800: Three Weeks Too Late
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Hello and welcome to MacPower Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined, as always, by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. How are you today? I'm good. Congratulations on 800.

Yes, 800 episodes. Hard to believe, right? I know. I know. It's awesome. That's a lot of Mac Power users. It is. It is a lot of MPU. And we're here to do some more. So today we're going to be doing feedback episode, talking about some previous topics. I went on a little exploration of apps that work with Apple Notes. So I've done some work there. I'm going to talk about that.

And WBC is basically here. And so episode 801 will be talking about what happens at WBC. That episode will be out sometime midweek. So we're not going to wait all the way till Sunday. We're going to get it done and get it out sometime midweek. And then we'll be back on our normal schedule. But man, I just, I cannot believe it's already WBC time again. Like it, it happens so fast. Yeah.

This is such a weird year, too. I feel like this year has a very strange vibe around it because of everything going on in the industry, the way Apple's under attack in so many ways. And I think they're just their whiff on AI last year.

I just feel like it's just a weird year, and I'm really looking forward to talking to you about it after the announcement. Yeah, it's going to be great. We spoke a lot about that stuff last week with Jason Snell. So if you haven't heard 799, I think it was a really good conversation. Jason's one of the smartest people in this industry, and it was good to hear his thoughts going into this event. Yeah, totally.

Today on More Power Users, which is the ad-free extended version of the show, we're going to be talking about how we get ready for the WWDC beta season. You know, every year where there's a bunch of new betas, Stephen and I have slightly different approaches. So we'll be talking about that. And also, gang, my voice sounds a little weird today. I've got something going on. I don't know what it is, but I'm coughing and I guess I'm kind of cold. I'm COVID negative, so I'm not going to get any of you sick. But...

But there's something going on, so hang in there with me. Yeah, yeah, we will power through. You're going to hear a lot of me this week. So some listener feedback. Dan wrote in saying, I work from home as a software and graphic designer. I have gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi from Google Fiber. That's awesome. Man, I wish Google Fiber had...

gone wider than it did uh it's still in just a few cities here in the u.s but i use one computer an m1 pro macbook pro right now my foul management is on external ssds time machine and backblaze very similar to uh to your setup david i'd like to he didn't say if he's taping his ssds on a display though i just want to i don't do that anymore i'm not an animal i'm good

I'd like to discuss the state of affordable NAS options for a small power user like me who intends to develop more. So we've spoken about a little bit in the past. There's a couple of ways you can do storage on a network. Probably the easiest way from a macOS perspective is if you have a Mac Mini or maybe a Mac that you've retired from,

setting it up on your network with file sharing turned on and system settings. And then you have all the benefits that we've spoken about so many times about having an always on Mac, right? You can run Hazel rules and mail rules and keyboard maestro and Dropbox and all of these things all the time. That is definitely a way to go, but, uh,

This is a good opportunity to talk about network-attached storage as well. So this is storage that's on your network, not associated with any individual computer, but it's its own thing on the network. And

A lot of folks in our community, KC List comes to mind in particular, really like the Synology line of products. And so you pick a Synology, they have a lot of offerings, different capabilities in terms of how many hard drives you can put in there, what kind of networking it offers, that sort of thing.

And what's neat about the Synology is that it is kind of, it is this enclosed system. You plug it into power and plug it into ethernet, but it is its own computer. So you log into it via a browser on your local network and you can run applications directly on the Synology. So you can have it backing up to a cloud service provider. You can have it syncing files with Dropbox. You can plug,

you know, have it downloading things from the internet automatically. Like there has a lot of applications that run on the Synology. It's its own operating system with a really wide user base of support. And they're very popular. Now Synology has had a dust up in the last month or so where they are like certifying some brands of hard drives and not certifying others. I think that's mostly kind of silly, but,

You can go read about that. There's lots of blog posts about that. But in general, that's kind of what a NAS is. And Synology is just one example. There are other brands. But I think for the small business owner, the power user at home, Synology is a very popular way to go. So I recently went through this where I was using external SSDs because I'm on a MacBook Pro. And I was...

running into the wall of what I could do kind of easily with that setup. And so I ended up actually going back to a network-attached storage device. Now, I used a Synology for years, but when, like 15, 10, 15 years ago, when it was time to go back to that, I thought long and hard about it. And really, I wanted something that wasn't a full computer. What I wanted, just for my needs, was something

a box on my network that's just a bunch of hard drives and isn't really its own computer. I didn't want the overhead of that. I didn't really need anything that offered anything

And so what I went with was the U-NAS Pro from Ubiquiti. And we're going to talk about Ubiquiti an episode later in the year. In fact, we have a question about that in this feedback episode about when are you going to talk about it? But I went with their NAS product because it is just a box of hard drives sitting on my network and I can connect to it via Finder or

Drag things on and off of it. Now, I can manage it from a web interface, right? So I can check the hard drive status and the network status and change things with some settings there. But it's not doing anything, right? It's just a volume in Finder for me. And that's what I wanted. And I backed that up with ARC.

through my Mac Mini to Backblaze B2. And I've been very happy with this setup. It's been really solid for me for a number of months now. And it's just like humming away in the other room. I even opened it and put quieter fans in it, which I'm not sure what that did to my warranty, but that's okay. It was kind of loud. Most of these products, there is a noise barrier.

Because you got spinning hard drives and a thing with a fan in them and that sort of stuff. So you got to kind of take that into account. But that's what I'm doing. So I'm not doing a Synology. It's really not a traditional NAS in terms of running software. It is a basically a dumb box with a bunch of drives in it.

Yeah, I like that idea, a dumb box with a bunch of storage, because I've never been somebody who really wants a NAS to be like a media server and all the other things people do with Synologies. Yeah, a lot of people run Plex on it. Yeah, exactly. And so that's just not really for me. I don't have little kids, so I don't need to have like all of my – I don't need to have copies of everything everyone will watch on TV.

Dan is kind of in your shoes, you know, the way he wrote, he's just looking really for file storage. One thing I would think Dan is about, you know, cold versus hot storage, because the stuff that's you've got local to your machine is going to be so much faster, especially in Apple Silicon. So, you know, think about how much space you need locally for the stuff that you're working on and then how much stuff you can make slow locally.

because it's like cold storage. And then you can, you know, that helps your strategy. I have to say, cause I'm heading this direction between the labs and the field guides. I have so many media files and things that I've generated as part of the business that, you know, I've got this problem, you know, I've got this huge drive in my computer, which is great, but even that is starting to get a little tight and I'm going to have to do something about this soon.

I'll tell you, I haven't done all the research you have, but my gut reaction, my starting place would be Mac mini. I mean, you can get a Mac mini pretty cheap, you know, even just like a, a prior gen, uh, Apple Silicon Mac mini. I like the idea of it being a Mac cause I know the Mac operating system so well, and I could have it doing things like Hazel rules and stuff in the background, which I think would be cool. When you start looking at the cost of a Synology, uh,

you're getting to Mac mini prices already. So it's not like you're saving a bunch of money going to like a system.

over mac mini so that's kind of my feeling we're actually doing a thing in the labs where we're going to have a bunch of members who use mac minis as a home server talk about what they do with it and that's a session that i'm doing for my own personal benefit because i want to take a bunch of notes you know but i'm i'm headed the mac mini direction i think dan when it comes time to do it but i i'm saying that without having done all the research yet yeah and in that case you can get you know uh

You go to someplace like OWC, you know, Mac sales and get an enclosure that puts a bunch of hard drives in it. Maybe they're rated together. RAID lets you span data across multiple hard drives and you can do it. There's several different like trade-offs, like you can have the mirrored or striped or a combination thereof.

And that gives you some redundancy, but RAID is not a backup. And so one of the benefits, honestly, of using a Mac Mini is,

And you can get a 10-core refurbished M4 Mac Mini right now for $500 from Apple. That is bananas. That's really a good deal. And you get them even cheaper other places. But having it on a Mac means that you have more options in terms of backing that data up off-site. Because if you have a Mac Mini and then you have all your drives attached directly to it, then you don't have to go through the hoops of like Arc and Backblaze B2 or...

or Glacier or something like that, you can just use regular consumer Backblaze because consumer Backblaze lets you back up drives that are attached locally. Why I have to do what I do through the network to Backblaze B2 is because those drives are mounted as network volumes, not local volumes. And so I think for a lot of people, especially if you've got an older Mac, that is probably the way to go.

And then finding, you know, a good enclosure with multiple drives that kind of fits your needs and going from there.

So we mentioned Ubiquity. I've gotten this question several times. Andy wrote in, I'd love to hear you talk more about Ubiquity. Andy uses it for their home network as well as they do some consulting with it. And we'd just love to hear our thoughts on it. We are planning that episode later in the year. So I'm going to walk through all of that. And if you've got questions about it, I know a lot of people are sort of curious about Ubiquity legislation.

let us know in the feedback form. I'd love to answer as many questions as we can when we get to that episode. I'm just letting you know ahead of time, my role in that episode will be the official skeptic. I'm like, why do we need all this stuff? Yeah. I mean, it seems like quite an investment, but I know you love it. I've seen your pictures. All my ethernet ports light up. It's sick. But yes, we will get to that. All right. This next topic. Yeah.

Glass breaking. Glass breaking. So on our member special, which is out now to all Relay members, no matter what show you support. So if you support focused or connected or upgrade, you have access to this. We spoke about our vehicles. And one thing we harped on because we're dads is you need a way to break the glass in your car. So if you're in an accident or, you know, God forbid, in water or something like that, you can get out.

And Brant's wrote in saying companies like Rivian and Tesla and others laminate their windows. So to pause, automakers use laminated glass to make it quieter. So it's usually two layers of glass with laminate in between. They're bonded so you have less wind noise coming in the car. And as you know, driving two electric vehicles in your household,

You hear a lot more of what's going on around you in an electric car because you don't have engine and exhaust sounds competing for that, right? They're trying to make it quieter. Brantz goes on.

It seems like it likely won't shatter the glass in the way you would expect in a normal car. And so there may be a solution out there. They were kind of asking, like, is there a solution out there? And you went down a rabbit hole with this, which I love. I opened the notion the other day. I was like, there's a lot of stuff in here about breaking vehicle glass. So what's going on?

Well, I was worried because, you know, I don't want to be sinking into the bottom of a lake and not be able to get out of my car. In your very heavy vehicle. In my very heavy vehicle, exactly. I would sink quickly. Yeah, so he's right. And I had no idea this was a thing. But laminated glass, Rivian has laminated on the passenger windows and the front window and...

The top is a big window too. And that's also laminated glass. And if you look at it, when you roll the window down, you can see that's a good way to test. By the way, if you have laminated glass, just roll your window down and look at it from the top and you'll see like layers, you'll see like a ridges. And that means it's laminated. It's not just fancy Rivians. A lot of cars have this, but it's important to be able to get out of your car. And so I started researching it, looking around, they're actually making tools to help you get out of laminated glass, but

None of them from what I could tell are things I could use while I was sinking to the bottom of a lake. You know, it's like, you know, power saws or, you know, it just doesn't make sense. I mean, I'm kind of not going to be able to break that glass in an emergency. But the rear windows, the windows for the back seats are not laminated. And so I guess in the jam, I could get back there and smash one of those.

I mean, the real trick is if you're crashing or you're going to the waters, roll your windows down right away. I called Rivian and they said that actually there are circuits that are supposed to make it easier to roll the window down while in water. I mean, I'm like, really?

How am I going to test that? Well, it's a one-way test. Yeah. And also, I mean, the thing is, if your car is suddenly in the water, you may not be completely conscious enough to do it at the time. Yeah, that's a good point. So I don't really know what the outcome for this. It was really good feedback, though, because it was something I had no idea. So then I started looking around at all the other cars in the house.

And the Toyotas do not have laminated glass, the kids' cars, but Daisy's, Kia does. And so it's a thing. And so all these little hammers I've been giving everybody doesn't necessarily mean they're going to work in a gym. Don't really have the answer for it, but it was an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Yeah, it's definitely a trade-off, right, that these car makers are doing and

Yeah, there are some specific tools. One labels itself as a military-grade cutting machine, which is like, what a cool phrase that is, but maybe not something you would be able to quickly use. So yeah, do some homework there. And that's fascinating to me that Rivian has thought about this, like that there is protection for those circuits, I guess, for a period of time.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't even know what that means. I will say, of course, it's a very expensive car, which I'm leasing and again, I have to give back to them, but I've never had a better customer service experience with a vehicle. You know, you call them, they immediately call you back and it's a human. That's cool. Yeah.

They should when they're charging that much. Yeah, that is definitely true. But yeah, it's cool and a little scary because I can't break glass. I think this is probably true for most electric cars because they are very quiet. And I'm sure that the noise is a complaint people have when they buy these cars.

you know, wind noise. Yeah. I mean, even, even you mentioned Toyota. And of course that's what I'm familiar with is an all Toyota family. Even newer Toyotas have laminated glass, even like ice vehicles. Right. So like they're some of their newer cars and trucks are using it. And, you know, some of these tools, the one that we linked to that I always mentioned, the other end of it has a seatbelt cutter. So if you do find a glass brick tool that works on laminated glass, you know,

Seed belt cutter is also really important. I mean, when I was in my accident, like I couldn't get the seed belt undone. I had to end up getting cut to get out. So, you know, this is something to just be prepared for and to have a plan. Yeah, no. Although we were so happy to tell everybody to buy these things during that session. And no, it's not going to work for everybody. Not for everybody. So yeah, glass breaking.

We had a productivity field guide question. Yeah. So you're just the guy to talk to about that as the person who made the productivity field guide. Logan wrote in, what advice would you have for somebody whose schedule is wildly inconsistent? Yeah.

I don't know what I'll be doing at work or for how long until the night before I could be at work for anywhere from 10 to 15 hours. And my days off are not consistent when they arrive or how many I will have or in what order. It seems like a lot of tools out there are not designed for someone in my position. Yeah, that your life sounds like hell Logan. I will say that. Um,

You don't know how long it'll be and you don't know when you're going to have your next day off. So I, I don't, I do not envy you. That's tough. Yeah. Um,

I was a lawyer almost 30 years, and that's another very what I would call reactive job. You think you know what you're going to do that day, but a client calls and says, hey, the IRS just showed up. And it's like, well, my day just changed then. So there's lots of people out there with jobs where they're very reactive. And the thing that I talk about in the productivity field guide is how do you become intentional or get time for the important stuff?

And it's even more of a challenge when you have reactive jobs. There's a technique I taught this year in the new version of it called fluid blocks.

where, you know, a lot, you know, like historically people teach you time blocking. They're like, well, you know, you sit down on Sunday and you figure out on Tuesday afternoon, I'm going to do project X. And on Wednesday morning, I'm going to do project Y. And you've got everything kind of nicely lined up. But if you're like Logan and you show up at work and they're like, oh no, you're not working on that Tuesday afternoon. We got something completely different for you to do. And then your, your plans get blown all that, you know, smithereens. And then you feel like you're not getting anything done.

Fluid block scheduling is the idea of make up the two or three things you really want to do this week and make them fluid. Don't put them into a specific slot, but look for a slot that you can drop them in as you go through the week and always have that on your mind. If you do that, it gives you the ability to be reactive at work, but also get some work done. Now, if you've got a job that is 100% reactive and you never get a two or three hour block to work on something,

then you got a problem. You know, frankly, you got to think about that. I mean, even as a lawyer with that reactive job, when, you know, I did get calls from clients and judges that would blow my day up, but that wasn't every moment of every day. And I was able to find time to work on the important stuff.

But the problem with a reactive job is you give yourself kind of permission not to do the hard stuff or the important stuff because you're like, well, I have a job where I never know. So I'm just never going to do that. And that's not an acceptable answer either. You've got to work a little harder. Yeah. But you can do that and be reasonable. I mean, if you've got a job that's reactive, you're not going to have as much time to work on the projects most important to you. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's really tough. I mean, I was reflecting on this question, and even times as recently as last week, we had an issue come up at work that really disrailed my week in a really profound way that kind of bled into the weekend. Yeah.

That's really tough to manage that on an ongoing basis. And one thing that's really helpful for me in those situations, because not everyone is in Logan's situation, but I think everybody can relate to, hey, what you had planned kind of got taken away from you because of a scheduling issue.

For me, what's important in those issues is knowing, like keeping my priorities straight. That yes, you know, we have an emergency or some situation they need to handle right now. And that becomes the top of the list, but being mindful of those priorities. So I know what can wait or what I can drop to next week or hand off to somebody else. And so for me living in, in, in sort of a, uh,

I know not everybody likes this, but living in sort of a priority system, a lot of the way I think about things, like there are some things that have to be done now and some things that can be done later. And it's being, knowing that being able to make decisions under fire in that way, for me at least, is very helpful. Yeah. I mean, the thing you have to realize is that the one thing the world will never make a priority is the things that are most important to you. Yeah.

everything coming at you is going to be other people and other companies and other objects demanding your attention and time. But if there's stuff you really want to get done with your life, you have to carve it out. I mean, that's honestly the field guide in a nutshell. It's like,

Figure that out. How do you do that? And, and when you've got Logan's job, it's really hard, you know, and I, and I'm just talking about in relation to his work, you know, like what are the important projects at work he wants to be working on? And if he, if he has got this reactive job, he doesn't get to move the ball forward on the stuff that's going to get him promoted. But this is, I would say, take that larger to your whole life, you know, but the, just remember that the stuff that's most important to you, the stuff that you're going to wish you did is,

When you get to the end of the road is the stuff that nobody's ever going to urge you to do and then figure out from there what you're going to do about it. So much of that productivity field guide stuff involves death. It's true. Yeah. What is it you always say? None of us are getting out of this alive. Yeah, I was going to say, you always have this saying. That's true. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password.

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Listener Rob wrote in about read it later services. I'm sure you saw people have seen that Mozilla is ending pocket. It is going away later this year. And that's a bummer. Man pocket has been around for a long time. Yeah. But Rob wrote in, I know that y'all have talked about read it later services on and off over the years with pocket going away. What do you recommend? Yeah.

Okay. I got, I've got news here. Okay. I have gone, I have gone so hard into read wise reader. I don't even know. It's, it's the whole thing for me now, Steven, you know, read wise, you know, so I'm, I'm a big fan of the read wise service. That's the thing where you give them money. And if you highlight a book on your Kindle or your ebook, it gives you spaced repetition responses. Okay.

They started making their own read it later app a few years ago, but the early betas were just rough. And I, so I didn't really take to it initially. Yeah. And I, last time this came up, I said, I've been using unread, but about three or four months ago, I looked at read wise again and I'm like, Oh, they've got a lot better now. And it is so feature rich for someone like me that it has become the app that

Can I just tell you a little bit what I'm doing with this thing? Please. So I've got all my RSS pointed at it, but it's got a very powerful tagging system. So, you know, every Friday in the Mac Sparky Labs, you get a free podcast, a little podcast from me. Well, I guess it's not free if you're in the labs, but you get a podcast. And it's my, the only time I ever talk about Apple News is Friday. It's called the Lab Report.

So as I go through my feeds through the week, anything that I think I may want to talk about it, I just tag lab report. Or I see something like, ooh, that might be a good idea to write about that on the blog, blog idea. Or there's something about this research project I want to work on. I've got a tag for that. So I tag stuff as it comes in and mark them off, you know, so they disappear. But then I've got these smart lists that show up giving me just what I need to see when I do the expected work.

But it also allows you to have a magic email address. So I've got a bunch of my, you know, my kind of extended reading subscription stuff pointing at it, you know, sub stack, things like that. So I can do extended reading in there. It's also now got the ability to do eBooks. And when I had my fit and quit Amazon for, uh, for books, at least, uh,

I, um, all my books are now able to be read in read wise because I, you know, did certain things and now I can read the books that I paid for in my read wise read app. And so it's just become like a catchall for me. And, uh, there's more to it. I'm going to make some videos on it, on what I'm doing with it. But man, the read wise reader app has hooked me really well. I mean, it's in deep at this point.

So it is an RSS reader and a, and a read it later. Like I don't. Yes. It's everything. It's everything. It's RSS. Read it later. You can send articles to it and all of it has the highlighting attachment for, so, so anything you highlight will show up in your space repetition highlights. It's really an ecosystem and I pay, I don't know even what I pay for it now. I think it's up to about a hundred bucks a year or something like that. But yeah,

Honestly, it feels like such a good investment to me because I love the spaced repetition and it's just like I read a lot and now all the stuff is just showing up in one place, even my books. Okay. Yeah, there's something really attractive about that, like having a hub for all of those things. That's pretty cool. Yeah. They've really, if you looked at the early betas and got turned off like I did, they

Especially if you're a subscriber. I know a lot of listeners are subscribers just for the spaced repetition benefits. But if you haven't gone back and looked at the app, it's really, they've done a great job with it. Okay. Yeah, I tried it early on and it was definitely rough. Yeah.

And it's a lot like, like if you just want to read it later, this is not that this does so much more. And I think for some people that are like, I don't want to do deal with all this, but for me, it's actually super useful because like the workflow for getting that lab report, those lab report articles and all that stuff now is all in one place. And I just have to keep up with the feed in that app and everything is prepped for me when it's time to record the podcast and everything.

And then I can also read a book, you know, just, it's just really nice. Big fan. I am my, my, uh,

Setup is the same as it's been for a long time. I use Feedbin for RSS, but I send things to GoodLynx for read it later purposes. GoodLynx is a native app on the Mac and iPhone and iPad. Very simple, very straightforward. It's got a nice share extension so I can send stuff from social media or the web or anything to it.

And it's a very much a traditional read at later service where you got a list of articles. They're read or unread. You can tag them. The new update, you can do highlights. And so it's kind of working its way into a little bit of a research tool where you can do notes and create notebooks to group things together.

But I've been very happy with it. I've used it for a long time. And I actually, I mean, I don't really feel a need to change that up. Like I think ReadWise Reader is a bit more than what I want. So if you're looking at something more like Pocket or Instapaper, I think GoodLynx could be a contender.

Yeah, I actually paid for a year of good links when I was kind of in the wilderness. And I think it's an excellent app and it's just pretty and useful. I like the way it displays the articles. I think if you're looking for the simpler solution, that that's a great one. Yeah. Scanning paper from Russell. David mentions he still uses paper. How does he digitize it? Scan set. And the answer is no.

No, not usually. I still have my ScanSnap, and when I get big piles of documents, I will ScanSnap them. But since I'm not doing the law thing anymore, I don't have as many big piles of paper. I have got to the habit of just when the mail comes in, I just scan it right there with Greg Pierce's Simple Scan app. And it's just so fast. And honestly, taking it with the picture with the camera and the phone is so good. I think the scan is actually probably better than

taken with Greg's app than it is with a traditional document scanner. But his question was actually about like journaling paper. So that actually takes some work. So I do like to write out longhand journal entries sometimes, and it just helps me slow down and think things through.

Um, as AI gets more and more powerful, I'm finding there are certain parts of my life I want to stand really clear of AI on and journaling is one of them. So like the process of writing by hand is kind of a way to force that separation. Um, but I also still use day one. So, you know,

take it with a grain of salt. But when I do write out a long form essay or journal entry, I like to get the text into day one. And the way I write, I write like an architect, you know, my handwriting is all caps. And so traditionally OCR has been almost impossible with it, but I did discover that artificial intelligence is actually really good at it. So I made a little prompt and

I don't know if we should put it in the notes, or I can just read it. It's just like, "Transcribe this all caps text into regular sentence case. Keep the original wording intact and correct any spelling errors. Return the result in clean, markdown friendly formatting." That's a text expander snippet that I created. I just type AI.block, and then it pops that in. So no matter which AI engine I'm using, I can use that. Although I find ChatGPT is the best one for me for doing this.

And then I give it the picture that I shot with Greg's app and it does a really good job of turning that into text for me. So I can get the text into my, my day one. Very cool. I am not doing a lot of OCRing of handwritten stuff. I don't, I journal in day one. I will sometimes journal in my field notes, but then I'll just like take a picture and stick it in today one. But for scanning paperwork and those sorts of things, I,

Uh, simple scan is awesome. Uh, and, and we just say the files app on the iPhone, the notes app on the iPhone, like Apple has its own scanning stuff too. Uh, I just like some of the niceties Greg has put into simple scan, uh,

Um, but if it's like, Hey, I need to scan this pile of paperwork for, you know, uh, the new school year or something for one of the kids. Uh, I just have like a random flatbed scanner. I got an office Depot a hundred years ago and it's totally fine. Like I think mine goes up to 600 DPI.

So it looks pretty good. And then I just use the built-in image capture application that comes with macOS. So I'm not using any weird HP software or any of that junk. Just image capture and this USB flatbed scanner that served me well for a long time. Not real fancy, but it gets the job done for me. Yeah, the ScanSnap is still awesome. I'm glad I have it, but I don't use it very often because I just try to keep up with it as it comes in. But you're like...

End of the year taxes and insurance, the big piles of documents from your insurance company, stuff like that. Then I'll break out the big boy. iPad usage. Several emails defending the iPad for others. This was an interesting thing. I got a bunch of email from different people after the iPad show saying, hey, you guys don't take the iPad serious enough. I've got one with my...

husband slash wife slash kid slash mom and dad slash friend everybody all these power users are deploying ipads to non-geek friends basically is the thing i learned after making that episode yeah

Which I think makes a lot of sense, right? It's so much simpler than a Mac. A lot of those users are the kind of users that end up with, you know, they're launching applications from their desktop and maybe they end up with some sort of adware on their computer. And the iPad just takes care of so much of that stuff for you. It comes with those trade-offs that we talked about in the episode. But for a, you really can't break it software-wise, the iPad's kind of hard to beat. Yeah.

I mean, and for the listeners writing in, it's like very much easier to troubleshoot for their relative, right? Because there's not that much that goes wrong. As I was reading all these emails, I was thinking, how can I get my 80-plus-year-old mother-in-law on an iPad? Because she is so dangerous with a Mac. She...

You know, she's so vulnerable to hackers and like she'll get the little pop-up about Microsoft and call the 800 number and install the botware and everything. It's like it would be so much easier if she would just use an iPad. But I brought it up with her after reading all the emails. She's like, oh, no, I want a computer. I don't want an iPad. I'm like, I'll pay for it. I'll buy it for you. Yeah. And she just won't do it. Yeah.

But if you can get your vulnerable family members on an iPad, you should. And that, I thought, was an excellent point we should have made. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think about my dad as sort of the quintessential iPad user. He is unsure of technology and is nervous about messing it up or breaking it or something like that. But with the iPad, he can do what he needs to do and

I very rarely hear from him from a technical support perspective with it. And he's browsing and doing his stuff. And he likes the form factor. He likes that he can take it with him or use it anywhere and that it's lightweight. He doesn't have a bulky laptop or something. So there are definitely benefits to a lot of types of users, even if folks like us or people who listen to podcasts like ours, it may not be their go-to every day.

You know, once in a while you say something really smart. And on that episode when you said maybe they shouldn't make the iPad more powerful. I mean, reading these emails, that lends credence to your argument. That like, no, this is a device for those people and we shouldn't mess it up. Yeah. We also got lots of iPad size discussion. I think with our listeners, 11 inches the winner.

Yeah, it really, the 11 inch really splits the difference nicely where if you pair it with the magic keyboard and track pad, like it's a totally usable keyboard, right? It's not super cramped and it's great as a tablet on its own. Um, just to, to hold in your hands or to be on the couch and, you know, watching a video or something where the 13 inch, I feel like the, uh,

is better as a laptop replacement, but maybe not quite as, as portable. And it weighs a good bit more with the keyboard on it than the 11 inch. Um, 11 is just definitely my, you know, between the two, the one I think is the default that people should, should look at.

Yeah, a lot of the 11-inch people would say, well, why on earth would you ever want a 13-inch? And you just answered it, if you're going to use it as a laptop replacement. That's really the only reason to get the big one, in my opinion. And the other thing I would say, just from our listeners and the Max Barkey Labs folks, is there are some absolute mini zealots out there. Some people are very serious about that mini device.

And unhappy that they don't have a pro-level mini. But that makes me think this folding iPhone thing is going to find an audience. I think so, too. I'm very excited about what the iPhone could be in the next few years.

You know, I've been doing this thing. I don't know if we've talked about it on MPU, but I've been doing this thing for about a month now where I have a separate personal and work phone. And boy, having like a foldable phone for work, my work stuff of like, hey, I need to really kind of sit down and like look at this spreadsheet real quick and I just have a phone on me. That's pretty compelling. I'm very excited to see what they do. Wait a second. Wait a second. What is this? You've got two phones now? Yeah. How did I not know this? Yeah. Yeah.

I'll tell you what, we'll put a, we'll put a pin in that and we'll do it in the stuff we're playing with section at the end of the show. All right. All right. I'm taking out what I had in there and putting that in. We'll come back to that. Okay.

And because the iPad's up in the WWC rumors, the keynotes tomorrow as we release this, a lot of people wrote in saying that they think that this will be the year the iPad gets saved. No. No? You don't think so? I mean, they may do some window management stuff.

But I think we said it on the show. The fundamental problem of the iPad is not how you manage the apps. It's the power of the apps themselves. And that's nothing against developers of iPad apps at all. It's that the operating system and what it can do is just much more limited than what the Mac can do. And unless Apple changes that, no amount of window management or keyboard shortcuts or background processing changes

is really going to move the needle for people who need the iPad to be more. And I would say, as you're watching the keynote tomorrow, if you're listening to the show right after release, ask yourself when they announce iPad changes, does this make sense to make the iPad better? Or does this make sense because we might get a folding phone and iPad next year? Yeah. I think that's the question. That's really smart. Okay, moving on.

Oh, actually, one other question from James related. After the iPad usage episode, I was left wondering, what is your mobile setup for a trip to the coffee shop or, you know, quick trip out to get some work done? Steven, what is it? Yeah, so for me, it's my 14-inch MacBook Pro is my main work computer. And I will take my field notes with me and usually some AirPods. I love that.

You bring the whole office with you. I bring the whole office with me. It's great having everything on the one laptop. Jason spoke about it last week, the benefits of that. And it is really nice to not worry like, oh, the project I'm working on was on the desktop. It's all just with me.

I like to think in advance what I'm doing. Like if I'm going to write like blog posts, newsletters, like a lot of the stuff I do starts as something written. I bring the 11 inch iPad with the keyboard and off to the races I go. If I'm going to be doing more admin style management stuff, I might bring the MacBook cause I have a MacBook air and it just depends on what I'm going to do. But I am stuck once I get there. I can't switch gears cause I don't have what I need. Sure. You know what I bring. Okay.

So that's another good reason why I should just buy a MacBook Pro like you and Jason. Wait, didn't you buy a MacBook Pro? All right. I need to talk about this. I want to upgrade my computer so badly I can taste it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I think I'm getting older and losing inhibition, right? Because I have a perfectly functioning M2 with an 8-terabyte hard drive,

And there's something about those two extra M's and M4 that calls to me, just calls to me. I want to get a new computer and set it up. And I want it to be like you and Jason, all the other cool kids with all my stuff on it. And I can bring it with me. You can get it in a space black. It's sick. Get it space black. I want it so bad. I mean, I'm talking about it right now. I'm thinking I should just go order it. And so I did. I ordered it. But then you look at the benchmarks.

there's not that much difference between M2 and M4. Like, you know, the stuff I'm doing, it's going to render videos, you know, 30 seconds faster, you know, I'm going to have left storage. So I'm going to have to figure that out unless I want to spend another two grand to get the eight terabyte version. And so I canceled it the next day. Cause I just, you know, it's in the cold light of day. It doesn't make sense. It's not, it's not a big enough improvement to justify, justify the thousands of dollars it would cost, but,

but man, I want it so bad. So I, I, I, I canceled it. I will, they'll get my money eventually, you know, M five, M six. I really think if I was smart, I'd wait till the M six. Cause that's supposed to be a new screen technology in the M six, but man, I try not to think about it. Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. And it's not a huge update, right? Yeah.

I went from an M2 Pro to an M4 Max and like it's the same experience basically yeah and I think even at the you know when I do push it it's just not that often and it was fast before and so from a performance perspective I totally totally get that um and I think that's not unwise I do think I'm convinced though when I do upgrade I will get a laptop I think that

You guys have sold me on the idea of being able to bring all my files with me. Yeah. I don't travel as much as I used to. That's okay. Last year I had a lot of travel, but even then I would just bring, cause I've got a clone drive, you know, a, a, it was a super duper, not super duper. It's a carbon copy cleaner, carbon copy cloner drive. I just throw it in my bag. When I go out of town, I can plug it into my laptop and it's got everything on it. So I kind of got my stuff with me, but yeah,

It's not the same. And Jason's right. It is kind of a pain in the neck sometimes when your scripts don't work or whatever. I mean, I'm kind of sold on the idea. Yeah. But if I'm going to spend thousands of dollars on the business right now, I'd rather spend it on something that actually helps my customers than make me render videos 30 seconds faster and be more convenient when I leave the studio. But at the same time, man, it's like a –

It's like a topic I want to avoid because I'm still tempted to order one. Yeah. And now they're in the refurb store. Jeez.

tough tough times for a nerd like me you know the other thing i i was thinking about coming when i was getting ready to record today is like something the listeners should be aware is like the rules have changed it used to be after a couple iterations of intel chips you got some bang for your buck when you upgraded like it used to make sense to upgrade more often whereas with apple silicon they're already so fast that

I think the upgrade cycle, you just have to, I have to rewire my brain to think that, no, I should wait like four upgrades, not two. Yeah. No, I think that's right. It's tough though. Cause man, wouldn't it be fun to get a new computer? Maybe what I should do.

is after the show, I should just nuke my studio, just wipe it out and restore it. Maybe that would scratch the itch for me. Like it would be like getting a new computer. What do you think? Should I do that? That seems like a lot of work without any trade-off. Like it just, uh,

What you do is you're going to wipe it, and then you're going to go trade it in to a MacBook Pro. Yeah, that's actually – that would probably be what I'd do. So that's probably a bad idea. Don't do that. But I do – yeah, I do think that – and this is something Jason said too. It's so much more manageable now having a laptop as your desktop replacement, right? It's so –

It's so great. So much better than the Intel days where you would get weirdness. And I think you're totally right about the upgrade cycle being longer now. So, yeah, I think you should wait. This is what's going to happen. I'm going to publish this episode. And there'll be certain Max Barkey Labs members. There'll be certain listeners that will write me. They're like, oh, dude, you should totally. I did it. I upgraded from M2 to M4. I love it. You should do it. You guys are all evil. I know it.

But I'm still going to try and hold on. Okay, so no new Mac Pro for you yet. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by NetSuite. It's an interesting time for business. Tariff and trade policies are dynamic. Supplies chains are squeezed. And cash flow is tighter than ever. And if your business can't adapt in real time, you're going to be in a world of hurt.

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Super human got a bunch of comments, you know, Hey, what are you doing with your super human? I was very excited about it when I, when I announced it. You did. You were. Yeah. I'll tell you after using it now, it's about three weeks since we recorded that. I'm still just as excited about it. I love it. It really has been great because it came at a time when I had taken back over customer support for Max Barkey. And that was always kind of the bane of me.

And I've been reading the new Mark Twain biography, Stephen. You know the things I don't know? It's by Ron Chernow. It's like 1,200 pages. Gosh. I have not read it, but that is long. It's a lot of pages. He said, because he got all these letters every day, and he called it The Persecution of Kindly Letters from Well-Meaning Strangers. And then he said, Correspondence is the despair of my life.

Because he couldn't just like, if you wrote Mark Twain a letter, he couldn't just write you back and say, hey, thanks. He'd have to be Mark Twain. And he'd have to write something like clever. And he told his sister, suppose you have to have 15 teeth pulled every day. That's how he talked about his mail. My life's not that bad. I actually like writing and corresponding with the folks that are listening to the show. But it's a scale problem, like when it's too much. Sure.

superhuman has totally made it easier and manageable. Like maybe at some point I'll become such a big deal that I won't be able to keep up, but superhuman just gave me time on that. So I, I'm really a big fan of it.

Uh, go back and listen to the show. All the stuff I talked about then is cool. And I've learned some more tricks since then. And again, it's, it's another thing where I've been really appreciative of the company. I've had a couple feedback issues and questions and like humans write me immediately and

So they're very into your success with their product. I mean, I would hope so for the expense. $30 a month. Yeah, exactly. But honestly, in comparison to hiring somebody, this is so cheap for me. And I heard from several listeners that tried it and got hooked the same way. It's not for everybody, but if email is a problem for you, this could be the solution. Yeah.

And I'll be very curious to see where it all stands in a couple of years. I think we're on the verge of something big with artificial intelligence and email. I mean, ultimately, what this is, is email, you know, artificial intelligence is going to become the communication technique, I think, between people. And you're not going to be involved with it. Instead, it's going to spit out lists of tasks and things you need to do based on

the requirements of your coworkers or something like that. I, I just think we're in the verge of some real disruption. So maybe it'll get easier or harder in the next few years. But for the time being superhuman is the, uh, the answer for me. It's fascinating. I was very curious if it had stuck or not. Um, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm totally, I, so much so that I switched over to Google and dealt with all that headache. I mean, it's, it's fine. And, um,

And I also, I mean, just to show you how far I went down this rabbit hole, I set up my own personal domain. After all these years of using a .Mac account for personal email, I bought my own domain and I ran that through Google too so that I can run my personal stuff through Superhuman as well. One of the nice things, they let you do your personal and your work email on one account. They don't make you pay twice. Okay. So, yes, I like it. I've got an affiliate link if you want a free month. Get it and that gets me a free month too.

Don't do it just to get me every month. Do it because you want it. But I think a lot of people might like it. Ray wrote us. He talked about defense of Microsoft Exchange. Yeah, this was really, really interesting. So Ray wrote, they are a longtime Mac user and have never owned a Windows machine. They own and operated 24-person consulting business that is all Mac, but they use Office 365.

for email, file storage, and the rest of the app suite. So, you know, Word, Excel, et cetera. And so they kind of say that, like, I'm not a Microsoft, you know, admin or apologist. They're a Mac user, but they're using Office 365. And they gave us four reasons that they really like it. So one is the server-level rules. And we spoke about this about Gmail, right, that their server-side rules are really powerful.

And Ray Rodin, I get about 300 emails a day and two thirds of those get siphoned off automatically with rules. 300 emails a day. That's a lot. That's a lot of email. And it integrates perfectly with mail and the iOS mail app. And that's actually something that is a strength of Exchange. I mean, Snow Leopard is known for like the no new features, but

One of the features it got was Exchange support. And so Exchange works across mail and contacts and calendar. You do not have to use Outlook. You do not have to use the web. You can use Apple's built-in tools. And really, in a way, I think Apple Mail is actually the best example of Apple embracing the open web. You can basically check almost any kind of email online.

within the mail application because it's just IMAP and SMTP and pop and that sort of thing. Right. It's, it is, um, great. And you can do calendars across a bunch of those services. You can pull in contacts from a bunch of those services. So anyways, they go on, uh, it's not Google. We spoke about that too, how some people are just, uh, don't want Google to have their data or, or, or interact with the services totally understand. And this is the thing that really got me. Um,

Office 365 has a feature called Power Automate, which is Microsoft's automation tool, but it works at the individual level and in the cloud. And so he has an example that every five minutes I can have a cloud flow, that's what they call it, run on a certain mail folder. Let's say I want a message to go into the drafts app. I move the message to a specific mail folder and within five minutes it's in drafts and then the email gets deleted.

I do the same thing with receipts that send business receipts to my CPA or even task items to DoList. So it's using email messages as triggers for automation. That's pretty cool. I feel like, Ray, you sent this email to me three weeks too late. Because if I had known all this, I probably would have switched to Exchange instead of Google. But the thought of switching, because Exchange also works with SuperHuman. Mm-hmm.

But the thought of switching, it's just, I just don't have it in me right now. You know? Yeah. And also I've got a couple other people that work with me. And so they're now in the Google workspace. It's like, ah, cause I've had some other problems with Google, uh,

that i didn't expect like with max market labs we have a custom calendar like if you sign up you get this calendar that shows the events and i thought google would be perfect for that and it's actually not the way they do calendars it's not going to work and um so like yeah man i wish i'd seen this sooner but uh maybe in like six months when i catch my breath i will re i'm gonna put this in my my list to look at in six months

But the idea of switching mail servers right now to me is not something I want to think about. Yeah, I don't, I don't blame you at all. Uh, it's a big, big deal. It's good to hear from folks using this stuff. You forget, you know, Microsoft, there are some real great stuff that they're doing over there. And, um,

And, you know, I think we poo-poo them too easily. But for me, it was Outlook, right? I just have never been a fan of Outlook. In the old days, Outlook had a really bad database flaw where you could lose a lot of data very easily. They fixed that ages ago. And Ray doesn't even use Outlook. So there you go. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. Go to ecamm.com slash mpu for a powerful live streaming platform for the Mac and get one month for free.

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We got a note from listener Jason about an app called Pro Notes. And what Pro Notes is, it is a menu bar application that interacts with Apple Notes on the Mac. I'm calling these Notes extensions, but they're not, it's not extensions. These are apps that are using accessibility features and some other system hooks to interact with Apple Notes.

So ProNotes is the one that Jason recommended. There's a link in the show notes. And so it's a menu bar app and it puts a pop clip like menu in place on Apple Notes when you select text and notes. So if you have a paragraph selected, you get this pop up like we're in Notion right now. Notion does this exact same thing. It actually looks.

Exactly the same. And you can do some text formatting really quickly and you can use AI tools on your notes. So ask it to summarize or bullet points, kind of the normal things people doing with AI and text. If you don't want to use Apple intelligence, it can finish your sentence. It can improve your writing, fix grammar, that sort of thing.

Um, it has Markdown support. I'm going to come back to that because both pro notes and notes commander, which is a, uh, another application in this area that I looked at it's Markdown, but it's not Markdown. So I'm going to put a pin in that for now.

You have slash commands, so you can type slash H1 and you get a headline or slash H2 and you get a subhead. So a little bit faster formatting just with the keyboard. And it adds ProNotes adds a backlinks feature. So in Sonoma, Apple added the ability to link to another note, but there's not a way to see what notes link to you. And so it adds backlinks feature.

And lastly, it adds templates. And so you can create just like you can in things or Todoist or a bunch of other kind of to-do applications or in Notion with templates. We use a template for our show notes each week that puts in like the topics and the ad breaks and stuff. You can create templates and then fire those templates into an Apple note. And so if you have something repetitive, it can make that a little bit easier as opposed to using something like Text Expander or something like that.

notes pro notes is free to use unless you want to use the AI stuff. And then as, as expected, it's seven 99 a month or 79 99 a year for those features. So,

So you get the formatting bar slash commands, bi-directional links, templates, and then the markdown stuff. And if you want to use the AI features, you're paying for that, which is that's a pretty common way. I think software currently is kind of dividing the line because it costs them money to pay for chat GPT or cloud or whatever they're using on their end. And so I think that's fair to pass that on.

Notes Commander is the other application I looked at here. It's Notes CMDR is how they spell it. It also runs as a menu bar app, but it does the weirdest thing in the menu bar. It's only visible in the menu bar when Notes is the front most window on your Mac. And if you use Bartender, that's fine because you don't see it like jumping in and out of your menu bar.

But because I was using it, I had it not inside bartender. I had it out in the main menu bar and it was legitimately distracting to like switch between notes and notion and Chrome and Safari or whatever. And seeing this icon coming, uh, coming back and forth, um, in the menu bar, I really don't like that choice, uh, by the developer.

Feature wise is very similar to pro notes. You have a slash commands. I will say the UI for that is not as nice as pro notes. So when you type slash, you get a little dropdown. It shows you everything you could do. Pro notes. I think just looks a little bit nicer. It does not have the format bar thing that pro notes has. So where you get a little window that hovers and you can pick bold italics, underline, whatever, just with your cursor and,

It does have templates. It includes a simple calculator, but that's kind of taken over by math notes, I think. And it is a purchase of $14.99 for one year of updates and support. You don't have to pay again, but if you want updates again, it's another $14.99 after the first year. That's basically how CleanShot X works. It's like a subscription, but you don't have to pay it every year if you don't want to.

So the Markdown thing, I was so excited when I had no idea these apps existed before a couple of weeks ago. I was like, Hey, this is cool. Like having Markdown Apple notes would be really neat. I use Markdown all the time. Like the relay CMS takes Markdown five to a pixels. I write in Markdown. I even do like little pound signs in my field notes for like the date. It's like an H one.

You handwrite and markdown. I handwrite and markdown. Markdown support is limited in both apps because notes is a rich text application, right? There's not a plain text mode in Apple notes really. And so you can use markdown, like you could do a single pound sign and then typing and it turns it into an H1 or you can do type an asterisk and then a space and it turns into a bullet or

Pro Notes has block quotes. So in Markdown, that is the right caret for a quote or a block quote.

But it's basically just using Markdown as a shortcut to get to rich text. I don't necessarily mind, but it's not like opening BBEdit or ByWord or something or MarsEdit and having a Markdown document. And you can't make links with their Markdown support. So even if you're writing in Markdown and it's kind of converting it as you go, it's

In Markdown to do a link in line is like you have the text that will be the link and it has brackets on it. And then you've got next to it in brackets, the URL, and it doesn't know about that. So this doesn't really turn notes into a Markdown app in the way that you might think it does at first glance.

And so I think these apps are cool. I think they're really clever, but for me, like I'm fine with notes being rich text. And honestly on Mac OS where you can in system settings, you go into keyboard and set your own keyboard shortcuts. Like I've made keyboard shortcuts for like a dash list and a, at a bullet of listen stuff and have tweaked those over time. And so for me, it doesn't really add anything to the notes experience.

But I thought it was really interesting because this was a category, honestly, that I had not come across. I'm working on a field guide about the Apple productivity suite. I've been looking at, there's a bunch of add-on apps for notes and reminders in particular. And I feel like my concern with these apps, and again, I don't want to discredit, the developers are doing great work and kind of reverse engineering Apple's file system.

But you're always at the whim of Apple with this stuff. And if the day after the show releases, WWC comes out and they make some change to notes that suddenly makes all this stuff break, I'm a little nervous about relying on these apps that are supposed to be additive to...

somebody else's app especially a big trillion dollar company so yeah i think they're cool as well but i'm i'm nervous about using them yeah not that i think they're going to break anything or cause me to lose data but i just feel like i'm not sure you can always rely on them to work forever yeah i think that's fair as definitely a concern that i have as well um

And, you know, I think Apple Notes is just kind of fundamentally different than a text editor. And I think that's fine. Like, you know, I use Apple Notes for a ton of stuff. And if I wanted my notes in a text editor, I'd use Obsidian or something like that. But I kind of like the rich text thing. And so for this sort of document, this sort of stuff. But if that sounds like it scratches an itch for you, Pro Notes and Notes Commander links are on the show notes. Go check them out.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you just want to get, get more out of it, you can. Yeah.

It's got a picture of the dog food that we buy. It's got a list of the prescriptions she's taken, the vet's contact information. And it's just got a bunch of different types of data in it, and we share it.

that apple notes is perfect for that right whereas like when i'm writing into something that's deep into sparky os or something that's a text file i don't do that in apple notes so i just that's the way i kind of draw the line but then in that way i'm not so tempted to use these apps to try and make it do something else because i'm just not using it for that good stuff though it's really cool i mean you know we're just talking about the ipad and the uh

Sort of the app issue on the iPad. And these apps can't run on the iPad, right? Like, you know, this is something that you can only do on the Mac. And that is really cool. And, you know, they're both taking what is a very popular application. You know, Notes is very widely used and making it more useful on the Mac. Even if it's not for me, I think that's really awesome. And it's something that the Mac allows for.

Like, okay, so another topic that's related to this is apps that, like, modify your photos library. Uh-huh. You know, those are out there where you can get it and it makes it easier to, like, manage the library. Mm-hmm. Have you played with any of those? Not in a long time. You know, that I think is kind of fundamentally different because...

uh the your photo library is at the end of the day just a database and an app like uh gemini 2 right from our friends at macpaw or uh there are lots of others power photos is the one i use power photos yes uh they sponsored me once so you know take that i think me too but um

you know, they can do things, they can merge the library, find duplicates, et cetera. And that is kind of like fundamentally different, I think, and more durable in that way. And it's, you know, I think Power Photos in particular, they're offering things that Apple doesn't. Like Apple doesn't have a great way to do some of these things and they're meeting that need. I think that's pretty cool.

Yeah. And like another kind of the app like this is like the reminders capture apps. And we've covered those in the show. I feel like, again, those are pretty, I'm pretty fearless about using them because they're just making it easier to capture data into the app. They're reformatting how the data looks.

But you're actually – are you still using that Reminders alternative? Good links. Good task. Good grief. So many names that start with good. I am. I'm still using good task, and I've been very happy with it. And again, that is just using –

the reminders database because Apple actually has that open in their system where other apps can can talk and use the the reminders. And then you can use reminders menu bar. And like there's a bunch of Mac apps and iPhone apps, honestly, that make it easier to enter things like remind me faster and others. And so reminders is kind of.

designed with that in mind, or at the very least they haven't gotten rid of it. Maybe, you know, depending on how generous you want to be about this. Whereas Apple Notes just is kind of fundamentally different because it's a kind of self-contained thing. And the complete opposite of Apple Notes, I would say, is calendars because Apple has this open calendar standard and there's a bunch of calendar apps out there that are doing different things. So the calendar data and you can use them just interchangeably.

Yeah, I mean, iCal is like a – iCal, good grief. Calendar, they renamed it from iCal like 100 years ago. That – boy, that – Yeah. Rough. You're getting a little old, buddy. It's like calling contacts address book. I think they did it at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, the Calendar app is really like the mail app. I mean, we said a few minutes ago how mail interoperates with all these mail services because it's all standardized. Yeah.

The same thing with calendars, like a .ics event or a calendar subscription can open really in any app that can understand it. And an example of this is Fantastical, right? You can, in Fantastical, sign in to your iCloud and Google accounts or Exchange or whatever it may be.

Or you can have it just use the calendars that the system already knows about through settings, through the default calendar app. And it's a really rich ecosystem of applications that can build atop that. And a lot of those are really...

Really powerful tools that kind of go above and beyond what Apple has built itself. And, you know, it means that folks like us who want a little bit more can have it, but still have the benefit of playing in the open ecosystem.

You know how earlier I was saying email is ripe for AI disruption? I think calendars are the same. They just added a feature to Fantastical. If I forward any email to a Fantastical address, it parses it and adds whatever event is in the email to my calendar. I don't have to fudge with anything. It just puts it up.

And it's like, yeah, that's where AI makes so much sense right now. It's like just the little friction points of life and making that stuff easier. I don't need something to think for me, but something that makes it easier to deal with mail and calendar events. I'm all for that.

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Whatever it is you want to accomplish, things can help you get there. Try things today at things.app or click the link in the show notes. You won't regret it. Our thanks to Things for their support of the show. All right, so you teased us earlier. I don't know how I missed it. You've got two phones. You're a night phone, day phone guy, I guess. Oh, wow. That's an old reference. That was about the Path guy, wasn't it? I think it was. Yeah. Yeah.

Separate work from my personal phone. Always on. What did he say? I'm always on. Day phone, night phone. Always on. Gross. So personal phone, work phone. So I've already had a phone, a 15 Pro, and having as a beta phone and stuff. We're going to talk about that on More Power Users here in a minute about our beta strategies heading into WWDC. But I have this phone and...

A lot of my friends who have sort of jobby jobs, this is very common in big organizations now because the phone can belong to them and they can have all of their stuff on it and control it. And people don't want their personal phones running the corporate MDM or whatever it might be. Yeah. My wife has a company phone. Yeah. Yeah, that happens. All my friends at St. Jude do, right? So really thinking about this and seeing it and the people around me,

And really considering the benefits of like if it's Sunday and I'm, you know, doing stuff at church or with the family, I don't want to be in a position where like Slack or Discord or whatever is is bugging me. And like, yes, when I've talked, I think I was on Connected or maybe a member show. I don't know. Yes, like focus modes can do some of this, but they don't go far enough. And I really wanted to.

like more separation and what a focus mode could give. And so I took this 15 pro I bought the cheapest prepaid T-Mobile plan as an experiment and all my work apps and social media and work email are on that.

My personal phone has, it has a notion on it. That's the only work app and kind of quote unquote work app on it. Because sometimes I do think about something for a show and I want to write it down quickly and it's just easy. It's easier just to like open the document, write a sentence at the top and then move on. But no work email, no Slack, no discord, no social media on the personal phone. And if it's the weekend or at night, no,

And I'm doing something, the work phone stays in the kitchen. And I have a safety net in the sense of, you know, for now 11 years, Relay has worked

almost exclusively in Slack. And, uh, we, that is our office. Uh, same thing with underscore when I joined his company, I was like, Hey, we're going to use Slack, uh, because I messages for personal conversations. You and I do this, right? We're talking about work and Slack, talking about personal stuff and I message. Yeah. And, uh, cause it's very easy for work to take over a relationship. And so if you have separate avenues, you can, you can kind of keep an eye on that. And, uh,

The fallback has always been, hey, if I'm not around in Slack and like you really need something like a few weeks ago, Jason was hitting an error in the CMS when trying to publish upgrade. It's like, hey, that's a problem, right? We need to get upgrade out. I didn't have my work phone on me, but he texted me. He's like, hey, you know, I tried getting in Slack, but if can you can you take a look at this? And I was like, yeah, sure. So grab my laptop and do that. So I have that safety net built in, which makes this a little bit easier to stomach as somebody who, you

does have responsibility outside of regular work hours because people are publishing and doing stuff, you know, all the time. And it's been very successful. You know, it is kind of a pain to like manage two phones. Like I have them both signed into my personal Apple ID. I have, you know, I've had to tinker with some of the settings there to kind of get it to work the way that I want.

One thing I've done is both of them use my personal number for iMessage. Dude, I don't even know the phone number of this phone. Like, I don't know it. I would have to go look it up. I didn't want to get in a situation where like,

If someone messages me or really what I ran into was like, oh, I found this article on Macedon. I want to send it to, you know, a group chat with some work people on it or like connected because Federico is allergic to Slack for some reason. Like connected has its own text thread. It's the only thing I do in work and iMessage. Like I need access to that on the work phone. And so they both use my personal number for iMessage.

The work phone just has no notifications for iMessage whatsoever. So I'm still tinkering around the edges with it, kind of figuring out some of the settings when you use more than one phone with one Apple ID are kind of weird.

But because I have all these friends who do it all the time, I've gotten some good advice from people on how to manage it, including the very annoying thing. If you have two phones is when you bring two phones together, they want to instigate airdrop with each other and they want to share a contact card back and forth. That should be turned off. Apple, if you're listening, if two phones are signed into the same Apple ID, you're

Turn that off. Thankfully, there's a setting you can turn off like the bring phones close together for airdrop thing. It's fine. I never used I never tapped my phone to somebody to share a contact in my life. I can use airdrop through the menu if I need to. But so far, I found it to be a very useful thing in my life. And and I think it is going to be an open ended experiment.

I'd like to talk about this again in six months to see how it's settled for you. Because I'm curious about it, but I can't imagine doing it. I'm such a fan of focus modes. I feel like I'm able to thread the needle okay. I will say, however, with all this talk of AI, I'm sorely tempted to buy a Google phone or a Samsung phone just to run Android again. I haven't done it in six or seven years yet.

and just see is it really that good i mean am i you know what are we looking at here on the other side and i just like you know again i just got am i going to spend the money to do it or not i don't know but it's it's on the back of my mind like maybe i should just get one to play with it but i wouldn't run it as a day phone night phone thing i just probably use it for testing or maybe i just need to go haunt a cellular store and just like spend an hour every month you know

Either way, yeah, that's cool. It sounds to me like it's working for you, though. It is. So that's all that matters, right? Yeah. But I definitely want to hear more about the friction points because I'm sure there's a lot of people in the audience that have two phones thrust upon them. Right. And the ways you solve these problems are probably going to help them, too.

Well, my new and shiny isn't nearly as exciting. I had a USB-C... I'm sorry, I had a Lightning Apple extended keyboard I've used for years. The F key stopped working. I took it apart, blew it out, put it back together. It worked for like a week, and then it stopped working again. It's been an ongoing thing. And the thing I discovered is I actually type F quite a bit. And so that was kind of a thing when I'd go and look at my... Because I'm a touch typist.

And I'm like, oh, wait a second. It's missing all the Fs on this page. So I just decided to replace it. I have a Keychron Q1 because everybody tells me I've got to have a clicky keyboard. Got it out, used it for a few days. These things just never stick for me. I think it's the Touch ID that ultimately is the killer for me.

And I know that you can like take a keyboard apart and make it so stupid that you have to do all that stuff. Apple should just make a track pad with a touch ID in it. Please. You can even charge extra for it, you know? Mm-hmm.

So I decided, no, I think I want a keyboard. And also when I'm on the laptop, I kind of like the keyboards to match. So all my keyboard shortcuts still are in the right places. Sure. So I ordered the new, um, USB-C extended keyboard and, and you know what? I,

I like it. It's really good. One thing they did that I wasn't aware of until it showed up is they added the globe key to the bottom left because the old one I had, it was up by the F13 key. It's way better on the left because they've really engineered a lot around the globe key these days, like window management, stuff like that. And having it there is really friendly. And that's another thing that wasn't really easy with the Keychron is the globe key solution.

I don't know. I'm sure there are people out there that would tell me I need to use the Keychron keyboard because it is fancy and clicky. But the Apple keyboard is very convenient, I have to say.

Like all of the dictation stuff and everything I have built into it. I could get by without an Apple keyboard, but I kind of like it. And also I think the low travel is kind of good for my fingers, if that makes sense. Me too. That's why I keep using it is the low force and low travel I find to be more comfortable. So people say, well, why did you get the extended one? This is the second one I bought now. I also have the more compact one, which is nice. Yeah, that's what I use.

Keeps your mouse closer to your keyboard. But to me, the extra function keys are really useful. Like I've got a lot of dictation and AI stuff I've been playing with. And now I have F13 through F19 available to me. And then you've got F13 through F19 plus modifiers, which is really, it gives you a lot in addition to my stream decks.

So I like that. The keypad, I don't need that often, but when I do need it, it's kind of nice to have it. And I've got spoiled by having actual arrow keys. So for a variety of reasons, I do it. And frankly, I'm much more a keyboard guy than a mouse guy. So I don't find myself going to the mouse that often. So having more options on my keyboard are nice things.

And it's black. I mean, they don't sell the small version with black keys. I know. It kills me. I want it so bad. But yeah, it's white. Although I will say that the black keyboard on the MacBook Pro shows like finger shmoo pretty badly. And at least the white really doesn't.

That must be why. And that's my next question. Now, I've had this thing for two or three weeks. The space bar, I can already see on the space bar the exact spot that I rest my thumb. And the F key, the J key, I can already see a bunch of shiny keys all over the place. And I got thinking, man, do I have that much oil in my hand? I started researching it. And I didn't realize Apple's still using ABS plastic on these keycaps, you know?

If you go out into the world and buy a nice keyboard like a Keychron, they use what they call PBT. I don't know the exact name of the plastic, but it's much more robust and doesn't wear down the way ABS does. And this keyboard is like $200. It's like, you couldn't charge that much for a keyboard. Just use the plastic and the keys where it doesn't look like it's wore out after three weeks. Yeah.

I don't get that. Well, I get it, but I wish that wasn't the case. Yeah. Maybe it's an expense thing. It's probably an expense thing. Yeah, it's got to be what it is. Because everybody else in the keyboard world that wants a fancy keyboard uses PBT switches or keycaps. In fact, my Q1. One thing that does tempt me to use the Q1 is it's got better keycaps. They don't like...

look all like wore out, but either way, I think I've just got to accept I'm an Apple keyboard guy, but I do wish that they would, would get better key caps in these things. Yeah. Uh, but now I've bought this, I'm going to use it probably for another five or six years. So they've got time. Yeah. And so do you have any lightning stuff left at your desk?

I have a trackpad, a lightning trackpad. And I've been using the vertical mouse from Logitech. I've mentioned it a few times on this show. And this thing has really stuck around for me. It doesn't have a lot of buttons on it. But again, I use a better touch tool and modifier keys. And I kind of like the vertical mouse.

There's a rumor out now that they're coming out with a new mouse from Logitech. Did you see that? Yeah, the successor to the MX Master 3. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm using. I'm using the Master 3S, the quiet one, and I'm very interested to see how they would improve it. Because the MX Master 3S, I was very hesitant. I used a long-time listener to know I used the Logitech Performance MX 3S.

for years, like to the point that I had a couple on the shelf and the last one finally died. And I was like, well, I'm not buying a used mouse on eBay. I just have to get used to the new one. And I really like it. And so I'm very curious to see what the four could bring. And like occasionally when the battery dies in this thing and I'm charging, I just get the magic mouse out and I can get by with it. But there are some friction points there. Like,

The worst one for me is when the screen jiggles left to right because my fingers on it and the whole thing is a surface. It's really bad when you're scooting a screencast and stuff like that happens. No, I bet. I think I'm the Logitech vertical for now. But yeah, so I've got the one lightning device. I don't mind. I would have kept the other keyboard if it wasn't for the fact that I couldn't get the F key out of it anymore.

But the upgrade was nicer than I thought. I like the way they changed the key layout, but boy, I wish they use better plastic in these $200 keyboards. For sure. One other thing I wanted to call out for stuff we're playing with. I mentioned this on the show with Jamie Newberry, but I love this thing so much. I wanted to just say it again on the feedback show, this Holly Lynn mic is,

has been such a great purchase for me. You know, sometimes you buy stuff and it delights you more than you think. It's a little microphone that pins to your collar. And if you're doing a lot of AI or dictation on your computer, it's a much better than the internal mic. And I use it all day. In the morning, I clip it to my shirt. And in the evening, I put it back in the charger. And I just, this thing is really like landed for me. Is it the Lark? Yeah.

It's the Hollyland Lark M2S. And I got the low-end package. It just has a lightning receiver and two mics. But there are some where you can get the doodad you put on your SLR camera, too. I didn't get any of that stuff. I just got the basic one. And in addition to me using it just as kind of a daily mic in front of my computer...

I had sent you and Jim and Jeff some blind tests, and that's the one that sounds the best for just recording my voice. So when I do like the lab report when I'm on vacation, I'm just going to bring the Lark with me and record into that. And also because it's got a lightning receiver, it works great with the iPhone. So I can plug it into the iPhone and

And then use the voice memos app and record and walk around the studio and talk and pace. And I get a great recording. I'm just finding a bunch of little uses for this thing. I think I paid like $120 for it. And I'm just continually impressed by it. That's really cool. Since we talked about it, I have noticed them on YouTube videos. Yeah. They're good enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, well, that does it for another feedback episode. Thanks for listening. We're the Mac Power Users. You can sign up for more power users at relay.fm slash mpu where you get the ad-free extended version of the show. We'd love to have you as a member. Today on the membership show, we're going to be talking about our 2025 beta strategies. Thank you to our sponsors, 1Password, NetSuite, Ecamm, and Things from Cultured Code. And we'll see you next time.