797: "A Power User in Life," with Jaimee Finney
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Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks. And as always, joined by your friend and mine, Mr. Stephen Hackett. How's it going, Stephen? It's good, David. How are you? I am excellent. And today we've got a guest on the show. Welcome to the show, Jamie Finney. Hey, thank you for having me. Oh, man. Well, we've been friends a while now. Jamie is a

a woman of many talents and interests. And so I think the first time you and I met was when we were speaking together at one of the conferences. I don't remember which one it was now. I don't either, but yeah, I had to have been maybe one of those, like a Yosemite, one of those Mac or iOS conferences. Exactly. Back when that was a thing, but you've done a lot of development work. You've got a business. You've just got a lot going on.

And every time I talk to you, I'm always amazed how much you're doing. And I thought you'd be a great Mac Power user to share with the audience because of all the plates you keep in the air. So today we're going to talk about that.

Oh, thank you. And I feel honored and a little bit like a fraud under the lens of a power user, but we'll talk through what I do. I want to talk about that. I guess some people think being a power user means you're using the most complex app system. But to me, a power user is a person who ships a lot.

with their Mac. And you certainly are a power user. And it's going to be fun talking through your workflows, because some of the stuff are basic apps, and some of them aren't.

But you've got an interesting mix here that I think people would be interested in hearing about. So don't sell yourself short, Jamie. All right. All right. All right. A couple of things before we get started. The Alfred Field Guide is still on sale. As this show publishes, there's just a few days left on that intro discount. MPU Alfred gets you 10% off. We've got a link in the show notes.

And we did a whole episode on it last week. You can check that out as well. Thanks, everyone. I've heard so much from some NPU listeners that have got it. I really enjoyed making this one, and I'm really happy to see how people are upping their Alfred game with the field guide. So thank you very much. Jamie, before we get started, tell the audience a bit about yourself. Oh, my goodness. Well, David, yeah.

I suppose my background, I spent about 15 years on the product design side of things, working with companies like Zappos and Apple and clients on the client side, like NASA and IBM and all that, Disney. Yeah, designing digital products. And then I hit burnout pretty hardcore in about 2012, and I walked away from my professional

My product work and kind of soul searching ended up becoming an executive coach and almost like a life coach. I hate the term life coach, but I was coaching folks in the tech field who've also experienced burnout or career coaching, career pathing kind of stuff. Did that. That evolved into building my own products.

you know, with my kind of focus on life and what's important and ended up launching a clothing company with my partner in business and in life, Ken Finney. We launched Pictureless Clothing. Yeah, let me just stop there for a minute. So like you were like consulting and speaking and talking to people about, you know, their digital products and

really kind of an authority in the field. And then one day you're like, didn't you get on like good morning America with that, that company picture? Oh man, picture this clothing. We were everywhere for about eight months. I mean, everything from the today show, good morning America. Um,

Ashton Kutcher tweeted about us. George Takei tweeted about us. We were invited to pitch on Shark Tank. I kind of failed fabulously, so we never aired, but we went through the whole process. And so, I mean, it was, you know, it was a really spectacular... The day we launched, we got a write-up in TechCrunch and...

And it just, it went bananas from there for about eight months nonstop with the viral. Like every time it would kind of simmer down, something would pick it up and it would just go bananas all over again. So that was an amazing way to launch a new product. Yeah. Okay. So just for the audience. So Jamie, like I said, Jamie's got a successful kind of career consulting and helping people. She comes up with this idea. I think it was for your daughter, right? Like, so the idea is you draw a picture of,

And then your company turns that into clothing. So, yeah, I mean, like the basic of it, I like to summarize. So and this was a very collaborative, you know, Ken and Jamie sort of thing. So I, you know, working for myself as a coach, I designed a dress for my daughter who was seven years old at the time. She drew a picture. We went to the fabric store. We made it real. And it was a three day arduous sewing project.

And I'm, you know, I'm kind of like 4-H level sewing skills sort of sewer. So, but we did it. We made it real. She puts it on and she's like, ah, my imagination, which like she wears this dress for three months nonstop. And, and everywhere she goes, people are like, oh my gosh, that dress is amazing. It's this rainbow spectacular Lycra, you know, thrown together, but everywhere people are complimenting it. And so can't,

actually says like, man, you've got something here. You should do something with this. We should do something with this. And, you know, initially that idea was kind of like, no, I'm not doing this for other people's kids' imaginations, you know, how hard this was. But he was really the genius behind the simplification of it. And so collaboratively, we built Picture This Clothing over the course of not

quite a year, about 10 months, we worked with a friend of ours named Ignazio Laccitignolo, who did the design side. We came up with this sort of simple concept. So it's, it's,

you know, print out a coloring sheet, which is just like kids know from a coloring book, right? A coloring sheet of a dress and, or t-shirt now you print out the coloring sheet, you design it any way you can imagine, which means you can color or marker or whatever, but you can also use 3d objects, anything you can take a smartphone photo with. So the second step is to upload your smartphone photo of your design and step three, we send it back ready to wear. It's so cool. I mean,

I, like many other parents, write the refrigerator is like covered in things my kids have made. Now, mostly my my youngest because my older two were in high school. But having it's just so cool, like that, that creative spark and letting kids have something that, you know, they may like. I remember when you launched this, it was so cool and continues to be so awesome. It's just such a great idea.

Thank you. And we really like it is, you know, started out beautifully, but it's kind of become more of a labor of love. We're keep alive through our other ventures. But to me, like this is entirely consistent with my experience of you, Jamie, that like

Yeah. She would make a viral clothing business on the side, you know, and, and she would, you know, get on good morning in America with it because that's, that's how Jamie rolls. But yeah, but that's not all like you're also still doing consulting, right? Yeah. I, I, well, so, so here's a funny thing that I don't know if I spilled the beans on, but I accepted a full-time role in a completely different realm.

from my past history. And I'm currently the global director of learning and development, which falls under like a people operations team at a company called Play Studios. So yeah, that's very fresh. That's very fresh. So yeah. All right. Excellent. But that now what do they make?

Um, mobile games. So, um, they started in sort of the casino games environment, but also do casual games like Sudoku and, um, solitaire and, you know, Mojang and some really cool that I love the casual games. Those are the ones you find in your Tesla. That's same, same ones. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's really impressive, Jamie, all the stuff you do. And that's why we wanted to have you on. You are certainly a power user in life, if nothing else. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. I feel like I'm sitting amongst peers in that realm. You guys have both done some great stuff and it's really an honor to be invited to be on your show. Well, share with us your gear. I mean, you're on the map power users, you know, use Apple stuff. All right.

Well, you know, again, this is like one of those context things. So after, and I want to just like preface, like after burnout, I really like,

I went through a whole process of sort of disconnect and, you know, where, when I was designing stuff, I was like the newest Mac, the newest phone and the newest iPad, like all the time. And now I think I'm on a, I think my iPhone, I have to even look, I think it's like an iPhone 14 and see, you know, even just to not know, like this is who I've become. Well, actually I'm going to defend you there because I feel like the iPhone is

Except for people who are camera nuts. I feel like the iPhone doesn't improve that much year over year. I mean, back in the early days, every year was a big jump, and now it's becoming more of a commodity. I think most of the audience is probably not on the most recent iPhone, I would guess. Yeah.

Well, you know, and I think that's okay now too. And I'm, you know, I'm planning an upgrade maybe toward the end of the year. We'll see what happens at WWDC and see what comes out in the fall. But like, I'm not in an urgent hurry to do that. But as far as like, so I do a lot of Zoom calls and I was doing a podcast for a while. I do occasional guest interviews.

you know, that sort of thing. But so I have a, I feel I have a nice setup for my desktop, right? So I have a nice iMac and I have my,

camera. I have a Nikon D750. I have a Shure SM7B microphone, some decent lights, you know, so that kind of set up for my desktop. And I'll again, credit Ken for this because he keeps me in good gear, making sure I'm, you know, not looking too janky out here. Is it possible to have like too good of a zoom setup for like normal business stuff? You know,

It's, I think it's possible. And this might be overkill for just Zoom calls, but like we set it up actually when I was doing, you know, when the pandemic set in, we started doing a live show, a live stream for Picture This Clothing, just creative stuff kids could do at home. And, you know, like where Picture This had kind of fizzled out around 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 were crazy.

almost as good as our launch year. So they picked up because it was a great thing for kids to do at home. So on Facebook, we used Facebook Live and Ken put together this amazing setup where the front cameras, the Nikon, and then we had a great overhead camera as well where you could super zoom in and we were using... Yeah, it was just a really nice setup. So we had a lot of those live streams there and we had a great... We're getting two to 5,000 views on every...

there for a while. We also live streamed the hand cutting process. So we wanted it to be really nice and really quality. And we were experimenting with stuff like Facebook,

uh live and and twitch streams and youtube you know all sorts of things just kind of seeing what what might work and what's fun we want it to be good quality so i just kind of have the leftovers of that we do hear you know we hear from listeners sometimes that are like hey what what are you using for your zoom setup you know i want to like really upgrade my game and

I'm mixed on it. Like, I feel like if you're just like in a company and going to Zimtels, you should definitely get like a light and like maybe, you know, think about ways to make it look better and

But then do you really need a mirrorless just for going to your company calls or does that become like a discussion point? Like, oh, fancy Jamie. She's showing up in her Nikon. It's like you have to kind of walk the line if you're just in the normal business. I think everybody should have a good light source, though. That's the worst thing is when you're on someone's Zoom and they're like in the dark or really grainy.

Yeah. And, you know, like a lot of people use those like dark in the background or the fake background. And those are great. I love a real background. I feel like I get to know you a little bit through your background. And, you know, sometimes it's a great icebreaker conversation piece. And for the context of what I've been doing as well, as far as Zoom calls, it's not just internal corporate conversations. There's a lot of that. But.

But there's also, you know, I'm doing, I wrote and conduct like a new hire orientation. And so it's like the welcome point for this company. And then I do a lot of manager training stuff and having a nice camera for external stuff, I think makes us all look better. You know, the care investment on quality.

quality matters and then like the mic context though it's easier and easier like if you if you do something like that if you're doing training or something the internal mic probably isn't good enough you should probably look at something i just actually i actually bought a new mic steven this hollyland right have you heard of these guys hollyland i have yeah

So it's a little thing, it's a little button that goes on your shirt and it comes with a USB-C transmitter. So you just plug it into your Mac, the transmitter or the receiver, and then the mic just clips onto your shirt. And it's really good for like a hundred bucks. Yeah, this stuff is all getting really good right now. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing how far sort of home or work goes.

you know, cameras, audio stuff have come and that's, you know, straight out of the pandemic, right? I mean, I remember in 2020, my brother trying to buy a webcam and like, you could not find one because everyone was, you know, trying to get one because everyone was having to figure it out. And now, you know, we all have these setups that, you know, I don't do a ton of video calls, but it looks pretty good when I do. And

And things like camo and an iPhone, like you don't even have to necessarily even have like a dedicated camera. You can use, you know, the iPhone that you were going to hand down to somebody or it's just it's all come so far so quickly.

I actually wanted to touch on the backdrop side of things too. You know, we talked about analog, we touched on analog a little bit, but like the analog setup of your composition of the set behind you when you do a video call, like think about those things. I always, I always encourage people to think about what's, what's showing up behind you. Um,

I don't know. I love, I love playing with the composition of that from time to time, moving things around, trying different things. I think that there is something to like, just, just, let's just clean up, you know, just like a little nice. Yeah. I'm not saying people don't expect a little clutter and things, but like sometimes you'll see one and it's like, wow, this person really should have turned on the blur filter. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a mindfulness and a care for quality again. You know, I do appreciate those sorts of things. I want to talk about that iMac. So which iMac are you on the current one, the colored ones? Are you on one of the older ones? No, I'm on a 2020. It's like the Retina 5K 27 inch 2020. The last of that line. Yeah.

Yeah, six core Intel. So yeah, it's a super nice one. It's been serving its purpose beautifully, sitting on a really beautiful desk that was made by me and my neighbor out here at the desert homestead. It was from a piece of wood I found out in the yard. Yeah, it's a great setup. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah, you're in for a really nice day someday when you upgrade that to an Apple Silicon. Ooh, so now I'm going to be kind of itching to do that now. Yeah.

And then I have my laptop for when I'm on the, you know, on the road, it's slightly, you know, so there's a funny thing. I was, I was trying in like 2021, 22 to just go all I'm at or iPad. I was trying to just be iPad only. Cause I was mostly writing, not really doing much else other than writing, not doing any more graphics stuff. Like I used to not really doing no editing or, or audio stuff even. And I thought, you know, now's the time I had a nice iPad and,

I thought I'm going to switch over, but I couldn't make the

the leap. So at the end of 2020, I wrote a sort of a funny medium blog post about it. I had actually posted a tweet and then I kept getting all these questions. So I decided to turn it into like a blog post on medium. I was like, I tried for almost a month to switch over to iPad. And today I ordered a new MacBook Pro. So I'm using that MacBook Pro from 2022. It's like the 14 inch, I don't know, M1 Macs.

And, um, super, you know, for my needs again, I'm mostly doing like, you know, Google docs and Google slides. And, um, I pop open like Photoshop or Figma every once in a while, but I'm pretty low fidelity these days. Like it's all writing and, and a lot of chat GPT and whatnot. So, yeah. Yeah.

I feel like there's very few people left who have gone in on the iPad and stuck with it. Yeah, it was, you know, I really wanted it to work, but yeah. Yeah. It's just, there were a few things I still, I still love the iPad for like my easy on the brain games, like outlanders. I love, you know, stuff like that. I love the magic keyboard. Yeah.

I love the Apple Pencil, but yeah, it's just, yeah, for the full capacity thing, just I am so much more nimble on either a laptop or the desktop. So I just...

Stuck with those. What was the biggest friction point for you to that prevented you from turning the iPad into your main thing? You know, the, the, the apps that I was working with. So I was using my two main things that I was using were medium. Cause I was writing mostly on medium at the time. And I was using, um, Squarespace for my web stuff. Cause I was using,

I do these daily doodles. They're not so daily anymore, but I was doing these daily coffee doodles and a daily thought. And just that there was a lot of limited or broken features that made details like adding and formatting posts and pages way more difficult than it needed to be. Things like selecting blocks of text to relocate them. It never really worked out well.

as expected, you know, you end up moving entire sentences or vanishing things inadvertently. So, so yeah, I just, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm way too clumsy. And maybe the apps weren't quite there yet or what I was choosing to work.

And then, yeah, I picked up a little client work as well back then. And, you know, so yeah, stuff like spreadsheets and Zoom and Slack and VPN authentication and stuff just wasn't, it wasn't working out for me. So I was like, all right. Back in my lawyer days, I used to try occasionally to turn the iPad into my laptop. And I'll never forget sitting in a meeting where we were acquiring a company and

And at one point during this fancy meeting, the other lawyer sent me like 20 spreadsheets and like three PowerPoints, you know, and I was on the iPad and I just thought to myself, this is not going to work. I got to get a laptop. That's it. That's the experience right there. You know, it's just like, ah, this is just not going to, it's not going to scale with me here. This episode of the Mac power users is brought to you by one password.

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and get started with the full suite of 1Password protection. That URL one more time is 1Password.com slash MPU. And thank you, 1Password, for all of your support of the Mac Power users. Jamie, I want to get into some of the software you're using, some productivity stuff you're doing, keeping up with all these different projects and the new job. I would imagine that you're spending a fair amount of time in things like email and calendar. So how does that look for you?

So, okay, great question. And yes, that is exactly correct. And so kind of like the little spheres of life that I've got going on, I've got the picture of this clothing and Amico apps, which are kind of weekend focused for me. And then I've got sort of my coffee with Jamie, which is personal stuff.

And, and, um, place studios, which is sort of the full-time gig. So I have everything kind of centrally feeding into from my outlook calendar, which is what I use for play studios, but I feed it into the, the Apple calendar, which may seem sort of redundant, but it's so that I could have it on my widget.

you know, my desktop widget. And so I feed that in through there, but I use the Outlook calendar primarily. And I have to tell you, like, it's the thing I look at. It's the last thing I look at when I'm going to sleep, like right before bed. I look at my calendar to see what time I have to wake up tomorrow because I'm at the age where...

that could be any time. Like I used to wake up so religiously like at four 30 and bam, bam, bam, you know, super productive sort of day. Now I'll sleep till like six 30 if I don't have a 6am meeting, but I'm doing occasionally I have 6am meetings because I'm meeting with like Tel Aviv or I have 6pm meetings because I'm working with folks in Vietnam. And so I have, um,

I feel like every day is a little jumbly from the next, right? And so that calendar is really my sort of my lifeblood and it keeps me, okay, here's what I got going on today. Today looks completely from tomorrow, completely different from tomorrow.

And so it all starts with the calendar and Outlook is great just with that scheduling tool, being able to look at other people's calendars and then, you know, transmit that into my Apple calendars. That's kind of a long answer, but it all starts there. And then...

what else my Google suite you know I use all the Googles and so everything from the you know Google Drive Google Docs Sheets Slides that's a one or many of those are you know whittled throughout every day

woven throughout every day rather. And then other apps. So with like Amico and Picture This Clothing to stay sort of organized and team communication, we use Trello. For Play Studios, I use Asana.

For that sort of thing. So, so there's that a lot of zoom. That's a lot to unpack. But I mean, you are kind of in different buckets for different businesses, which I guess that kind of makes sense, really. So they don't kind of intermix. So

Let me just wind back a little bit. Neither Steve and I use Outlook. I know a lot of our listeners do. What is the current state of Outlook? How's it doing? You know, so because I'm an Outlook user on a Mac, like I used to have a lot of frustration with it, but the latest version is pretty solid. And, you know, the things that...

that I like about it really for internal teams, that scheduling tool, I cannot say enough good things about the scheduling tool because you can, you know, and I think Google calendars might do this too, but I haven't used Google calendars in many, many years. So I'm a little out of touch on that one, but that's really, you know, the, the organization uses Microsoft and, and Outlook is one of those tools. I also use OneNote for my place studios sort of just,

the same way you might use Evernote or different, I do a daily to-do list within OneNote. But with Outlook, it's all about that scheduling tool. Like I can, I don't have to do that, that cumbersome step of like emailing someone to say, hey, do you have time to talk this week or in three weeks? I can just pop their calendar open, look at their availability, see

start the conversation with an invitation rather than that back and forth of like three to six emails to figure out who's available when and what time zone. The instant step, just start with the invitation because you have access to their availability is a super time saver. Yeah, that stuff still makes the world go round in a lot of companies, right? We don't talk much about Office 365 and Outlook on the show, but it is everywhere and

You know, the history of that's so funny. We're like Excel started on the Mac for a long time. The best version of Word was on the Mac. And Microsoft is still absolutely committed to Apple's platforms. And there was a time where they were holding Office back from the iPhone and iPad in particular, but they're not doing that anymore. They're playing ball. And I think that's good for everybody.

I mean, for a while it was bad. I mean, the Outlook database model was one where like if something went wrong, the whole database would become corrupt. I mean, I remember early days of Mac Power users hearing from listeners and frankly working in the law firm at those days, I was dealing with those things too. But yeah, it is much better now. And that's good to hear.

Yeah, yeah, it's functional. I hadn't used Outlook since I was at a dot com in like 2000, 1999, 2000 out in the San Francisco Bay Area. And they used Outlook. And that was where I learned like the scheduling tool. But it was a lot easier.

uh, less nimble than, um, for us Mac users. And really in the company, the only Mac users was the design team. So we're like, we're the only Mac users. And so we were kind of the, you know, the, the neglected ones of the bunch. Um, but yeah. And then, then coming back to play studios, um,

you know, into a corporate environment of some sort where I mostly work from home, but, but yeah, they use it and getting on their system and kind of revisiting Outlook after all these years, it's the first time I've used it since then. So it's, it's been, you know, kind of relearning, but it's easy. It's easy. And I haven't had trouble with it. It's been pretty graceful.

We've talked about Asana some on the show, and I feel like it pops up more and more often. For those who aren't familiar with it, it is a very team-based, collaborative. Task management is selling it short. It feels like project management is maybe a better way to describe it. But how has that been for you, and what are some things that it kind of unlocks when working with other people?

So, you know what, I'm kind of building a learning and development team here. And so we just started a new hire in Vietnam. And then, you know, I work with people in Serbia, in Belgrade, Serbia, and then in Tel Aviv, Israel, and trying to, you know, you get people.

learning and development or training requests or ideas or needs from all these different regions. And they go to different sources. And so what I'm trying to do is get my arms around like a proper intake flow. So in all...

transparency. I just pulled Asana in last week and started using it. And so I'm much more familiar with Trello, but Asana was a tool that a marketing team already uses for their intake and all of that. So I did a quick

tutorial with one of the marketing folks who just walked me through the highlights of Asana, how it works. I was like, oh, it's kind of like Trello. Great. I'll figure it out. So that's what I've been doing is, you know, setting it up, but it's really for that, you know, I need a way to allow people to submit things.

requests and for me to organize the intake and to see what intake is coming from the other regions and then be able to like globally align and prioritize without things falling through the cracks that in a nutshell is what I need it for and what I plan to use it for.

Yeah, I feel like the people that really resonate with that are people who have complex project management or people who have group task management. It seems like for group task management, it's really I've heard from a lot of listeners and we've even had guests on the show that just swear by it for that stuff.

And that's really what it will be like our Vietnam team will, you know, do. Yeah. I just need to be able to see and make sure we're staying on track that we're not getting too far into the weeds of the, the local learning and development when we've got global priorities. And so that's kind of a piece of it. And, and so far Asana looks exactly like, you know, that this is going to help me solve that problem. I believe. I ran a bunch of test data through recently, Stephen, cause I was looking at it for Max Markey. Um,

And so I did the full, I think, two-week trial until they turned me off. And I did not use live projects on it, but I think it's very accessible to team members who aren't necessarily geeky if it's set up by somebody who knows what they're doing. And I see a lot of benefits to it. For me, ultimately, I decided Notion...

is kind of scratching the edge better for my team, which is two geeks really, you know, so it's not, we didn't really need that kind of a handholding, but I, I feel like Asana really is one of the big ones you should be looking at if you have a team. But I, I also am a fan of Trello like you and I don't use it. Cause again, I kind of get my Kanban itched, scratched by notion and, um, and some other Mac apps, but the, uh,

But Trello to me feels like the definitive Kanban app. Like if you want to run a system. It's so easy. Yeah. And even for picture this clothing, right? It was such a great flow and can really set up an awesome flow within there for if we had an order that needed customer service, a

So like we could drop it in and we had just this whole like eight columns. Right. And I could drag it. It comes in as soon as I've addressed it from a customer service side, I'll move it over to column two. If they respond, I move it to column three. You know, it was just like this really nice,

And the same thing for Amico apps. My participation in Amico apps is I do customer support on the weekends and sometimes in evenings. And I love it. I love it. I love connecting with the customers. It helps me stay on top of how the apps work and kind of keeps me busy.

Fresh and well-versed. And Trello really, really serves the purpose for that, just the way that they've got their boards set up. And I can go directly into the Jamie column and address what I need to address and knock through the email inbox. And then if they have copywriting things or anything like that they need me to take a look at, I do. Yeah.

And yeah, so it's kind of, I love, I really love Trello, I think just because I've been using it since, you know, 2016, I think. So I have much more comfort with it, but, but I'm, I'm liking Asana and what I see so far.

Yeah. One of the apps that you use that we were talking about in the pre-show was, and I think that we don't give enough time to on the show is Miro. And that Miro is an aspirational app for me. It's a online kind of diagramming tool and I've got the free account and I I've actually mapped out my whole like Mac Sparky kind of flywheel in there. And

boy, is it nice. And every time I use that app, I'm tempted to subscribe to it. I love it. And I, you know, I started using it. Um, I, I took on a freelance client back in, I think early 2022, like January, I don't know. Anyway, early 2022, um, I took on a couple of freelance projects. I had never even heard of Miro before that time. And, um,

they were using it. So I needed to kind of just jump in with both feet, figure out how to use it. But, you know, that whole like infinite canvas and real-time collaboration stuff, like those things have proven really, really helpful. And so when I decided

joined the team here at Play Studios, we had a need to do some real-time collaboration. Like people were using a lot of physical sticky notes and whiteboards and stuff. And I thought, you know what, like we're trying to collaborate with teams around the world. Let's give this a try. I saw that they already had a license for it. So I brought it in and kind of

kind of help the HR team learn how to use it. And because I brought my, my previous contract experience there, but it's been really great for, you know, everything from,

org chart mapping to brainstorming ideation. I really love it for, for brainstorming and kind of plotting out things and just getting ideas out of my head. A lot of content strategy mapping I'll do inside Miro. Like I use it for a lot and it gets a little messy, but you can clean it up and you can share certain zones with people. And it's a pretty nice tool.

Yeah. I mean, the obvious competitor in the Apple space is Freeform. You know, Apple made like a free app that is sort of like Miro. It's a diagramming tool. It's free. It's cloud-based. So if you make it on your phone, it shows up on your devices. It's easy to collaborate with people. But there is a refinement to Miro that I feel like Freeform just doesn't have.

And my challenge is always like, there's the cheap part of me that's like, you know, I can build these diagrams. And it's only really a few people on my team anyway. So they're functional and good enough just using Freeform, but they're so much prettier and they're more fun to make and mirror. I really feel like a pull on this one, but I also like try to use the Apple stuff and that's a rough one for me.

So, you know, there's also FigJam, like if you're the design side of me trying to keep up with Figma and there's FigJam as well. So like our, our designer, the designer at Amico uses Figma. And so the FigJam like comes into play every now and then there. Um, but I'm less involved in that side of it. Like it's, it's great for, you know, adding feedback to UI stuff or UX stuff.

But yeah, like I haven't gotten way into FigJam, but it's pretty nice from what I can tell. The little bit of contact I've had with it, it's a good, depending on what you're doing, like if you're more on the design side and if you're already using Figma, that might be a natural connection. But yeah. So many great tools.

Yeah, it's really, I mean, we are in a rich time of applications like this. And, you know, there's something to be said that these things are, you know, mostly web-based and that means you have access to them from everywhere. I think it's interesting that maybe Apple's platforms aren't necessarily at the forefront of some of this stuff anymore. It's a bigger conversation. But the beauty of it being online, at least, is...

that collaboration stuff is kind of more native, right? We've seen Apple for a long time struggle to add collaboration to things like

Keynote, Freeform. They've come a long way and they're much better than they were. But things like Mirror kind of built, things like Asana are definitely built with that sort of work from anywhere, work with anybody anywhere collaboration in mind. Exactly that. And yeah, you know what? You know what a funny one that I use, like a Super Mac, probably

probably the app I might use the most lately is notes. Not to sound ridiculous, but I use notes like daily. Every day I use, I have like over a thousand notes in my little note thing. But I started using it when I was doing my daily coffee doodles. It's part of like a journaling exploration. And so I would do my little journal note. Usually it's like three to five minutes. It takes me to just jot out

some thoughts and feelings for the day or stuff that's going on or, or whatever motivation, inspiration stuff. And I would jot it down in my little notes and then I would do my little coffee doodle or vice versa on the order. But, um, and then copy pasted into my little Instagram. And that was, I, but I use it seriously. I use it for everything. I, I, I,

you know, t-shirt ideas. I don't know, locations. We were in Portland, Oregon a week or two ago. And, you know, I was like making notes all week, ground control and the classic arcade. We need to go to the Japanese guys. You know, I made some stuff, but I use notes for everything, like a lot.

Yeah. You know, you are not alone. I mean, notes is it's, it's really, I use it a bunch too. And so does Steven and we hear from listeners all the time because it's

It was, it's so weird because for those of us that have been around the Mac ecosystem long enough, we still remember the Comic Sans joke that was out. Right. It wasn't always as good as it is. Yeah. And I don't know for people who want to get nerdy, it used to sync with IMAP, which was completely, you know, just bananas that they did that.

And, but then like it got good one day and it was like, it was kind of immediate. I was at the dub dub when they announced the, uh, the notes update. And, and I remember that like, okay, now it just like turned a corner. In fact, I think on one of our shows, uh,

We interviewed the guy who started that project. I don't remember what it was. It was this show, I'm pretty sure. But anyway, the, but Apple like takes notes seriously now. And to me, I always tell people, if you're sick of Evernote, Apple notes is really their answer to Evernote. And, and,

It's so good. I mean, like you can throw images at it. You can throw links at it. It just accepts everything. It's stable. You've got over a thousand notes in it. You haven't any sinking problems. No, I've never had, I mean like every once in a while I'll have to quit and restart. But I mean, when I say every once in a while, like I think I did that maybe six months ago, you know, like it got a little clogged, but that was, it really doesn't happen often. Yeah. And we cover more high end notes apps on the show. Yeah.

And every time we talk about like Evernote or note planner, one of the more fancy ones, we always get emails from people saying, yeah, that's great. But Apple notes is just fine. And seriously, even drafting like a Slack message or whatever, like, so I don't accidentally hit return before I'm ready to send a message. I'll do, I'll draft things very quickly over there in notes and then copy and paste it over. And, you know, if I need to update the formatting or whatever, but like it, it really works well.

It's so handy. It's always right there and it's on my phone or my desktop or my laptop, wherever I'm at, it's there. So yeah, I use it.

How do you like, what's your structure in Apple notes or do you have any, do you just like, is it just anarchy and just throw stuff in there? Do you have like folders or tags? It's pretty much anarchy. I have a notes folder, you know, whatever the default was. And I just add new notes at all times. And it goes back years, but I do use tags. Like I, like I actually hashtag things and it,

it sorts my hashtags automatically. So like, if you put a hashtag on it, it treats it as a tag. Yeah. And then, so like if all my coffee doodles, because I wanted to have that hashtags ready to go in my, you know, my Instagram posts or whatever. So those are all automatically. Yeah. If I want to find any of my,

Those they're already tagged, that kind of thing. So I can tag stuff and it just kind of, if I, if I'm thoughtful enough to do that, it'll do that for me. Now with a thousand plus notes, do you ever have a hard time finding what you're looking for?

No, usually I'll have some semblance of a memory and just type it in the search, you know? And like, I have a terrible memory, but like, I'll be like, oh, Ken and I had a great t-shirt idea. And at the time it was a great t-shirt idea. So I titled it great t-shirts. And if I just type in t-shirt, then it brings it up. And so, you know, it's just one of those things. I think that's, I don't know, you know, it's a funny thing, David. It's a great question because I feel like at one time, because I used to do a lot of

production work and stuff, I was almost hyper organized. You know, I had physical binders and information architecture was a huge part of my life. And I still think about it a lot. It factors into everything I do. But for stuff like this, I feel so free and wild west about it. No, I think that the reason I ask the question is to make the point because people like me

Like the idea of just having a thousand notes in one folder, that to me sounds like insanity. Yeah. But it's because there's a part of me that just wants to organize the deck chairs as the Titanic goes down. Like I don't, I think I use it as a mechanism of distraction, you know? I love that. Just remember, search is really good now. Yeah.

You could have just one folder and you are likely not going to have a problem finding whatever it is you want. Exactly. Like I usually find it. And sometimes it's something I wrote. I didn't even realize how long ago I wrote it. And I'll just be like, oh, where's that thing? I know I made a note and I search it and it's like 2022 or whatever. And I'm like, wow, I didn't realize we wrote that so long ago. But yeah, that we had that idea forever ago. Yeah.

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Now you've been talking about WidgetWall, which I know is an app that you work on. Tell us about that. Okay. So my capacity of working on is really, I'm married to one of the co-creators, but I do customer service. So I don't do a lot more than that. I test things because I'm really good at breaking things and being confused. So I'm a great tester for that reason. But I love WidgetWall. It's desktop-based.

widgets for your Mac, Mac OS only. And one of the coolest features about it is because I'm working across time zones a lot, it has this little clock widget and I duplicate it. I have like

nine clocks on my desktop. I have Las Vegas time, Tel Aviv, Belgrade, Hanoi, Santiago, Chile, Mexico City, Singapore, Austin, and Hong Kong. All of those little, yeah, nine clocks up there. And what that allows me to do if I'm doing a presentation in any one of these time zones, or I can say, hey, we're going to take a break. It's

It's a 1247 AM Hanoi time. And so let's, you know, I can say it right in their time. I don't even have to say in Hanoi, you know, like if I'm speaking to Hanoi, I can say, Hey, at one o'clock, let's come back. And then I'm, you know, it's like, it's just a smooth transition.

thing. It's a small detail, but that attention to detail of speaking to someone in the time zone that they're sitting in, rather than having them have to math it out. Like, you know, it's 10 48 AM here. It's 12 48 AM there. Like who wants to do that math? I can just look at it and instantly refer to the time zone to whom I'm speaking, which is super nice. I know that's kind of a long story for one widget, but there's also, um,

you know, just simple things like, uh, the weather there's a calculator, there's a music, there's a little timer, which I use a lot for focus, like 20 minutes, bam. Uh, if you're into like Pomodoro or anything like that, but then also, um,

I love the confetti widget. And I'm just going to say it is a little burst of joy, a moment. It's silly and I love it. And I think it speaks very well to the personality of Ken and Inazio who created the app. So yeah. And just for, for folks who aren't familiar, it's, it's an app that allows you to build kind of user customized widgets that are kind of permanently on your desktop. So yeah,

Like if you want to see in the background things like she's talking about, like time zones or things that you constantly need reference to.

It's there. And it's a really well-done app. It's been around for years, right? It has. It actually, you know, it came out of need and it existed before the Apple native widgets came out. So, you know, it's just like, because, you know, you're a widget guy, Steven. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I spend a lot of my time working on WidgetSmith and, you know, the Mac was like kind of forgotten. We had Dashboard, you know, forever ago. And then, yeah.

Apple just had this, I mean, it's still there, just the sad thing, like the widgets in the notification center, like what's going on over there. And so what I love about widget wall is y'all saw a place in the market, right? Like, hey, Mac users want this too. And yeah.

you know, after our sort of preliminary call, like downloaded and playing with it. And it's, it's really, really good. And I totally second the, the confetti thing. It is so much fun. It's fun. And you know what's a really interesting note about it is it, it actually went, it went viral on TikTok, which it all did. And it, it's, it's kind of beloved by college students.

who love to customize their desktops. Who knew? You know, you get your first Mac desktop or laptop when you're going off to college and this customization and the desktops designs that people share are just adorable. So I see the most adorable desktops and, you know, you think of it, usually, you know, you think of your like Mac tech dudes really loving this, but it's like the customization

college-aged girls that love this app. And, you know, I think that's such an amazing thing. My daughter's age, both of them, I have a 16 and a 20-year-old, and both of them absolutely love it. So I thought that was such an interesting surprise demographic. I always think it's interesting, you know, when Apple shows up in an existing category, like, you know, the famous Sherlock term. And I think so often it's actually Sherlocking doesn't apply. It like opens people's eyes to something.

And then like developers like widget wall always take it to the next level. Like if you like the built-in widgets, but you'd like it more customizable, more options, then,

You look at something like widget wall. I mean, you know, you can't do a lot of the stuff with the Apple stuff that you can do with, with what you guys are doing. And like you have a plane, a video or, you know, I actually, so like you, I've been seeing what I've been playing with. I like the white noise generator. Cause I'm always looking for white noise, got a white noise generator right on the desktop. You hit the button off, you go countdowns, count ups. They've got all the stuff you can think of. So it's just like a one kind of stop shop.

And I also like that it's an app you run. So it's just in the background of your desktop. We've got these giant screens. Why not use the space for something, you know, productive? Oh, I love that. Thank you for that. They'll appreciate the kind words. You talked about the, you know, analog tools and you've got sticky notes, like stickies back on the Mac. That's kind of fun to see. It brings you back, you know?

So you mentioned earlier, you're kind of handling support for this app and some others on the weekends. And what is that just over email? Do you have like a ticketing system? How does that work? Kind of, you know, dealing with customers and then figuring out, hey, you know, this is a feature we should build based on feedback or this is just somebody kind of yelling into the sun. Like, you know, things that a lot of us deal with who are working on apps. How do you approach that sort of thing?

So a combination of email and Trello. And so for, you know, when I get a bug, I put it in Trello and then the team, it's Alexi, Ken and Ignacio will review it and they'll prioritize based on need and bug. And, you know, like things are buggy, things get broken and whatever.

We just, they just released a new, a new release this month and then a bug fix on the 8th of May. And, and so, you know, things, things happen and sometimes you get surprised. And anyway, so to answer your question, it's really email. Like I feel the email inbox and then I file things in the Trello board and they have,

It's everything from feature requests to bugs to other things that they want to improve or work on. Yeah, it's a pretty, I feel like they keep it pretty organized and I have my little columns that I add to the bugs, I add to the feature requests and I tackle the Jamie questions

column. So I have my three columns in Trello, but they have several columns up in there all set up really nice. Three of them are great at working together and communicating together. So yeah. And then I just jump in to help when I can. You know, I didn't realize this app is part of Setapp too. So if you've got a Setapp subscription, you're already on a license. Yes.

Yep. It's on the Apple App Store for Mac. And yeah, Setapp. I love Setapp. That's where I found CleanShot X, which is another one that's just kind of my little menu bar. But I love CleanShot X. I can't tell you how often I use that, especially for support stuff, Stephen. Like that's another little piece of

You know, sometimes you just need to do a quick demo of how to, I don't know, how to delete something or how to change a photo or how to, you know, one of those really quick little things that can create a little animated GIF for them. And I say GIF. So yeah, it's super easy. I can paste that into an email super quick. Anyway, so that's another plug for one I discovered on Setapp. Yeah, CleanShotX. It's like, have we met anybody who...

and didn't get immediate religion. I don't think we have. I honestly didn't want to like it because I thought I was such a pro. I had made these labs videos about everything you can do with the built-in Apple one. I'm like, I don't need CleanShot X. I can do this stuff. And Steven and Mike and everybody's like, oh, you got to try it. And I'm like, I'll try it, but I'm not going to like it because I like the things I do better. And then like a week later, I'm like, okay, you guys are right. This is better.

I was like you, David. That was very much me. I was like, I already, you know, sometimes I'm a little bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to onboarding new systems, learning new things. Like I love change and I love newness, but at the same time, it's hard.

And it's sometimes daunting. And I just like the way I do things already. But being open to trying, it's amazing what we can learn and what we can get exposed to. And that actually makes our lives easier than we thought it could be. Yeah, totally. And I actually covered this in the Alfred Field Guide. But if you use Alfred, there is a CleanShotX workflow that I didn't know existed until I made this guide. It has changed my life. Wow.

Clean shot has so many features. That's the thing. Like you don't remember or like how to trigger a feature. You got a mouse up to the menu bar. Now I just type CSX and Alfred. And with that workflow, I'll put the workflow link in the downloads, man. If you got Alfred with clean shot X, it like takes you to a whole new level. Amazing. Now I have a new thing to try. Yeah. I'll give you the link to that. I love it. I love it.

What else is in your menu bar, Jamie? What are some of the apps that kind of bring you joy and delight? So we talked about CleanShot X. I'm just going to go kind of from right to left, I guess. I have Widget Wall, which we talked about earlier.

And I forgot to plug the battery feature because I'm on my desktop. But for laptop, there's a battery widget. So that's one I use all the time. And I like it better than the one up in my menu bar. But let's see. Quit All is another one that's always in. It's another Amico apps, but it's not in the App Store. It's only available either through...

it's through set app or through the Amico apps website. So not to overplug Amico, but quit all is just a super easy way to quit all your apps really fast. That's cool. You know, I've never seen this one before. So interesting. Yeah, it's a good one. Like it's a really good one and you know, super simple solves one, one problem. You know, like when your stuff starts getting all laggy, you can just quit everything all

all at once. And there's a way to like leave stuff on, you know, I encourage folks to get in and play with that. I do customer support for that as well, which is primarily what is the next one on my, I think I'm going to download and check this out because it's also on set out, but like I do the thing once in a while where I hit a command tab and then

you can cycle through and hit the Q button to quit each one. Individually, this one. And that's kind of a pain. Exactly. This is like instant and I love it. And I've used it so many times just for, for exactly that, you know, like, especially, you know, they've,

They launched it quite a few years ago, but like when I, when I was using Photoshop more, for example, things just get laggier. If you're, you've got Final Cut Pro open and you've got, I don't know, a bunch of different things open and, you know, you can leave,

leave some on and turn everything else off in a single click. And it's pretty, pretty sweet. Yeah. It's like you can set your own keyboard shortcut so you can make it really fast. Nice. I have focus up there and then bar I use bartender and I, I don't know. I've heard that there's some like controversy on, on bartender, but I really like it. It's that, you know, especially on my laptop with that stupid notch that just things just vanish all the way. Um, the

the stupid notch that wasn't very nice. But yeah, that's kind of true. You know, it's just, it's one of those things where like, if you don't know, so this comes up in the customer support side all the time, people are like, oh, I can't see my widget wall or, you know, I like, it's not working. And it's like, okay, so here's what's probably happening is you have so many, you know, apps open that widget walls actually hiding behind the notch because that's how Apple handles it. Right. They just hide. I am so shocked by that still. Yeah.

They added a notch and they didn't like write something into the OS to tell menu bar apps just to jump over the notch. Right? It's a weird thing. It feels to me sloppy. I don't know, Stephen, what do you think about that?

super sloppy. I mean, it's the reason bartender and its alternatives exist. And in some ways, they're more valuable tools now than they were, you know, on older notebooks. We did on episode 787, we did a whole section about bartender and

I think what that basically boils down to is it got purchased and that process was not really clearly communicated. And they sort of had a couple of communication blunders in a row. But, you know, I'm using it. I tried a bunch of other ones and I always come back to bartender. It's so good. And I think that the dust up is basically behind them now.

Yeah, I think it's over. That whole thing is overstated. And one of the features in bartender for notch people for people on a laptop is it can put the bartender below the menu bar. It's like right below it. So it just slides right underneath your notch and then you can see everything. So there's a lot of reasons to like that app.

I love it. And it holds, you know, it's the holder of my other things like 1Password and Setapp and Dropbox. And I do still use Adobe Creative Cloud from time to time. Yeah, that's kind of, I think, the extent of my menu bar.

Another thing you do, Jamie, that I think is interesting, always an interesting question to me is you also like analog tools. You know, you use paper and pencil and note cards, but you're also a digital lady. So, I mean, how do you figure out where those lines are drawn? You know, it kind of just...

I set up my work. So we moved out to this, you know, 10 acre desert land, Ken and I, in December. We bought it a couple of years ago, but we've been working on it slowly. Another weekend project, right? A hoarder home overhaul. And when I set up my little office here, which was formerly a storage room. So it's this cute little space, but I love it so much. And we, I set up my

my workflow around my morning coffee. And so, you know, I do this thing where I like make my morning coffee. I come in, the sun is rising out my window. And, um, and I, I start with my pencil. I set up my little camera, my iPhone on a holder that also has a ring light, but I face it down toward my desk and I do my,

Coffee doodle. I doodle over dried coffee spills. And this is sort of like setting my daily mood and intentions for the day. Um, it's just like this little exercise I do. And then often I'll put a journal with it. Um,

And so now in the last month or so, I've fallen off of my daily doodles, but this was a very analog process. It's a very therapeutic process for me. I am an art kid to the core, right? Like I, my, my college, my degree is in metal sculpture. I don't know if you know that, but I was a drawing and metal sculpture was my major. And then I figured out computers because I had to learn how to make a living and I didn't want to do fabrication. So yeah.

Anyway, so computers happened for me. But yeah, so like this sort of getting this moving out to this desert homestead, I'm outside more. I'm working with my hands, pulling weeds and planting things. And I'm drawing again, which I had, you know, I've been so digital for most of my professional career that coming back to some of these tactile and, you

analog tools has really just been like a spirit builder for me. Like I feel so at peace. And I, to me, it's, it's going back to those sort of analog pieces, but then integrating them. I still love technology. I'm a, you know, I don't know. I kind of a wannabe nerd, I guess, but like,

I love to, I love my Mac. I love my Apple products. I love being able to create things quickly, but I also love my colored pencils and my note cards and my sticky notes. And I don't think I'll let, and my big paper calendar. I have a big desk calendar that, you know, is kind of, I always have to cross check my, my outlook calendar to make sure that everything's synced up. But I use that paper calendar all the time.

all the time. I really think there's just, I experienced the same thing, like using analog tools to me, scratch a different itch. I think maybe because I spend so much time on the digital, taking time to go analog on occasion is like a different mindset. Like my brain works a little different.

And I think there's absolutely something to that. And a lot of people are, we're hearing from a lot of people now who are exploring with that. Like nobody's saying I'm going to give up my computer and work everything out of a notebook. Well, a few people are saying that, but not many. And, but you know, I think most people realize, no computers are really useful and tech is really useful, but,

It's not the end of the story for the way I think and process things. Like, you know, we were talking about Miro earlier. So often for me, I've got a glass board and I've got some big paper in my studio. And so often the types of things you would do in Miro, I do analog.

And then I just take a picture of it. I love that. Yeah. You know, there's definitely an advantage for a bigger team to have a diagram that's digitally created. So like I, I too, I don't think I have, I don't think there is a right answer to this stuff, but I think it's absolutely something people should be exploring. What are some of your favorite, like analog tools that enhance kind of the digital for you? So I use these little, uh,

what are they, five by seven watercolor cards. And I still my little coffee drops and they're intentional now. It started by accident. These started as because I have a big paper calendar on my desk always. Back when I worked with Black Pixel, like way back 2011,

2012, I would rush for our daily standup with my cup of coffee, set it on the desk, the coffee would invariably like always spill. And then later I would have these dry coffee spills. And, you know, when you get, not to say that meetings were boring, but sometimes meetings are boring and I always end up doodling in a boring meeting. And so I started doodling and then I started

photographing them with my iPhone and uploading them originally to a Tumblr blog. And, um, you know, it got a little traction at the time. And then, I don't know, I just kind of kept doing them on and off. They were always kind of just a therapeutic thing for me. And then, I don't know, eventually somebody was like, you should make an Instagram for them. So I did. And here we are today, but I guess that that would probably be the, the, the

The one that I speak to the most is my note cards. I think they make for a really nice, I like my little Instagram. They changed from square to a different format. So I feel like all my photos are weirdly framed now on my Instagram. But at one time it looked really nice.

Well, Jamie, you are a woman of many hats. We appreciate you coming on and spending some time with us. Congratulations on all the different things you're doing. I love that you're able to pull it all off with different tool sets and make it work. If people want to learn more about the stuff you're doing, where should they go? CoffeeWithJamie.com is the best place to find me at any phase in life. All right.

Okay, we'll put a link for that in the notes. We are the Mac Power Users. You can find us at relay.fm.mpu. If you'd like to get the ad-free extended version of the show, sign up for more Power Users. You can do it right there, relay.fm.mpu. Thank you to our sponsors today, 1Password and Squarespace. We'll see you next time.