baby. Go baby. Are you just using the iPad app on the Mac? Yes.

I think so. Yeah, I think it's a compatible app. I'm not sure that they've done anything specific. Yeah, it doesn't look like there's a Mac version. Yeah, it just looks like they checked the box, you know? Okay. iPhone mirroring? Yes. Which I don't use very often, but it's there if I ever want it. Chrome downloads folder trash. Okay. Downloads in the doc, huh? You're one of those people.

I am too. This is like Finder and the App Store, right? Like they've been there forever. I'm not convinced, but okay. You're not convinced it's been there forever? I'm not convinced of what you're saying, but I accept that you are saying it. But I also do like it, though. I like having it there. I don't doubt that. It doesn't mean you're right. I think your dock is decent. Yeah.

There's a lot of stuff in there. Let me finish. I think we have a problem with duplicates. If it was not clear enough... You know? This idea of you splitting up companies and things in multiple things, it's a slippery slope, my friend. Yeah. You could be the guy with 20 task managers and 20 email clients and 20 calendars and 20 mango babies. But if you think about it, it is also a way for me to limit the amount of things that I can do.

Well, you say that, and yes, here we are. Eventually, eventually it will. Please don't add anything else. Can I just put that on the record?

I'm not sure it's possible. The man needs his apps. Okay, Stephen? He does. Do I want to try Obsidian? It's like, what can I do? You're working for David Sparks all of a sudden. Okay, I'll go. Okay, let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Where are you? All right. I'm also a Doc on the right side person.

So you can see that in the show notes. I'm also putting a link in the show notes of my wallpaper because you can see just the edge of it. It's a picture of the space shuttle. You can't have my wallpaper, but nobody wants it. Yeah, it's the Beverly Hills Hotel one. Okay, Finder. I barely know her. Messages. Finder and Messages next to each other is like absolutely chaotic. Yeah, where's the App Store? In Alfred. I'll never go there. Wait, what?

Wait, what? I searched for it. Oh, I thought you searched for apps in the App Store via Alfred. I was like, what does that mean? You probably can. I was like, what is that? You can probably do that. Yeah, I got a workflow. So you use, now we're into a different thing. No, we're not doing that. You use Alfred? I do. Interesting. Do you think you'll switch to Spotlight? Unknown. Okay. There are still people using LaunchBar. I know.

You don't use like Raycast or anything? No, I don't really like it. And I've got so much, what worries me about the spotlight things, I have so much custom stuff in Alfred now that the switching cost is very high. I mean, you might be able to do some of it, but definitely not all of it. Yeah. So messages, timery, track all my work time. An honest question for you guys. Over the long run, has time tracking been beneficial for you both? Yes. Okay, how? I have a giant spreadsheet.

That I keep up with how I make my living across my various projects. And I compare that with the time I spend on those projects. Yep. To know if what I'm doing... is moving the ball forward. And sometimes it's not right. Sometimes, I mean, I do projects that don't make sense going to the spreadsheet. But without real data, I'm just making decisions. This is my own opinion. I'm making decisions just on feelings. And that's...

fine. But when it comes to like work decisions, I really want that time information. And so I find it very valuable. Now I only track work time. I used to track some other stuff too. Like I tracked health, which was like workout time or going to see my therapist or like whatever. I quit tracking that. I quit tracking some other things. It's just work. But I find it extremely beneficial. And I love timery. It's how I do it everywhere.

i have the same answer uh like i do like to make decisions on vibes but i also like to make decisions on data so i can choose how i want to make that decision and it is the only way to do it and it's like i know how much money I make per hour on all of the various projects that I do. And that is valuable information to me. It also really helps me with yearly theme stuff because I can have a look at what my year was like in numbers.

And it can help me sometimes think about what are the things in this list I would like to do less of? Or are there things in this list that are surprising to me? You know, it is a data point that I otherwise wouldn't have. And it sometimes works in the opposite where sometimes I feel like I'm spending a lot of time on something, but the numbers say I'm not. And then I have to think about what that means.

So I find it, I do find it valuable. I understand why some people, I understand why most people don't get, like just don't get it and just not interested. Like I understand that. But. I find it to be just very, very helpful for a lot of work and life stuff because I don't track everything, but I track life stuff that is important to me for a specific time, depending on if there's something that I'm trying to do more or less of.

Okay. Good answers. Thank you. Todoist is back in my life. I used Reminders for the better part of a year and... Some of the frustrations I was having aren't fixed in Tahoe and 26. And so I'm back in Todoist. But I had the problem of shared family lists, just like Mike did. And my wife really likes reminders. And so...

We have like a family to-do list and our grocery list are in reminders. They're not on my doc. I primarily interface with those on my phone because usually it's like weekend stuff or, you know, that sort of thing. But I'm back in to-do lists for all my things. I'm quite happy to be back. So why did you want to pause it? You said I want to put a pin in that. Oh, just that I was split between Todoist and Reminders in a similar way that you are. Yeah, I...

I do not want to have things like grocery lists in my work task manager. Like, I love my wife so much. Love my life. Give me everything I need and whatever one in my life. The woman adds tasks like she's possessed. Just so many tasks. So many tasks get added.

And I love that she's doing that for helping... remind her of things that i need to do she needs to do we need to do i can't have that in my to-do list i think i would triple my daily tasks if they were in there so i don't need that that can live off in another place and i can get to those things when i need to get to them Okay. So I've got that. I've got Mimestream, the Gmail application for macOS. All my accounts are Gmail or Google Workspace. I really love Mimestream.

Are you still okay with just using MimeStream on the Mac and having to use something different on the phone? No, and look, I know there's an iOS build for MimeStream. Put me on the test flight. Yeah, but just knowing it exists doesn't mean anything. Put me on the test flight. I paid for it the day that it went public. MimeStream, hook me up.

I want it so bad. I couldn't do that. I don't know how you do that. Having them different? Yeah. I mostly just, really what I've learned is I mostly just triage emails on my phone. Like I always spawn if it's quick, but most of the time it's just like archive this, archive this, put this person in the same black holes and never hear from them again. That sort of thing. Next up are Safari and Chrome.

I use Safari for everything except cross-forward stuff, which is in a Chrome profile. Treat them separately. Does anything else happen in Chrome? uh things that don't work in safari very well like my bank my local bank their website's really bad it just doesn't work in safari it's like anytime i gotta do anything in there it's in chrome

And if they don't fix the way Safari looks in 26, I'll be in Chrome on Tahoe probably. So why do you use Chrome for cross-forward? Why don't you just use a Safari profile? I generally don't like Safari profiles.

I mean, using a lot of stuff with CrossFord that's like a little bit weird that I just had a feeling that Safari might not be happy with. Oh, okay. Eventually, you're going to have to use Chrome for something, so why not just use Chrome? Yeah, and it's nice of the separate apps. Chrome is on it. own space and that profile is blue like the the tab bar is blue so i can tell it's it's all separate

I love Safari profiles. I have four of them. Wow. I love it. It's so great. I love it. I'm so happy that they added that feature. Slack and Discord. So Slack for all work communication. Discord is where I hang out with our members. Apple Notes is where absolutely everything is. Like there's relay stuff. There's 512 stuff. There's personal stuff. There's notes shared with Mary.

Albany's is great. It's really good. And I use it everywhere. How do you organize them? I have folders and subfolders. Subfolders? Is that a thing you can do? Yeah. Yeah. Whoa, I didn't know that. So I have, I think you can only do it on the Mac. I don't think you can create them on iOS, but I could be wrong. No, in Notes? Yeah, can you? Yeah, yeah, you can. Okay, so for instance, my Relay folder, I have...

Three subfolders, podcasts, which is like various stuff about the shows, Relay Admin, and then St. Jude Campaign. It's great. I have no folders in notes. I have like 900 notes. Everything goes into the main notes folder? Yeah. I have 552 notes at the moment. Note search is really good and also I only ever really need the top 10 notes. Yeah, that's fair.

Everything else I can find if I have to, but I basically just need what I can see in the main view. Okay. Notion for connected and Mac Power users, both run on Notion. Calendar. I don't need what Fantastical offers. I think it's great, but I just calendar meets my needs. So I continue to use that. Hold on a second. Was there a calendar app in Mike's dock? No. What?

Fantastic Al lives in the menu bar. Okay. He's like, no, I don't use one. I'm just like, forget it. I have four task managers, six note takers, and no calendar. I live in my own life. I use a menu bar app called Today that just like puts a list of my things like behind an icon in the menu bar. So you were lying when you said Canada gives you everything you need.

It doesn't give me a quick thing in the menu bar, I guess. But that's not enough to swing for Fantastical, honestly. You lied. I also really don't like Fantastical. How do you add a calendar event? I open calendar and just do it. Oh, God. He clicks the things. Like a professional. Just text. Like an executive. Just be like...

No, I actually think it's not like an executive. I don't think executives click their own calendars. I tell someone else to put it in my calendar. I did have a thing the other day where like someone...

I was emailing with them, like, trying to set up a phone call. And I was like, can you just send me an invite? Like, I can't. I can't. I can't handle this. Reader. Man, remember when you used to make calendars? I know. Yeah. Three years. Is that why you don't, is that why you don't want an involved calendar? Like you just don't want to see it. I'm scarred. Scarred. Stephen, Stephen for calendars.

That's an old prompt title. That's really good. An old timer. Really, that was a piece of prophecy. That's how that turned out to be. Well, I wanted to tell you guys something totally unrelated. I think, I think... And I hope I'm wrong, but I think I saw passing by that OpenAI has either like a mini podcast or a YouTube series called The Prompt.

Oh. We should totally sue those guys. They have a lot more money than we do. Do we have that kind of money? Yeah, do we have that? I'm not sure that we have that kind of money. Open it. I don't know. If I go to Google and I Google open. That's a terrible thing to Google. Yeah. I just tried it. It's useless. No. Yeah. It's useless. No, I.

Either I was hallucinating. I don't think I was. No, I think probably ChatGPT was hallucinating. No, no, no. They don't have a podcast called the OpenAI Podcast. That's terrible. No, there was something. Maybe it was like a mini series. that they announced on their x profile or something like that possible i'll find it they we had the perfect name for an ai podcast i know right uh

You're just going to have the desire to do it. It's the problem. Maybe we remix ourselves into an AI podcast and we call that the prompt. There you go. Wraps all the way around. I'm working on it with Notebook LM, you know? Yeah. Reader. I mean, I am still using Reader on the Mac. It's way more buggy on iOS than is the Mac, but sometimes on the Mac it freaks out. This is Reader Classic.

I've tried all the other Mac apps. I don't like any of them as much as I like reader. So hopefully it continues to be okay. Day one for memories and feelings. I mostly use day one on the Mac. Oh, really? Yeah. Huh. So actually, I have a recurring task on Fridays.

to like spend a little time like writing about the week and usually i'll open photos as like a prompt and look through my photos i've taken throughout the week and drag some of them into day one and write little notes and that's like a mac task for me why is that not a daily thing It should be, but weekly is more likely to happen. Okay. Yeah, I've been using day one recently. Since the baby came, I don't have the ability to sit down and journal.

in my journal as easily as i wanted so what i do is i write in day one and then a couple of times a week will copy that into my journal So I'm getting the best of both worlds where I'm still writing what I want and I also get to sit and write it out and rethink what I was going through. I like it. So I've been using that combo digital and analog life. It's great.

Up next is Dev and Think, where I store almost 200 gigabytes of tech history resources. There's a lot of stuff in there. How many? How many? How many? Can you say that again? Almost 200 gigabytes. Do you ever think that might be too much? I don't understand the question. And you realize most of it's PDFs and you realize how truly horrific it is. Oh, my word.

How many individual files are in Dev and Think? Is that a thing you can... Yes, let me open it and I'll report back in a second. It's like 20 minutes for it to open. It takes it a second. Although Devon think 4 is much faster than 3 was at launching with such a big database. Okay, it's open. Wow, that did take a long time, actually. Yes. Oh, can I see a smart group of everything?

Please don't delete everything by accident. No, I just need to create like a smart. I'll look at this in a second. I'll report back. You can come back to this. Mars edit for blogging. to 512 pixels, which runs a WordPress, more as that it's a WordPress client for the Mac. Photos, music, pretty self-explanatory. Then I get into like podcast stuff. So Zoom, Audio Hijack.

forecast just like mike uh and then overcast i have uh the overcast ios app or i guess ipad app uh to check things feeds and that sort of thing um i don't use it very I don't use it very often. I had to stop using it. At some point, every time I opened the Mac app, it changed all of the sorting of the queue on my iPhone.

Sweet. So it's like, I've got to stop doing this. It might have been during the beta period. And so I've just stopped doing that now. And I just check it out. I just grab my iPhone and check out my iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. And then 1Password. In the dark. I use it all the time. But it's a keyboard shortcut. Yeah, but I also, I mean, I use it because I've got like bank information and all sorts of stuff. It's all available via command and then backslash. It's just right there. Yeah.

And then iPhone mirroring right at the bottom. I use it quite a bit. And then downloads and trash. Do you know in the UK it's called Bin? I do know that. Yeah, I do know that. They did that in Big Sur, I think.

Big sir. Big sir. Federico? I'm kind of afraid of sharing mine for a whole bunch of reasons. So anyway, duck at the bottom person. I have tried them all. I have been a left doc guy. I've been right side doc guy. Doc at the bottom. I mean.

It makes sense. It makes sense. You dock it like it's right there in the word. You dock it at the bottom. When you think of the word dock... You can't say... you duck it is right there in the word you duck it at the bottom because i can say you duck it on the right like i can no no no what i'm trying to say is that i'm an open-minded person but also i'm right um so like that's what you're trying to say

Yes, yes, yes. They're not understanding that. Sorry. Right, right, right. What I'm saying is that I'm right and y'all are wrong. Right. But politically correctly... Is that different to normal? So... What? What? Anyway, find your app store. Find your app store. Obviously, like a true gentleman.

Like a true gentleman. They're like friends. Like if you don't have them next to each other, it's like you're separating them for some reason. Stephen, I'm not really sure why you would do that or advocate for that. It's quite mean. Yeah. Crime against MacWass or something. Then it goes downhill from here, I'm guessing, based on you guys' perspective. I mean, I've opened the image big now. It was Tiny in Discord, and there is one specific thing.

I have a big question about that I look forward to. One specific? Yeah. I mean, there are a few things, but there's one thing that is like screaming at me and it's like, I need to understand. Okay. So do you know what the next icon is? Absolutely no idea. Oh, you know what I bet it is? It's like Yalama or whatever the name of the app is that you use. Yalama, you think it's called? What is it called? No, is it Airfoil?

No. Okay, so this is my web browser. It's the Comet browser by complexity. Oh, what's he doing? What do you think of it? It's pretty great, actually. Of all this new wave of AI-powered browsers, I think it's the best one so far. Why? They've done a really nice job in making it fast. making it compatible with... It's Chromium, I suppose? It's Chromium, so every single extension works out of the box. And...

As much as I did not like Perplexity's original approach to web scraping, and I still don't like it, and the CEO is not, I would say it's fair to say, it's not the most likable CEO of all the... AI CEOs, but as I wrote on Mac Stories when I wrote about their assistants, you cannot deny that they're making a pretty good product. And I think...

I think they make good products. I think, you know, the people that they have designing and writing software, they make a good software for what they're doing. And it's fast. Like the thing about perplexity. So for the past week, I've been comparing just the web search results. that you get in perplexity, chat GPT, and cloud. Like, pretty straight-up comparison. And Google, also, with the Google AI snippets.

I think perplexities are the best ones, and they're fast, and I don't know how to do it, probably by scraping the whole World Wide Web. I'm sure it's part of the reason why they're pretty good results, but they're good. And I think with this browser, I really like what they've done with the Assistant UI. The fact that whether you can start a tab, like you can open a new tab and you can start typing or you can invoke this sidebar and... I have done things like...

It's been pretty great for researching places in London, for example, like researching restaurants and, you know, openbooking.com or opening Google Maps and telling the assistant, hey, in this tab, I want you to do these searches. Because some of these... Websites that don't have APIs, they don't have integrations. The only way to do it is with an agent that can... visually like basically use fancy GUI automation to make sense of data and it's pretty great at that like it's it's been great at

clicking things in the Booking.com interface or the Google Maps interface to see, okay, is this place like four stars out of five? Do they accept, I don't know, pets? Do they have vegan options? Like things like that. that maybe you wouldn't find with an API call somewhere because there's no API. It's been pretty great at that. Does it do things for you? Yes. Yeah, it can, if you give it permission. How well does it do those things?

Pretty good. I had to do researches on Amazon Italy and say, yeah, I want you to find such and such product. And if you think you're absolutely sure what you're doing, add them to my cart. Kind of scary. But it did it, and it didn't do anything else. It stopped at adding them to the cart, and it was fine. Yeah, I know. I mean, I could have canceled the order if anything went wrong. No, it's just funny. It's like, you just imagine, like, please stop. It's like, okay.

It's nice to kick off these things in the background and let it do things. The one thing I think, and this goes with all AI companies, right now, if I had to pick just one service to use, it would be Claude. I have a preference for Claude because Claude integrates with other apps that I have, especially now that Claude can do MCP on the iPhone and the iPad. And they're the only company, I think, that can do that.

And I think Perplexity and ChatGPG, like all of these companies, they should have a better MCP strategy. And I think that's what's missing for me from Comet right now. just having integrations. But they have so many nice little touches, like you can save prompts that you frequently use as shortcuts. You can customize the new tab page with little widgets. And it's fast and they're working on an iOS version. And I don't know, it's an exciting space for me right now to watch like Comet, Dia.

Google, now Microsoft with Edge. It's the time for AI browsers. It is so funny. The AI industry is so funny to me because it's like... someone has an idea and they're all like, well, we've been doing that for ages. Like, oh, we do that as well. And then like, it's just like, there aren't. Yeah, it's kind of hilarious, to be honest. I like the name Comet. I do not like their icon. Yeah, I do not like the icon. I don't like the icon. I like the name.

Yeah, I think it's pretty good. I think they're rolling it out to more and more people, so it's pretty nice. Next up, Spotify. I know that it's... I have so many problems with Spotify as a company. I have fewer problems with Spotify as a music service. Your dog is just full of conflict. Yes. We don't need to roast you. You're roasting yourself. Yes, yes, yes. I myself as a person am full of conflict.

Yes, that is my thing. That is my thing. Yes. I am uncomfortable with a lot of things that I like and yet I do. Don't like Spotify as a company? Very much like Spotify as a music discovery service, especially. And I like the Spotify. This is a common theme for me as an API that lets me integrate Spotify with Zapier or with Claude. I'm doing things now that I actually...

like, for example, creating playlists with natural language using cloud. It's totally a thing that you can do now with these things. Or, you know, I came across an article...

Yeah. Or like, I remember a while back, I came across a YouTube video, like the hundred greatest guitar solos of all time, as judged by a professional guitar player, like a proper expert. And I remember I used Google Gemini to extract the 100 songs from the video because Google Gemini is the only one that can extract things from a YouTube video. And then I gave that text to Claude and I said, hey.

use your Spotify integration to make a playlist for me. And it did it. It was incredible. Yeah. Photos, messages, and WhatsApp. Pretty standard combo for my doc. Like, especially the messages on WhatsApp. They go together. Messages is basically for you guys. And WhatsApp is for everybody else in my life in Italy. Thank you. Ivory? Okay. Standard. Yeah. CharGPT and Cloud. I go back and forth between all of these AI tools. It doesn't help, obviously, that they're constantly...

changing things on a weekly basis and one week Chagypt is better, the other Claude is better. I think I use Claude and Perplexity more and I think I've been using Claude more and for longer than the others. I just generally prefer the cloud style, the UI, the integrations. I don't love how broken it can be sometimes, like cloud. multiple outages over the past year. And sometimes it just refuses, like it says, oh, Claude, the connection timed out. But it really didn't.

And if you refresh, you can see that it's actually still going. Man, I don't know what Anthropic is doing with their infrastructure behind the scenes. It drives me crazy sometimes. But also I get a lot of utility out of it. Like I did a lot of research for London or for...

You know, just finding things in my articles with Claude. It's been pretty good at that. That thing that you mentioned at the start, when you mentioned that, like, that they're constantly changing. That's the reason that I use ChatGPT, because, like, I... can't and don't want to keep up with the changes. Makes sense.

And like most of the things that are happening are like way more power than I need. Right. And also it's too impossible to understand which one of these 12 models is the right model. And I just feel like. I just try and pay attention to one of them and just go from there. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. And, you know, with this supposedly GPT-5 is coming out soon and it's going to change the world or whatever. We'll see. I don't know.

Discord. All right. Yeah. 172 notifications. This was the thing that jumped out to me. Something's going on here, man. Yeah. How do you get rid of badges? That's the solution. Just get rid of badges. Settings, notifications, and then you can... But what's going on, 172? What is it? I don't know. I don't reply to people. I don't read the announcements. Sometimes I join a Discord server. You win a lot of Discords?

Yeah, against my will, almost. I got rid of a bunch recently. Like, I don't know why I'm in the Google Gemini Discord, for example. Oh, dear. Yeah, I am actually in a bunch of discords that I don't want to be in. But sometimes, you know, when garbage piles up and like it's more like you look at it like, yes, I recognize that it's a whole pile of garbage.

but like i don't have the energy to click on that garbage right now yeah you know so what you should do is hide the garbage just turn off badges right that's exactly what i've done yes yeah uh calendar Yes, like a gentleman. I also don't have the energy to deal with the... corporate speak of fantastical or all the things are doing like i don't know yeah but you could so easily ignore that like you don't yeah but see that's my problem when i see something i i

immediately becomes a problem because I've seen it. And so at least in calendar, I got a pretty terrible calendar client, to be honest. But at least it doesn't show me 20 different things that are going to waste my time. Because I know myself, I'm going to click all those things. And I don't want to. I just want to see the month and the day and stuff in our shared family calendar. That's all I want to see. Okay. I basically only use it for our family calendar at this point.

Shortcuts. Use it a lot. The next one is a shortcut to upload images to the Mac Stories CDN. It's very nice because I can either click it and it works manually, lets me pick an image from Finder, or I can drag an image onto it and it's going to take it as an input. So, yeah, pretty nice. Reminders, again, only ever use it for family and shared shopping list. So right now, and you may be wondering, wait, where is your task manager? My task manager is in my browser.

Because a whole bunch of apps that I use on a regular basis are in my browser. I have Todoist. I have my RSS service, which is the iKnowReader website. I have social media that is not ivory. I have Readwise Reader. I have a Notion tab that I keep separate from basically the Relay Notion I keep in the browser so that I don't have to do the logout.

workspace switching in the Notion app for the Mac, I have a whole bunch of pinned tabs in Comet because I do work in the browser a bunch. Yes, that means I don't have a quick way to enter tasks. whenever I am on my Mac, but also I don't really enter a whole lot of tasks. So it's fine to have a little friction sometimes. It means I just have to go to my browser and click to do it. Couldn't you do that version?

I was going to say, obviously you can't do it with a shortcut if the app's not there. No, I could do it with the API, but also I don't really need to. I'm fine with just going there and doing it manually. Where am I? Notion, I guess, right? Notion and Notion Calendar. All right. So why I have Calendar and Notion Calendar? Notion Calendar is for work. Just for work stuff. I only have my work calendars.

in there. And I like it because Notion Calendar is by far the easiest experience that I've had when it comes to just creating and scheduling an event with a Zoom call link at the same time. It's very, very easy to do. Like you just... create an event, click add link, and immediately send the invitation. It's super easy, very nicely done. Also, something that I appreciated, I had a Notion database for our London trip.

And a bunch of those entries in the database had dates in them. And in Notion Calendar, you have an integration where you can connect a Notion database and the entries that have dates will show up in the calendar. Yes. So that's very cool, I think. And yeah, this is based on their acquisition of Kron from a couple of years ago.

Pretty good calendar app. And Notion, I mean, I'm basically living and breathing in Notion right now. I am this close to saying, I'm also going to do my task management in Notion, but I will not because I prefer to, like, I just prefer to... I have notes and articles and ideas in there, and I consider tasks a separate thing. And I don't love how it's not really optimized for task management. So I still prefer...

Notion tasks and then... If they do, then I will happily reconsider. Yeah. I guess you want to make fun of me for using superhuman. I mean, at this point, I feel like we've... we have covered the making fun of part. Like it's, it is an absurd email client, right? Like that's like it's all things too expensive. It does too much stuff. It's the shortcuts icon. Look at that. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. I think for longer, though, I think that logo has existed before the shortcuts. Superhuman's been around for a long time. Here's what I'll say, Federico. This doesn't hold up with your, like, I don't want the corporate speak in my calendar. Yeah, I know. I know. I know it's a problem. Superhuman's way worse. It's way worse, but also... It's the only app that does all the things I want, both on Mac iOS and iPadOS. I wish I could switch to something else.

But if I want to have all the things that superhuman has, it is literally my only option right now. I have searched. I have asked. There is no alternative right now. So, yeah.

I mean, I kind of like it. Like, it's really fast and really reliable. I think it's pretty good. Ooh, text edit. If anything, because sometimes I just need to have a quick way to... paste in a bunch of plain text and i just want to have a quick way to do it this just to me feels like something you would have a shortcut for like whatever that is you know i think you think of me as a person with a

like a shortcut for every single interaction whereas a lot of my shortcuts no I do I do think of you as that person yeah but no I'm more the kind of person like I do I prefer to have like complex things that either run in the background automatically or that do something once or maybe periodically. I do like my manual interactions with apps.

It's why I like Apple software after all. I do prefer just use... If everything was a shortcut, I think I would miss the joy of using apps on iOS and on the Mac. And I don't want to be the guy like, oh, look at me, I got 2,000 shortcuts. But then, you know, kind of misses the point, I think. But, you know, to each their own. Marked. excellent utility for previewing markdown so whenever i have a draft from a team member i can just drag and drop the file into the marked icon and i get a preview

with the Mac Stories visual theme applied, because I got a theme template in Markz. Really, really, really excellent application. The next one should be removed. Jump Desktop. makes sense in my MacBook Pro dock. This is my Mac Studio dock. It was migrated when I did the migration from the MacBook Pro to the Mac Studio and I never bothered to remove it, which I just did. It doesn't make sense to have...

Jump desktop in my Mac Studio dock because I do use it a bunch on the MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro. I don't use it here. Right. Terminal, I use it a lot. For local LLM stuff, keeping track of the Mac Studio RAM consumption, I use it a lot with the excellent MacTop command line utility that I installed a couple of months ago.

Yeah, I'm a big, big terminal boy over here. You lose it to look at how much RAM you're using? Yeah, especially when you're running things like DeepSeek, for example, on the Mac Studio, and you don't want to run out of RAM. I just think I don't understand it, Tom. You know what I mean? Like, I just, I didn't know. There's this program, there's this program called MacTop and you open it and you do pseudo MacTop.

And it basically gives you a real-time graph of your system resources and consumption in the terminal. It's very hackery looking. Do you feel like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix? Yes, I mean, yes, yes, yes. That's why I use it. Yeah. It's really cool. Yeah. I just use iStamp menus. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're not me. And I understand.

And I don't like to open the terminal. Every time I'm in terminal, I feel like I'm going to do something bad. Right, which you probably are. Yeah, I mean, me, yes. If I'm in terminal, something bad is happening or going to happen. Yeah, next time you're in there, Mike, you should type sudo rm tilde. No, don't. We do that now. You should try that. It's going to make your Mac faster.

I really wanted to just like quit the Zoom. No, please don't. Like just that moment, it's like he's gone. No one ever heard of me again. Next up is a shortcut to instantly put my display to sleep. When I'm done working, just click that and don't need to wait for my screensaver. I got a little subconscious about the fact that I got an OLED monitor.

And I'm always a little afraid of burning risk. So whenever I'm done working, if I am done with uploads and everything, I just run the shortcut and it shuts off the display and it goes to sleep. Does the Mac go to sleep? No, it doesn't. So the Mac's always on worldwide. It runs. Let me see. What command does it run? It runs. PM set display sleep now.

It runs a shell script in shortcuts. So you don't ever, your Mac is just always there, just idling. Always there, always ready, always good to go. Always on, worldwide. Always on.

And finally, finally, the Trifecta Audio Hijack OBS Zoom. No downloads, trash. That's it. Where do your downloads go? How do you find them? I click on the finder and it opens by default in my downloads directory. Interesting. Okay. So yeah, I roasted myself a little. Yeah, we didn't really need to roast you too much. There was like an internal conflict roast. You roasted from the inside, more like a microwave. I mean, too many calendar apps.

But other than that, I think it's mostly fine. Okay. Thank you. Steven, did you find out how many individual files are in your Devon thing? 107,429. Do you think there might be too many? No. Okay. It's a lot of files. It took it a minute to do that math, to be honest with you. I think that does it. for this week's show. If you want to find more of us, we're out on the internet. You can find Federico's work at max stories.net where he's the editor in chief. He's the, he's the boss over there.

telling people what to do. He's yelling at people to get screenshots in before the deadline. I really am not. You're really not. Yeah. Mac Stories is a pretty chill place to work. Maybe you should be, though. Maybe. Could be. So go over to Mac Stories. You can find Mike's work across Relay. It does a bunch of stuff here and at Cortex Brand and doing marketing for Crossboard now, which is exciting.

And The Enthusiast. Just keep adding to it. I also just want my outro to get longer and longer and longer. The enthusiast. So many places. You can find my writing at 512 pixels, and I'm the co-host of Mac Power Users here on Relay each and every Sunday. I'd like to thank our sponsor this week, Century.

If you love the show and want to hear more of it, check out Connected Pro, which is the longer ad-free version of the show that we do each and every week. There's a link to that in the show notes. There's also a link to send us feedback or follow-up. So check those out. And until next time, guys, say goodbye. Arrivederci. Cheerio. Bye, y'all.