¶ St. Jude Childhood Cancer Awareness
Welcome to the Mac Power Users. My name is David Sparks and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. Stephen Hackett. How's it going, Stephen? It's good, David. How are you? Excellent, man. Excellent. It's very hot here right now. We're dealing with the dog days of summer in Southern California, but that's okay. It's a dry heat. I don't know what that is.
Yeah, you don't, do you? You know, I am so bad at humidity. Daisy and I are heading to the land of humidity for a few days later this week, and I don't expect I will cope well. That's just me. It is September, though, and that means it is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
yeah we are officially into september now which is wild because we work on this campaign for so long and then it's like one day it's live which is a little bit wild But people probably know that each September, Relay rallies support for the lifesaving mission of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, which is September.
And we do this because my family was directly impacted by childhood cancer. Our oldest son is a childhood cancer survivor, thanks to St. Jude. But it has really become... about so many other stories. We've been doing this since 2019. And since 2019, the Relay community has raised over $4.1 million for St. Jude, which is just... absolutely incredible. And you think, well, why is this important? Why do we need to raise money? Why do we need to talk about this? Well, it's because St. Jude...
cares for some of the world's sickest children, regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. That means that families like mine never receive a bill from St. Jude. And I can tell you As a parent of a child in this situation, that is an unbelievable gift that you can focus on your child and their health and your family and not worry about things like insurance or hospital bills.
It's incredible. Patients at St. Jude receive the customized care they need no matter what barriers they face. And again, it's only possible... because of supporters like the Relay community, right? It's only possible because people care about this so much. One thing I want to talk about briefly is the Transition Oncology Program. This is really cool. So at St. Jude, the end of treatment is not the end of support, right? So for our son, he ended treatment back in 2010. They continue to see him.
We can even have annual checkups. There's anything going on. But part of that is a transition from treatment to everyday life. And that's a really... hard transition as someone who went through it it's really difficult when all of a sudden like treatment's over you're kind of thrust back into the real world and you got to figure it out and so the transition oncology program
develops a treatment summary to help families understand what happened with their child and their health, and that they partner with local health care providers to move forward. And they screen for possible mental and emotional health concerns. find out if the child needs school or job training support, help with dealing with health insurance, help families access health care services, and provide education about the child's current and future health needs.
It's comprehensive care at St. Jude. And again, only made possible because of generous... And so I want you to go to stjude.org slash relay. It's the top link in the show notes this week. You can learn more about the campaign there. We have some cool donation incentives. including a macOS screensaver by James Thompson, the writer of Peacalc, sticker pack. But you can also give a couple unique ways. So if you're set up to give through donor advised fund giving.
You can do that with St. Jude. There's information on the page at stjude.org slash relay explaining kind of the steps to make a donor advised fund gift. But also thousands of companies match their employees' donations to St. Jude. And it's not just big companies, right? Yes, of course, like Apple and Google and Microsoft, right? The companies we talk about, of course they have.
employer matching, but a lot of smaller companies do too. And so if you're unsure, ask somebody at work. But there's also, again, information on the webpage about how this works. And this is a way for your money to go further. A lot of companies will match you. Some companies will go above that. It's a really great way to make the campaign grow.
And so if you're set up for donor advice fund giving or you are eligible for employer match giving, check that information out. We do this every year because this is important to us. It's important to the world. And by joining us, you can help make more cures possible. Together, we can give families facing childhood cancer more tomorrows at stjude.org slash relay.
Yeah, just to follow up a few points, the employer matching has been really great for us. Daisy and I save every month for this drive every year. And since she went back full time, because she works for Disney, they match it. In fact, last year we had a fun experience. Several Disney employees.
contacted my wife internally saying hey i'm a listener too and i you know they all like got together like the disney donors that's awesome and the uh yeah and the uh the other thing is we heard this week from one of our listeners here in Southern California, whose son is dealing with a brain tumor. And while St. Jude, they did not need to use St. Jude for treatment.
He reports that because St. Jude publishes all of their papers on Creative Commons licenses, a lot of the treatment that his son received was, you know, benefit of the St. Jude contributions. Gang, there's just nothing better. Give money to kids with cancer and help make them better. It's a great cause. There's nothing to question here. Just give them some money.
And let's show as a community that we care and we can help. Absolutely. That's a really cool story. That's really cool. Isn't it? It really made me feel good to read that.
¶ Upcoming Apple iPhone Event Preview
Anyway, today on More Power Users, we're releasing this just a few days before Apple's big iPhone announcement on September 9th. We will be recording that show. We don't do this all the time, but we'll be recording the show on the day of the event and releasing it as soon as possible. We're getting out early this year. And on more power users, we're going to talk about what we think. Heading in.
Our thoughts about what the rumors are and what we'd like to see. Yeah. iPhone season is back. It comes around faster and faster. There is a rumor of an orange iPhone and I have not. Talk to you about it personally or on the show. I've been holding it. And I am definitely asking you about that today, more power users. Anyway, feedback show. Yeah.
¶ NAS Backup with Parachute App
I want to start out with using NAS as backup. So as we've talked about different storage solutions over the years. In conjunction with like iCloud Drive and iCloud Photo, a lot of people want to make sure that data is... backed up and it's a little bit tricky with cloud providers right it's like is my data on my local disk is it in my time machine how does it work and this app showed up in a forum post over on talk
MacPowerUsers.com. It's called Parachute Backup. And this is really a cool app. I downloaded it. I've been using it, backing up my iCloud data. to my NAS. And it has kind of two modes, it will backup iCloud drive, and iCloud photos. And you can do a one time backup, or you can do scheduled backups, which is what I've done.
So once a week, it will look at my iCloud photo library and copy everything over to my NAS just right over the network. But this is where the magic is. Parachute backup can even backup. files or photos that aren't on your local disk. If you have optimized storage turned on, or like you just have your thumbnails on your Mac, right? Or not all of your folders are local in iCloud Drive for whatever reason.
It will basically download those on demand, copy them to your NAS and then get rid of the file. So it's not filling up, you know, it's not filling up your laptop overnight. And because it does incremental backups, you know, the first one. Took a while, even over fast networking. But after that, it's really quick, just like Time Machine is, right? Those incremental backups can be pretty fast.
I've been super happy with this. I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, and I think it gets my thumbs up. And... You get it for the whopping price of $5. It's just nuts. This is going to be a frequently recommended app for me. Anybody, if you're running a NAS, check this out. Yeah, it's fantastic.
¶ Managing Automation Trigger Conflicts
A friend of mine, Francis, he's a lab member. We got to know each other over the years. He had an interesting question that I thought would be good for feedback. He says his problem is managing shortcuts. If one app uses something versus another and some shortcuts are app-specific or system-wide, how do you manage all this stuff? And I'm...
Partly at fault for the question because I teach apps like Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts and Text Expander and all these different apps. And the question comes, how do you deal with conflicts? And how do you keep that from becoming a system that crashes into itself? I get this question in various forms all the time. I thought I'd address it here.
I do get that problem once in a while, where I will hit a keyboard shortcut and expect something to happen, and the Mac makes the little electronic fart noise, and it doesn't do anything. Over the years, I've got kind of a system for that. So for me, the keyboard shortcuts primarily arise from keyboard maestro. I try to make that like the place where I use keyboard shortcuts.
like Apple shortcuts that I make, you know, for automation, I trigger those via Alfred. I don't trigger them via a built-in keyboard shortcut, even though Apple allows you to sign them. That is partly because of this conflict problem, also because I feel like shortcuts isn't always good at recognizing them, even though you've programmed them, sometimes they don't trigger.
But I'm very careful about where I put shortcuts in. So whenever I hit a conflict, the first place I usually go is Keyboard Maestro. And in Keyboard Maestro, you can have it show all your shortcuts or all your macros.
probably about three or four hundred and i organized them by shortcut trigger you can do that if you look on the right side of that window you can hit the little arrow and then just go down and look whatever you're trying to trigger and see if it that there's something there that's conflicting And often that solves the problem for me. And honestly, I don't have it too much anymore because I'm so mindful of it at this point, but like.
clean shot x i've put some shortcuts in clean shot x but i'm very conscious when i create them that they're ones that are not going to conflict with um you know with a uh existing keyboard micro master script Of course, I always test them as soon as I create them, so that'll expose a conflict immediately. The other thing I do that I think is very helpful is I am a big proponent of the hyperkey.
where i remap my caps lock key to become shift command option uh control and that gives me a whole nother set of keyboards shortcuts i can press and then of course famously, I've got a flock of stream decks that I can assign shortcuts to. So the answer, Francis, frankly, is just to be mindful about it.
And if you start hitting conflicts, then you're going to very quickly adapt a system because you're going to realize it. But for me, the trick is accepting that Keyboard Maestro is kind of the beginning and largely ending place for keyboard shortcuts. Yeah, I think that's about where I am too. I've moved a lot of things into Keyboard Maestro over the last six months or so, including all of my text expansion. I've moved out of Text Expander into Keyboard Maestro.
And it offers all the features that I needed, at least out of that, right, where I can have, you know, a dropdown and pick different things to expand or have smart, you know, dates and it actually knows the date and that sort of thing. Um, and yeah, I think, uh, I think you kind of just got to pick a lane here and I think keyboard and maestro is a great lane to pick.
¶ Personal Automation and Team Workflows
Bob wrote in, I love automation, but my colleagues think I'm overcomplicating things. How do you balance personal efficiency with team collaboration? I think for me, the line is somewhere around. Does your personal automation cause issues for your team, right? Am I forcing something on somebody else that doesn't work the way that they work or gets in their way?
You know, I think that that's worth the conversation. And, you know, I don't know a lot of the specifics about what Bob is asking, but when I was thinking through about how I work with other people, I try for my automation or my systems. not to really interfere with other people. And I've seen sometimes that I can go wrong. And so having kind of understanding where your work bumps up against somebody else, I think is important.
Yeah. My goal with my personal automation is that nobody knows I'm doing it. Right. I mean, I just, I just want it to, yeah, I just want it to happen and it doesn't impact upon their work. Back in the days when I was in a Windows office and I also ran Apple and Mac stuff, I mean, I was running automation on a completely separate operating system.
Nobody knew, but it was making me more efficient. And I do think, Bob, the trick is to realize that this idea of making the computer more efficient, making it do the grunt work for you. is an excellent thing to pursue it's you know one of the reasons the show exists but not everybody's going to be interested and your job isn't to evangelize it's just to get the most out of it for yourself and and if they don't know that you've got
¶ Rethinking Read-It-Later Apps
you know, scripts that are doing a bunch of this stuff, but you're getting your work done faster. So be it. Okay. Uh, Mark wrote in about read it later apps. Um, man, I feel like we just talk about this a lot, but I think a lot of people like there's a. Okay, I had this theory the other day, like when I was looking in the notes, I had this thought, I want to run it by you on the show. After Google Reader died.
It felt like, oh my gosh, RSS is going away. And it was weird for a little while. But now, all these years later... There's just a cornucopia of RSS services and apps out there that you can choose from, right? And you can even mix and match like the service and the client. And I feel like something has happened in the read it. read it later space that is similar and, and, you know, pocket has gone away, but Instapaper is still here. Safari reading list is still here, but there's also like.
all the new ones right good links and raindrop.io like there's lots of great things out there um so i think mark is feeling this a little bit mark said I'm drowning in read later apps. I have articles saved in Safari reading lists, Instapaper, and more. How do I consolidate without losing everything? So I looked into this.
particularly with Safari Reading List and Instapaper. Mac Stories has a great article on how to use shortcuts to export articles out of Safari Reading List, and then you could input them into lots of other things. And I would say basically any third-party app is probably going to be better than Safari Reading List. Safari Reading List is pretty basic.
It doesn't help you if you're not a Safari user or not a Safari user all the time, right? Like my browser usage has kind of gotten split between Safari and Chrome for different things. And so. In my case, Safari reading list isn't all that helpful because sometimes I am saving things out of Chrome. But check out that Mac Stories article. I've got it in the show notes. And Instapaper has an export tool. Most of these...
Where I ended up was GoodLinks, which I've talked a lot about in the show over the years. It's really straightforward. Syncs with iCloud. It's on the Mac. ipad and iphone and it's good on all three which is not always the case sometimes it's like well two are good but the one in the middle is kind of weird um it's great and i basically exported out of instapaper
and imported into GoodLinks. And, you know, so I have my entire history there. Do I need that? No, I don't. Do I enjoy having it? Yes, I do. So check out GoodLinks if you haven't. try to at least give it a shot. But yeah, I think one place is what you need. And then you can use tags or folders or whatever to organize within the one app. All right.
When's the last time you researched your history for something? It comes up sometimes. It's like, hey, have I ever saved anything about this computer or this Apple event? Sometimes it comes in handy. Yeah. I'll tell you, I've been really having a rethink about read it later in general because of the emails we get about this. And there are so many people that carry this like burden.
of this corpus of their own personal internet that they've saved and curated. And I think that for most people, this is just a big waste of time. I just think that something has happened here. It's got so easy to save stuff that we spend all our time saving stuff and not our time reading stuff. And I think you should really look at this carefully. Like my advice to Mark is.
well, how much of this stuff are you really going back and reading? And maybe it's time to just start fresh. Let's say you're a Safari user. Just say like every Sunday, I'm going to clear out my entire reading list. And if I don't read it, I'm going to delete it and I'll start again. You know, just like.
Think about ways to do this where you don't have thousands of unread articles that you're carrying around with you in the theory that one day you're going to do it. I was looking at mine, and I had saved articles about... ios 14 that i thought i might want to write a blog post about it's like that stuff's in there you know it's like come on give me a break and i'm really i haven't decided exactly what this means for me but i am scaling back on this stuff and
I'm going to try and spend more time actually reading the current stuff than tagging and foldering and managing old stuff that I'm probably never going to read. Sure. I feel the same way about... Like I have some good Substack subscriptions, but I don't carry Substack deck. You know, I just open it and read it. You know, like at times that historically I'd be more tempted to look at social media.
I will just read a good article on Substack or read something out of my Read It Later app. But I'm really trying to make this more of a thing where you jump into the flow as opposed to try and carry your own. you know, curated version of the internet around in your pocket. Yeah, no, I get that. And I fall into the trap a little bit of like, I just opened good links. I've got 14 things in my sort of inbox.
And like three of them are for future MPU episodes. And I really just need to like put them in those outlines. And I haven't yet. So I do, I am kind of bad sometimes about.
using it as like a temporary place and that's probably not great either you know well one of the things i'm thinking i haven't decided on this yet is just getting way more aggressive about devon think capture for that kind of stuff And then treating a read-it-later service more like just a consumer of information and not as a content creator, if that makes sense.
But yeah, I am having thoughts about all. That's the reason I pulled this question, because I thought, yeah, this is something I'm evolving on myself. I do think there are a lot of folks out there. who are spending too much time managing these lists and not enough time just reading what's interesting. Oh, definitely.
¶ Minimal Travel Tech Essentials
And I can say that because I am a violator. Grace wrote in, I travel constantly for work. What's your minimal but complete mobile setup for staying productive on planes and in hotel rooms? I was hoping she would say planes, trains, and automobiles. It's right there, Grace. Just right there. I thought about this. I travel so much less than I used to, but I have a 14-inch MacBook Pro as my...
Like it's my work computer is what I'm talking into right now. It's right over there. And it is what I take with me when I travel. I kind of put this in a work trip mode because that's what she was asking about. I will always travel if it's a work trip and I have my MacBook Pro, always grab the mouse off my desk, which is a Logitech MX Master 3S. Just because prolonged trackpad use for me gets a little bit uncomfortable. And very often if I'm on a work trip, like...
You know, we may be recording a show after an event and I, you know, I'm doing the edit or I'm getting it to Jim and, you know, writing and doing all these things. And so I found a mouse really useful in that. And I mean, this mouse is bulky. You can find a travel mouse.
And I know some people like the little like portable travel routers. I know our friend Casey List is a fan of that sort of thing. I've never really kind of felt the need for that. And so for me, it's the laptop, it's the mouse and. If I'm going somewhere where we're doing a show, I will bring an external SSD to have a copy of all the files on it because I'm not taking my time machine drive with me. And, you know, backblaze on hotel Wi-Fi.
And you're trying to back up, you know, eight gigs of audio. It's not ideal. And so I will bring like a little like scratch SSD just to have a copy of any files or anything I might be working on.
as a as a back a temporary backup on the trip yeah it really depends for me you know work trip can really vary because for me a work trip often involves apple stuff and then i need to bring you know various apple devices if i'm going to be testing things yeah and i was thinking about this in context because this week i'm taking a short a very short trip for a few days
And my rig for this trip, I've decided, is going to be my MacBook Air and my iPhone. And I'm not bringing an iPad and very little tech. But what I did do was order. A little folding keyboard for my phone. Okay. Which it's... I'll put a link in the notes. It's just, I found a nice one that has a, the one I had wasn't working anymore. I think the battery died in it and it was micro USB. I got a USB-C one. It's solid.
it folds in half so you can stick it in a very small bag it doesn't really fit in your pocket but it'll fit in a small bag and anywhere i need to if i have to like sit and deal with you know extended email conversation or something i can get a keyboard out and uh that's my my big rig this it's just the macbook air and and my phone and a keyboard okay yeah i will normally take an ipad too but
You know, if I'm going to put the beta on something or have it as a TV in the hotel room kind of thing, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's like for today's after show, it's like. That's something that has me thinking about some of these future phones that are going to get bigger screens and things. This is an experiment for me. I've never gone out really kind of without the iPad. Sometimes I've left the laptop at home, but...
For reasons I will explain later in the show, I actually definitely need the laptop with me on this trip. Sure. But yeah, I think it just depends. I think you can take a lot less than you used to, Grace. And I do think that even the lightest MacBook Air these days is good enough for most things you're going to do on a trip. I think so too, definitely.
¶ Sustainable Productivity System Habits
Lisa wrote in, my ADHD makes it hard to stick with productivity systems long term. I'll use something religiously for two to three months, then abandon it. Any advice for building sustainable habits? Yes, this is a thing that I think a lot of us Mac Power users deal with. There's always the new and shiny just around the corner. And maybe it has one feature that does something better than your existing tools. So why not spend a week switching over?
only to find out in two weeks there's another tool that has that other feature that you've always wanted. And yeah, that's a thing we do. Again, I have sinned. I have come up with a rule, though, the last several years that has really served me well. People in the labs will already know this. I've shared this in the labs a lot. I've decided that I'm only allowed to make switches of platform and big productivity software tool suites.
in the week before, between Christmas and New Year's every year. That's like it. That's the only time I'm allowed to transition. Good examples, note plan. You know, we did a whole show on it. A bunch of my labs members are super into it. And people are like, well, are you going to switch to note plan? Well, I'm not even allowed to switch until December. So I'll run some data through it. I'll be keeping my eyes on it.
I don't know if I'll switch to it or not, but that's not even on the table for me right now. And I think that's kind of a good, just make up a rule for yourself that you're going to stick with what you have. Try for 12 months, honestly. If that makes you really itchy, say six months or something. Or how about anytime there's a new tool, you're not allowed to adopt it until four months after it's...
you know, you first discovered it. So just give yourself time to get a cooling off period built into the system. And also realize that it's not the tools, right? It's really about how you spend your time doing the work.
And I understand the attraction, but don't get caught in that trap. Yeah, I think that's all really good. Really good advice. And it's like the classic thing, right? I mean... we all do it yeah yeah no none of us here this is a non-judgment environment when it comes to this kind of thing because we all do it we're all tempted to do it and uh you know it's like
I just heard Steve and I'm like, man, maybe I should switch it all into Good Links. It's really pretty. It's like, nope, can't do that. Not allowed. Not yet. We've got to wait until the end of the year. That's great.
¶ Markdown to Word Document Workflow
Amanda wrote in, I'm obsessed with Markdown for writing, but my colleagues need Word documents. What is the smoothest workflow for drafting in Markdown and delivering in Word? I would say, one, look at our previous conversation about your personal systems not impacting those around you. That aside, I found two ways that I think... You should look at one is called the Markdown to Word Converter. It's online. I don't know anything about this website. I would not paste.
secret company documents into here, but, you know, it's there online for you. If you're on a Mac, which I assume you are, Marked 2. can also do this. So Marked is a previewer of Markdown and a bunch of other plain text syntaxes, but it has an export function and you can export to a bunch of different file formats.
And one of those is including Word. Now, I tried this on several different Markdown documents that I just had kind of laying around. And I would say that I had better than mixed luck, but it wasn't... perfect. Some formatting stuff got a little weird. If you've got tables and things, it's not perfect. But if you're just doing basic text, it definitely gets the job done.
But that Markdown to Word Online tool and Marked2 for the Mac, I think, are good places to start, at least. Yeah, and just to add on to that, first of all, Marked is from Brett Terpstra, who guests on the show all the time, and he's a friend of the show. Great guy. My beloved Drafts also has an export to rich text format. And that's what most of these are doing, is they're saving as a rich text file. And you can drop that into Word.
That's not exactly Word, but you can paste it in and it gets you pretty close. Another one that I think is really nice is IA Writer. I think it's a really attractive Markdown Writer. there's just a button in it. You push a button and it converts it to rich text right in the application. So there's a bunch of these. And what you have to realize is that at some point you get off the markdown bandwagon. And I think maybe that's what's underlying the question is like, yeah.
What you can't expect is to put it in Word as Markdown formatting syntax and expect your coworkers to learn Markdown and write their edits in Markdown. You can't do that. At some point when you decide to share it with other people, then it goes into Word. It becomes a rich text document. And then the markdown you have left.
that phase of the project. The books I used to write with Wiley Press, it was the same thing. They wanted them in Microsoft Word, the editors did that. I wrote the books in Scrivener in Markdown, but they never knew that, you know. When I got to the point where I wanted an editor to see it, I rendered it in rich text and dropped it in Word and, you know, kind of like burned the ships on the shore, as they say. And that's what you just got to be willing to do.
And it's okay that you love Markdown, but at some point, if you're collaborating with others, you've got to go where they are.
¶ Content Creation Research Organization
Emily wrote in, I'm drowning in research materials. How do you organize information for content creation without it becoming overwhelming? I thought that would be kind of fun just to talk about our pipelines since she's asked. And I'll say that for me, Notion is the backbone of it now. And so each bit of content becomes a record in Notion. And I can talk later about some cool ways that I'm creating those.
All the research gets saved to Dev and Think. And when I do the writing stuff, I actually do it in drafts. So I don't do the writing in Notion. I do the writing in drafts. But again, at some point, my collaborators don't realize that. or don't know about it because at some point it gets rendered in rich text and dropped into a notion record and but the big key for me is the research database which is is a dev and think database how about you
Yeah, mine is similar. Dev and Think is where all my research materials live. And I have it broken up basically by topic. So I can go in like my top level things. Okay, there's like a hardware database. And in there I have a collection for the Apple I, the Apple II, the Apple III, Apple Silicon, the iPhone, right, the Jonathan, these sort of various categories.
I've talked a lot on the show. I'm not a tagger. Tags don't really click with me, but there's lots of organization within Dev and Think Tags or otherwise. Now, I don't... have the, like my sort of creative projects are basically fall in two buckets. It's a podcast in which case we have a sheet and notion for each episode and we're just collaborating.
or I'm writing something for 512 pixels. And in that case, no one else sees it. Occasionally, I'll have something run through an editor, but not usually. And so those are just markdown documents. Or sometimes I'm writing, most of the time, honestly, writing directly in MarsEdit. So I don't have sort of the project lifecycle that a lot of people may have. And so for me, it's really just the research stuff and Dev and Think, and then whatever I'm writing or preparing for on the show.
Yeah, I actually have a helper now with the posting process and editing. So when I write something, I assign it to the editor in Notion, and that person reads it. you know once over make sure i didn't embarrass myself and then they put it into the content system in wordpress but i'm the one who actually goes and reads it one last time and pushes the button so
¶ 1Password for Secure Sharing
I guess that's the other piece of it I didn't mention. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password. the password manager that both David and I trust to keep us secure online. I'm a big fan of 1Password for families, so we have this set up in the Hackett household.
My wife and I can share passwords with each other to our shared accounts, right? Things like the bank or the utility company, having our secure notes for information that we need, that sort of thing. But we can also have our own personal vault. doesn't really need access to my Blue Sky account. I don't want to clog up her 1Password with that. She doesn't care. So that's in my personal vault, all within the 1Password family setup. And this is great because you can have up to five family members.
for $4.99 per month paid annually. So as my kids get a little bit older, I can bring them into 1Password. We can control what accounts they see. They don't need the bank account. And they get their own personal vaults as well, just like my wife and I do. It is great to be able to share information.
with family like this in a secure way. And it's more than just passwords. Of course, 1Password has secure notes. You can store bank account information, credit card, debit card information, pass keys, and much more. So to learn more, go to onepassword.com slash MPU. There's a free trial waiting for you there, and you will get 20% off you sign up, including... 1Password for families. So go check it out, 1Password.com.
¶ Leveraging AI for Admin Tasks
Steven, I thought it'd be fun to check in on AI. I go through these various phases where I try to take advantage of this technology. Then I pull away from it and I come back to it. But I haven't talked to you about it. What are you doing with AI these days? Yeah, so really nothing generative. It's like I'm not asking. I mostly just use ChatGPT, not asking it for images.
Not asking it to like, hey, so one of the other things I do, I mentioned a couple of my projects in the previous chapter. Also, of course, work for David Smith on Widget Smith and Padamor++, etc. And I've spent a large part of my summer rewriting the text in Widgetsmith because we, with iOS 26, right, it's a comprehensive refresh of the UI. We're looking at every screen. And so I have been...
working on that. And it's just me, but I view myself as a writer above anything else. That's how I self-identify my work. And so I just can't ask the machine to write something for me. I do use Grammarly for grammar check, but I very rarely even take its suggestions. And so I'm not doing a lot of things that I think a lot of people do. However...
In reflecting on this, what I have noticed is my usage of chat GPT as a search engine has really gone up. And so I don't know if we talked about this on this show. I've mentioned a couple places, but I moved over the summer. And I inherited a lot of house projects, right? Anytime you move, there's just lots of stuff to do. And I found myself looking at a hot water heater.
And like, oh, I wonder what this setting should be and using ChatGPT as a search engine and reading what it says, but then following the sources to get that data. I got to say it's pretty compelling as a search tool and not, you know, I do have problems with how it was trained, et cetera. Like page views are way down the internet because of this. I understand all that, but as a search engine, it is pretty compelling. And so that's where most of my.
usage is right now. Yeah, I feel like one of my jobs as the Max Barkey Labs leader is to find uses for emerging technologies for my members. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. So I have actually been very much on, I've been exploring with AI aggressively. I have a paid account with Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. just the lowest tier but i have a paid account and i'm constantly testing them there i've made a lot of videos in the labs about things you can do and my my goal is to find
is not to be an alarmist about AI and say this is the worst thing, you should ignore it, or say this is going to solve all your problems, but just to kind of look like, well, where is this actually useful? That's kind of the goal. I'll tell you, in general, my attitude toward AI is I want it to do donkey work for me. You know, when I say donkey work, I mean...
the background stuff. I want it to do the admin work. I don't know if you've heard that story of someone saying like, hey, now that I've got AI drawing pictures for me, it gives me more time to do my laundry. And I want the opposite of that. I want the AI to do my laundry so I have more time to draw pictures. And I feel like you, my humanness and the stuff I come up with and develop.
is unique to me. And if I'm not doing that, then what's the point? But I do think AI can help in, in maybe the donkey work and making this stuff easier. And my most recent foray has been. looking at the MCP integration stuff that we have now available to us. And I am particularly at this moment, I mean, this is all relative and it changed over time as I'm very, um, I'm very much into Claude. I think Claude for me, in terms of giving me responses and doing work for me, has been the most reliable.
So I have connected Claude to my Notion database using MCP and I have found it really useful for donkey work. Like for instance, one of the things I have is a sponsor database. I had a list of sponsors in Apple Notes and each one had their own note. It had, you know, kind of a history of what they've sponsored for me and who the contact person is. And, you know, I had these Apple Notes.
But I wanted it all moved into Notion because maybe someday I would like someone else on the team to handle that, not me, right? And using MCP, I was able to point Claude at my Apple Notes and point it at my Notion database and say, Take each one of these Apple Notes and create a database in Notion on it and make fields for the charge rate, the contact person, the product name, the link, the email address.
And it said, sure. And it went off. And about 15 minutes later, I had a database built in Notion with all that information, something that would have taken me hours to manually create. And to me, that's the kind of stuff I'm really particularly interested in.
Another one I did like that was I have all these Apple event notes and we got the Apple event next week. And again, they're in Apple notes, but I'm trying to like consolidate this stuff into notion. I'm trying to be a responsible person about the way this business is run. So I said, okay.
take all these Apple notes from Apple events and create a database with the name of the event, the date of the event, and, you know, put my outline from the event into the record. And it did all of that just fine. And I said, OK, now add a YouTube link field, add a field for a URL, and go on the internet and find the YouTube video of the presentation and add it to the database.
And it did it for like 60% of them. And it said, I can't find the others. You'll have to find the others. And that's okay. I feel like it's a robot. That kind of stuff, getting out of it to me is very useful. And that's the kind of stuff I like kind of want to see this happening for me. I also have it read my posts and ask me reflective questions.
And I've told it, you know, who my typical audience members are, what would be the questions they would naturally have if they read this. And then I try to make sure I have answers for those. But that's one of those things where the process of doing that has got me better in the writing process of asking myself those questions. So I'm not sure the AI is as necessary for that anymore as it used to be.
I do have it to kind of grammar check, but I still feel like Grammarly is not going anywhere. I just don't think it's as good as Grammarly in terms of catching it. And Grammarly catches it as you're writing it, which I kind of think is good. And we've talked about this on the show before, but I think the voice to text dictation thing is revolutionary. Like we can now just reliably get a recording, you know, dictation of whatever we do. Like I, I just.
Yesterday, I was behind on day one entries. And I sat on my chair, and I just used voice memos. And that's the built-in Apple app. And I recorded two days of journal entries. And the built-in dictation was just fine. And I was able to put that into day one with a little grammar check. So I am finding ways to make it work for me. But my angle to this is not.
to be generative with it as you would say but mainly to get it to do work for me and i feel like this recent expansion of it being able to be an agent and go into things like notion and create records is really useful like i have a personal database area of notion that is just like a bunch of junk i've thrown in there over you know a couple years and it's not organized and i said you know look at that personal space
and give me a plan on how to organize it and it went in there and said you've got a bunch of duplicate notes but they're not exact duplicates some of them have more than others and i could say merge all those so they're all just one keep you know don't lose any data Now create a folder structure. It did all that for me. It's like having somebody go do that admin work for you. So that's the kind of stuff I'm getting out of it right now. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. And I agree with you.
Your role in the labs is to experiment with this stuff, right? And it's interesting how people sort of click with one of these services or another. Like I know a lot of people who clawed. really works for them and their workflow right and the mcp thing is really interesting we talked a little bit about it last week but it's a way to kind of glue these things together in new and interesting ways
And that's pretty interesting. And I think that sort of technology is what can bring this past. I'm just opening an app and like asking the robot a question and it gives me an answer, right? It's... building things, multiple steps, linking things together that makes us more powerful. Absolutely. And this is just the...
¶ LLM Evolution and Apple's Position
We're just cracking the door on this stuff. Another thing on AI I'd like to say, and I'm going to write a blog post about this in a few weeks. I've already started drafting it. But while we're on the topic, I think. this whole chat gpt5 thing it deserves a little bit of a comment okay so chat gpt5 came out and a lot of people are saying well i don't understand it's not really that good it's not really that much better and you know when you look back at the
prior chat GPT iterations from two to three, from three to 3.5, 3.5 to four. It was like a huge leap in ability. And the general consensus is, well, this isn't that much better. You know, it's, it's not the huge leap we were getting before. And I think, and this is, this may come back to bite me someday, this bit of tape. So if you want to someday rub on my face, you should mark this, this timestamp, but I think.
it indicates that LLM evolution is slowing down. I mean, the thing that has happened with GPT-5 is it got a lot cheaper to do this, but the actual results aren't much better. That's my general experience. And I think I'm not alone in that observation. And there are a lot of scientists that were arguing that we're never going to get to general intelligence just through an LLM model.
It made such huge leaps in the prior iterations that people started to think, well, maybe if we just throw enough servers at it, we can get Commander data out of this LLM. And I think that we're starting to see that's probably not the case, that it's going to take more than an LLM to really push artificial general intelligence. And we're farther away from that than we thought.
That's just a general observation right now. Now, maybe next week they'll come up with some breakthrough with LLM technology that it suddenly starts leaping forward again. But it feels to me like it's slowing down. And I think... As an Apple person, this is hugely beneficial for Apple because, you know, Apple's...
you know, the knock we've made on the show is that they kind of were asleep at the switch is this, you know, LLM thing was growing up and there's no reason why Apple couldn't have had its own frontier model, but they didn't even want to buy the chips. You know, there's all the stories are out there and. siri is not good and like all the stories you know we can talk about but if this is generally slowing down and if the trend line is now not necessarily better but cheaper
I feel like this whole thing about LLMs is going to commoditize. It's going to get super cheap. And the difference between the cutting edge LLM and a pretty good LLM is not that far off. where Apple's going to be able to just hitch into this now and apply this technology to their hardware, and we're going to get good enough LLM technology on Apple stuff, and they're going to have got away with.
you know, missing out on this. Does that make sense? I think it does. I mean, I think chat GPT five, that release, I think really caught attention of a lot of people because of it. Cause it was not. A huge jump in terms of what it could do. And at the same time, you have Sam Altman and others trying to redefine on the fly what general AI, what that could mean. Yeah.
So yeah, they're also hitting the wall with things like power and cooling and how fast NVIDIA can make these chips. I don't think we really know, but it does feel like something has shifted in the last... several months that this isn't going to move as fast as it has been. And I'm okay with that on a few different bases. I also feel like culturally we need to catch up with these technologies.
And we need a minute to catch our breath and figure out where they apply. Just like I was talking about, like, how do I use these things to help make better stuff? There's ways I can do that. But when everything was revolutionizing every few months. It felt like you couldn't keep up enough to figure out what this meant. And giving us a little bit of time to adjust to this, I think is good. So take all this with a grain of salt, like I said.
The AI people have fooled us before and come out with big changes and big improvements very quickly that we didn't expect. So maybe we're just paused for a moment and it's going to jump to the breakneck speed again next week. It feels to me like things are slowing down and getting cheaper, which means this LLM service is more of a commodity thing that Apple can just tap into with the vendor of choice.
It's also changed kind of my thinking on whether they should be acquiring anybody. Like if this stuff is slowing down, Apple doesn't need to go and buy Anthropic. They could just license Claude. And in a few years, they'll probably be able to roll their own. That's good enough. And I don't know. I just feel like this may be actually good for Apple. Now, I'm not saying that this is three-dimensional chess by Tim Cook.
Five years ago, he said this stuff is going to hit a wall and we don't need to spend $100 billion a year researching it because we don't need to because it's going to slow down. I don't think he had a crystal ball. I think they're getting away with something here. But I also think that it may be in their benefit. I mean, in the long run.
the market's going to look at Apple and say, well, you didn't spend all that money, but you still have enough AI and your stuff that people get what they want. So you, maybe you were the smart one. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really interesting time for Apple. You know, it's not even in the document, but Google had their Pixel 10 event recently. On the Pixel, they basically are doing some of the things Apple showed off now almost a year and a half ago at WNBC. We're like, I'm on the phone.
with the airline and it has gone and found my reservation and surfaced it for me on the screen, right? The things that Apple was talking about doing through Siri. Now, we've got to see how good it is on the Pixel 10, right? Reviews are just barely out, and I don't think there are many of them in the world yet. But even in that regard, companies are moving forward. But at the same time, I can't help but think...
this is how technology always goes, right? There's always big, big leaps and bounds. And then things, the progress slows down, right? Moore's law was true until it wasn't. And maybe that's just, maybe that's what we're seeing here. Maybe they'll develop a different type of technology that can get the bar rolling again. Well, I mean, the thing with the LLM, the underlying technology, as I think a lot of our listeners know, it's just smashing words and tokens together.
The systems that learn from their own experience are kind of the more general intelligence facing systems. And those are earlier in development. I still think like in the next. decade or two, we're going to be facing some crises from artificial intelligence that we've been talking about. But maybe we're not going to face them quite as early. And if that's the case, I'm all for that.
This is not fake technology. This is still very useful, even if it's slowing down, like I was just talking about earlier. There are ways to implement this stuff to make yourself more efficient and effective. So let's all figure that stuff out for now.
¶ No List App Developer Experience
Last time you spoke about your new app, The Know List, and wanted to follow up and see how it was going. Yeah, I mean, that's such a weird thing. I actually did it because of the guests. I wanted to just see if I could finish it off. I'd been working on that thing for like 10 years and I could never get it right. AI, I thought, got me over the hump. And it's a very simple app. I mean, it's just a one screen where you add to a list.
That being said, I have now experienced the life of a developer because I released it. And some people are having it not hold data. Like there's data loss, which is not what you want on an app that has a list. Yeah. So I went at it again. I think I made a mistake with the way it stores data. I mean, the way the app works is it saves data just to the device. It doesn't use Cloud Sync. So some people think they're losing data because they go on like their iPad.
And it's not there, but that's because I made it as simple as possible. You know, it's a free app, guys. I'm just experimenting here. But I also redid the way it stores the data, and I've got it in TestFlight now. So I think that... That's fixed. But it's kind of fun to put something out there. And it's a very simple idea. Historically, I wrote down my no list in an Apple Note. But now I've got a little app for it.
It's been very stable for me. It hasn't lost any data. In fact, it's kind of funny because I talked about this about a month or two ago, maybe our last feedback episode. And I said, the thing about Vibe coding is you shouldn't share it. And I played myself, because if I just kept this on my device and never shared it with anybody, I'd be fine. But I shared it, and there's a little problem, so I'm getting that fixed. But yeah, it's just kind of a fun thing.
The other thing I look at that for is we talk to a lot of developers on this show. and i think over time i would like to like add a widget support to it shortcut support yeah maybe even cloud sync so when we talk to people about this stuff i've got a little bit more of an understanding of what they're going through but it's very much a hobby project like i don't
I'm never going to charge for it. It's just a free thing I put out there. And it gives me kind of another way to understand my job as Max Barkey. But it was kind of fun putting it together. And I'm dealing with the developer thing of now.
There's a bug in my app. I think I fixed it. And I'm just waiting for test flight to approve the release because I didn't realize that even when you do an update before you release it to the public, you still have to get Apple approval just to put it in test flight. Yep. And it's like, oh, man, this is driving me nuts. I just wanted to get approved so I can get it out there. Yeah, I had to learn a lot about that.
working with David on development stuff because everything else I do is basically instant, right? Like the episode is done. I publish it. The article is done. I publish it. That is not the way the App Store works. And inevitably, something you did not find in testing, your users will find in about two seconds. It's just always how it happens. So yes, you... You can now feel some sympathy for developers who deal with that and just how slow App Store Connect is in general.
Kind of a terrible website. It's interesting because I released it to friends for testing. They didn't have the problem. I released it to all the lab members. None of them had the problem. Yeah, I haven't seen it. Yeah. But some people are hitting it, and I don't know. I can't figure out if it's specific hardware or not. But I changed the way it addresses memory, so hopefully that fixes it. But either way, yeah.
That was a little bit of a hiccup. And that's why I say I'm taking the laptop with me because I'm going on this little mini vacation. But if Apple approves it, I want to get it uploaded. Or if I need to make any changes, I want to be able to do that. Yeah. on this trip because you know i don't want it out there where it's not working for everybody as simple as it is yeah no absolutely um
Yeah. And we spoke a little bit about that on that episode about maybe some things like, was Apple going to need to address? AI generation in app development. And I had a conversation with a friend about this who would listen to the episode and they point out that steam. actually has developers disclose the level of AI generated content in their games. So you could say, you know, basically it helped me a little bit. I wrote the whole thing.
And Apple, so the two thoughts my friend put together was Steam does it. And Apple has a nutrition label for accessibility in the App Store. And maybe at some point there is an AI nutrition level and the developer just kind of says to what level it helped. Maybe they don't even want to open the can of worms. That's actually kind of my guess on thinking about it for another week is I don't see Apple wanting to.
wade into this, especially because they put in the new Xcode AI support, right? So you can plug in ChatGPT or... clawed and have it see your code and help you with your code and so apple is itself to a degree endorsing uh you know developers using ai to help them and so is that at conflict if they did something on the App Store for users? I just don't know. But I still think it's a really interesting conversation to keep having.
Yeah. And for me to be clear, this wasn't the thing where I just said, make me an app. I had an existing code that I shared and it found all my mistakes and told me better ways to do things. So I understand the code of this app, but. It was like having a really good patient teacher, you know? So I don't know where I stand on it. I think back, should I have released it? You know, the fact that there's a bug in it so early is an indicator I probably shouldn't have.
It's such a simple app. I thought, why not? But I guess it's a... it's a constant question. And I think a lot of people are going to have questions. Like since I released it, I've heard from other people who are like, Oh yeah, I have this unique itch. I want to scratch. And I'm thinking about trying to do something like this. Yeah. I'm like, you know, so I don't think I'm alone here. And, uh,
I wanted to do this. No. And just coincidental timing, the other day, Stephen Robles posted this blog post I'll have in the show notes. AI couldn't build my iPhone podcast app. And he... walks through using chat GPT and then Claude and then back to chat GPT. But he's coming from somebody who knows by his own admission in this blog post.
no development right so he's really flying blind if you will in terms of what it's doing what's broken um and it's it's an interesting take like i said i'll have in the show notes people to check out But it's an interesting time, and if it can help people learn, then I'm all for that. I'm just not for it replacing people. But it's not close to it, as I think both of you have learned.
¶ Reflecting on AI in App Development
Yeah, well, also, I think that just in general about AI, since this segment's on AI. Yeah. And one of the reasons why, first of all, I just want it to be my voice. I don't want it to be AI's voice. So I don't think it does a very good job of content creation. You know, whenever you try to get it to do something, it's often wrong. And it's very boring if it even gets it right. And like, there's just a lot that it's not good at. I feel like it's like, like I said, like a coach, like getting me.
figuring out how to get the buttons placed in the top corners was something I had struggled with alone. And it showed me how you do that. Like, okay, now I know how that works. Automation tools. Like when you're saying, I want, I'm an obsidian. I want a quick little script to help me do this thing and change these words to those words or whatever. It does stuff like that right now. And if it is slowing down, as I was predicting.
maybe that's what it's good for. And so long as you understand those limits, you use it for that stuff. It's definitely on my mind because this is a for real revolutionary technology.
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¶ E-Reading Habits and Devices
All right. This is the time where we talk about stuff we're playing with. And why don't you go first? I wanted to talk about eBooks. I kind of rage quit Amazon Kindle when they started. taking out the ability to download your books last year. So I downloaded all my books and ripped them. And now I've been reading them on...
I put them in the Apple Books app, but I got thinking maybe that's not the place because I have been buying eBooks now from Kobo. And I thought, well, maybe I should buy a Kobo device, but I looked at their devices and I wasn't really sure. I also looked at, there's a bunch of Android e-ink tablets out there. Yeah. So I bought the Books Super 7, I think it's called. It's a seven-inch thing from Books.
And I used it for one day and the user interface was so slow and like just getting books uploaded to it was so tortuous. And then I got books uploaded and then like rendering them was, it's just everything felt like I was in molasses. and I returned it. It was a very quick realization that's not going to fit. Mike Schmitz makes fun of me because I always buy eating tablets, and I always return them.
And I just kind of realized that for me, in terms of reading eBooks, I am just going to read them on an iPhone or an iPad. And the platforms I've been using is traditionally Apple Books, but... What's happened in the meantime is the Readwise app, which it's a service I pay for, we've talked about in the show, where you highlight things and it retains them, gives you spaced repetition.
Their e-book reader has gotten much, much better in the last six months. So I moved a bunch of books over to Readwise. to the reader app they have and i've been reading in that now so when i highlighted it automatically goes into readwise there's no sync required i haven't decided yet because i think i like the experience of reading apple books better than readwise
But I think Readwise is a real option. But I think I'm off the separate device bandwagon, and I'm just going to read them on iPhones and iPads. But that's been an ongoing experiment for me. Yeah. I actually have also experimented a little bit here. I've used a Kindle Paperwhite from a couple of years ago, and Amazon updated the Kindle Colorsoft.
This is there. It's the same size as the Paperwhite. And it's got the color screen. And the first one was not reviewed very well. It's expensive. It's $279. I was like, you know what? I am still in the Kindle ecosystem for better or for worse. And so I was like, well, let me see how this is. And it's not great.
The color is fine. I mean, it's e-ink color, right? It's not vibrant or anything. But one of the trade-offs is, and all the reviews said this, they're all right, is that it's kind of grainy. It's not as clear. It's not as contrasty as the traditional black and white ink. And so I sent it back. I mean, I've read like half a book on it. I was like, I don't like the way this looks. And the color.
Like, oh, it was great that I could highlight different colors or whatever, but it wasn't enough to overcome what I didn't like about it. So I'm back on my beloved Paperwhite, and it's fantastic. Yeah, I feel like... the color ink devices are not fully baked yet, that they need some more iteration before they're kind of ready for prime time. And honestly, if you're just reading books on it, what do you care? What do you need color for?
If you want, I guess, comic books or something, maybe it'd be useful for that. But I'm not a fan of the color ink devices, the ones I've seen. I always kind of struggle with the idea of going back to analog books. We talk about this on Focused a bit, and Mike is really into the analog books, but you get... So there's so many problems with that. Like when I want to read in bed, then I got to turn the light in and I wake up my wife. I had the same thing. I was on an airplane.
And I had a paper book to read, but it was nighttime on the airplane, so everybody's asleep. If I turn on my light, it's going to light up the whole area. And then I'm, you know. in my 50s and reading small words is harder on a ebook i can make them bigger so another realization i have is i'm i'm increasingly getting ebooks but uh
I've got an iPad, I've got an iPhone, and that seems to be the answer for me. Yeah. I mean, there were some things I want a physical book for, but that list is relatively short. If it's a book that I'm going to read and it's not going to be like a commentary on something that I may go back to over the years, absolutely hard copy, great. But a book about...
you know, the history of some tech company or some, you know, or fiction or a book I read earlier this year about the history of the, of the Soviet space program. That's not a book I'm like marking up and like going to put on the shelf and like revisit. Right. And so ebook is fine for that. But, you know, different people have different feelings. As someone who just moved and moved a bunch of boxes of books, my family has too many books. I'm just going to.
Just going to put that out there. You really feel the full weight of them when you're moving them around. Yeah. And the approach I've taken, there's some books I really love and some books like I'll read. electronically and say i really love this book i want to read it again i think at that point i'll consider buying it but i just built a bookshelf in the studio and it's it's already full and
I'm kind of taking the one in one out approach. Like if I really want to buy this book, what one's on the shelf am I going to give away? I know that's not like a lot of my friends are really into having a lot of books around, but I just, I'm fine with the E stuff.
I don't know. I understand the attraction of an e-book because it's less in your face than the LCD display is. And reading an e-book on an airplane is a great... choice like it's backlit and puts off almost no light but um i just can't seem to get my arms around one that i want and to deal with all the hassle it's just so easy being in the apple ecosystem it spoils you
¶ Tot 2.0: Simple Text Editor
Yeah. Yeah, it is. What are you playing with these days? So for me, it's Tot 2.0. Tot is an app that I absolutely love. When that came out, I'm like, Stephen must be happy today. Yeah, it's from the Icon Factory. So it is a text editor that has seven built-in documents. They're little dots across the top of the window, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue.
Purple, blue, teal, and green. And it's just like a scratch pad that I can use. It syncs Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, which is actually surprisingly useful sometimes. And I just use it as a place to kind of temporarily store something digital. Now, I do carry a paper notebook. It's always on my desk right here by the trackpad. But sometimes I'm like, I need it.
digital, right? Or someone sends me a bunch of URLs, I need to parse through them for something or things like that. And I've used taught for that since it came out. And version two is now here. I got a link to a 512 pixels post about this. But kind of three big features. There's automatic indenting, which is someone who I very often will outline things, not when I write, but like if I'm taking notes or jotting something down, that's fantastic.
You can do custom bullets. So if you want to set up a checklist and have the unchecked and checked emoji look different, you can do that. And dividers. So if you're using one of the little dots, maybe for an ongoing... you know, thing that's not just temporary the way I use it, you can put it in text dividers and it more easily kind of see where one thing starts and one thing stops. So really nice quality of life improvements.
And Todd's business model is really interesting too, I think. It does sync everywhere. It uses Markdown and everything else that you would expect. The iOS version. is the one that you pay for. And the Mac version is, you know, it's separate, right? So it's not a universal app, which is kind of interesting. And there's an app purchases to unlock it. It's like 20 bucks. But I find it really useful. And it's also just fun. Todd has a level of whimsy about it.
that has been lost in a lot of Mac apps over the years. But it's just like a fun, colorful thing. Like the background is tinted the color of the dot you're on. It just has a lot of nice little flourishes that I enjoy. And so TOT, man, it's fantastic. I think one of the features really is the simplicity of it. It's like seven notes that are always synced on all your devices. It's like there's nothing to, no scripting to learn.
no automation routines to build. It's just a simple way to keep text in multiple places. If you put it on your phone, type a few things in there, you know when you're on your Mac, you'll get back to it simply. I want to use this app. When the new version came out, I used it for a week. And the problem is I just ride or die with drafts. And I'm so used to...
All of the cool stuff I can do with drafts, like earlier today, talking about getting rich text out for a blog post or, you know, my automations to send a text to my whole family from drafts and like all this stuff I could. This is stuff that taught was not designed to do, never will do. And I just like that stuff so much. It's hard for me to find space for taught, you know, but.
If you're out there and you don't want to have kind of the power of something like drafts, I think Todd is the obvious choice. Yeah, it definitely lacks some of those things that you have in a more... full featured text editor, but I don't necessarily need a full blown text editor most of the time. Like I have BBEdit and ByWord and others, right? For me, it's just like a set of sticky notes that are with me everywhere.
Like one of the things you said in your blog post that really made sense to me is you actually have kind of a, you have a matrix of what goes in what color. Like, you know that you put certain types of information in different colored notes. And I thought that was a really smart. Smart thing. Yeah. Like the green dot is basically permanently a bunch of URLs that I need to send people when they have membership questions at relay. It's like, well, membership.
income green like it just clicked or whatever right and if a project is kind of ongoing like a bunch of writing for the saint jude campaign right like it's all the teal ones all together and now with text dividers it's easier to see what's what But yeah, it's fun. If you haven't checked it out, I would encourage you to. Yeah, congratulations, you know, getting the 2.0 out. It's great.
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