Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees, and with me is Federico Vittici. Hello, John. How are you? I'm doing really well. Federico, we have two sponsors for today's episode. We have both Memberful...
and Incogni. So I wanted to thank them for sponsoring the show and dive right into things because we are doing a classic PIC2, but this is a little bit different than your typical PIC2, so maybe it's not classic at all. It's a hidden gem. And as a quick reminder, because we're pretty much new to this,
If you're an App Stories Plus listener, you may be wondering, hey, wait, where's my pre-show? We stopped doing the pre-show. So stay tuned for more Picks in the Post show. You'll see it. You'll get it at the end.
So now we can just do a regular show and we are going to talk about hidden gems. We try lots of apps. That's what we do. We do. We probably have too many apps and too many betas installed. I want to hit you, John, with one a bit out of left field, maybe. Have you ever heard of NextDNS?
I have not. I see that your list has changed since the last time I looked at this. You've been sneaky. I was looking at this last night before I went to bed, but there's a couple of new things on here. Yes. What is Next DNS? What is this for? So,
In using my Android media tablet at night, which I'm so happy, by the way, that I can now watch Apple TV Plus on Android because they launched the native Apple TV Plus app on Android, which is something that I think I mentioned on the show before. Now it's here. It's pretty nice. It's nice to have a native experience. But on my Android tablet, obviously, I cannot use Safari to browse the internet. I got to use Google Chrome. And Google Chrome on Android...
uh obviously doesn't support native ad blockers because google really wants you to get those ads when you use google search and when you just browse around the internet and sure after many many years of safari on my iphone and ipad i i guess i i have gotten used to a certain type of web where i have my favorite websites where i sign up as a
subscriber and I typically don't get ads. But on the other websites, I typically, on my Apple devices, I do not get inundated with these pop-ups and newsletter sign-up prompts, ads all over the place. And in browsing the internet on Android, I realized, oh man, if this is what most people see,
No wonder they dislike going to websites because this is why they're going to a chatbot now. This is why they're going to a chatbot. This is like why, you know, people just spend so much time on social media because this is insufferable. And so I started looking like, what's a good solution to block some of these annoyances and some of these ads at a system wide level?
And I remember trying this service many, many years ago. It's called NextDNS. Now, it's advertised as a DNS filtering solution. What it really is, is it's a service where, depending on the platform that you're using, it's available everywhere. It's on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, everywhere.
You have different installation methods. On iOS, you need to install a certificate in system settings. On Android, you can just copy a DNS URL and paste it into settings. So there's different installation methods. But what it gives you is a filtering solution at a system-wide network level. So instead of installing an extension in Safari that blocks ads, trackers, annoying sign-up policies,
pop-ups that come up in the middle of a webpage just inside Safari, you block all of those things at a system level because your network is filtering them. So when you sign up for NextDNS,
First, you got to make sure that your device is communicating with the NextDNS servers. You get access to a special private webpage where you can see, is your device connected or not? So you follow the installation prompt. And then you have an allow list and a deny list. This is basically a way to say, this website, I don't want to block anything. These other websites always block these annoyances.
Then from this web portal, from this web page, you can install custom block lists. So all of those ad blocking lists that you typically see in third party ad blockers, like Easy List, there's another popular one that I don't remember. You can pick them a la carte and sort of enable or disable them.
So I set everything up. There's a whole bunch. There's like a regional lists for like typical ads and audiences that you get in Italy. There's other ones. One blocker works this way a little bit because they have multiple lists and some of them are regional. Some of them are topical, all kinds of things. I know that there's a whole bunch of like YouTube ads
things. I dislike those, first of all, because I pay for YouTube Premium, and second, because I have so many friends that are YouTubers, and I know that they make a living out of ads on YouTube. So I have always ignored those YouTube extensions. And I say this like we also have a YouTube channel that we're trying to monetize. Which we'd like to make some money with, yes. And I cannot recommend this enough. YouTube Premium is such a good deal as a customer.
Whenever I see somebody else who doesn't pay for YouTube premium and they see all these advertisements before watching a video, like my heart sinks a little because like I've been paying for YouTube premium for like, I don't know, seven years at this point or something. And it's a totally different experience. But anyway. And don't feel bad for YouTube creators when you subscribe to YouTube premium because they do get a cut of that money. It's not as easy as I've been asked.
Which way do YouTube creators make more money? And it's not cut and dried. The answer is it depends, but they do make money on it. But so NextDNS, in addition to blocking ads and these annoyances, it also filters like creepy requests that your devices make to like analytics services or like third-party companies that want to track you across the web. And so I can tell you it's been eye-opening.
Truly. It's been truly eye-opening to go in after just a couple of days. So I set this up initially on my Android tablet. I liked it so much, I enabled it on all of my devices. And I signed up for the premium version of NextDNS too. After like 24 hours or something, 7% of my entire requests that my devices make when they're talking to the internet...
We're talking about thousands of requests worth it, filtered.
And there are excellent analytics on the NextDNS webpage that really give you an insight in terms of like exactly how much data is being collected from your devices and sent off somewhere when you're using any app on your device, or even when you're not using any third-party app, just the requests that your devices make to Apple or Google or Amazon when you're using their core services. Yeah.
So, yeah, I have this enabled everywhere. It's made the web on Google Chrome on Android and also like in third party apps much more tolerable, faster even. Because like I can tell the difference when I'm using Chrome. Sure. That it's, you know, a whole bunch of requests are being blocked. And so, yeah, especially for the logs and the analytics, it's been really fascinating to see.
And a lot of those things being blocked are probably JavaScript and things which do tend to slow down web pages a lot more than just, you know, straight up HTML. Sounds a lot like a pie hole set up, but as a service, right? And I know that people would say, just set up a pie hole. I don't have the time or patience to set up a Raspberry Pi. I know that it's a popular solution. I just don't want to do it. Yeah, yeah.
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Again, that URL to check out everything Memberful can do for you and your website is memberful.com slash appstories. Our thanks to Memberful for their support of the show. All right, Federico, for my first pick, I want to tell you all about ScreenFloat by Eternal Storms. Now, ScreenFloat is a screen capture app for the Mac, and
And it does both screenshots as well as screen recordings, but it does it in a really interesting way. There's a, there's a menu bar component. There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts. You can use it just like you would screenshot X or some other screenshotting tool, taking screenshots of windows or areas or your whole screen, whatever it does. It has all of those kind of base level features that you would expect from a screenshotting app. But
But it does a lot more that I really like. One of the things, it really comes down to what it's called. It's called screen float because you can take... It floats. Yes, it does float. It doesn't float on water. It floats on your screen. Your screenshot can float above all your other windows, which is handy if you're someone who needs...
particular web page or some other image that you can screenshot as reference material as you work on something else. So you've got that ability and you can actually drag up and down on the screenshot to adjust its transparency. So you can still see through it a little bit if you've got kind of limited screen space, but you want to have it there floating and be able to adjust very quickly with a gesture on the trackpad, for instance, whether it's more opaque or not, which I like a lot.
But the thing that I think I like the most about this app and why I've used it last year for my macOS review is that it has something called the ScreenFloat Browser. And the browser is where...
you can access all of the screenshots that you've taken or screen recordings. And what's neat about it is that it really is a true browser, a full library setup where you can favorite screenshots, you can take notes, you can tag things, you can put them into folders, and you can do your typical editing and annotation type things with screenshots.
or pull text out of it with OCR. So what it's really good for is if you have a longer term project and you need to take a bunch of screenshots for that project, you can save those into this browser and tag them or organize them into a folder in a way that's easier to find than most screenshotting apps. Because a lot of screenshotting apps, they just dump them into a folder on your Mac and
it's hard to find them again. At least for me, I take so many screenshots that if I'm doing that from a long-term project like my Mac OS review, I lose track of those screenshots over time unless I get to them immediately and drag them somewhere safe. But with...
With Screenfloat, I can have them put into a particular folder. I can tag them really quickly. It's just a very efficient way of dealing with a lot of screenshots that you take over time. Everything syncs over iCloud if you have multiple Macs.
which is really nice. There's all kinds of sharing features. And along with the keyboard shortcuts that I mentioned, there's deep integration with both shortcuts and AppleScript, which the AppleScript integration is fairly recent. And that lets you use it with a bunch of different workflows that you might have. Plus, there's a cool new feature that just came out
that does something that I really like. One of the things that happens to me sometimes is when I'm taking a screenshot for the macOS review, I want to capture a menu. I want to capture a submenu. But in most screenshot apps, you can't do that because those are two separate elements on the screen. And so what I end up doing is I take a screenshot of the window, then I take a screenshot of the menu, then I impose them upon each other in Pixelmator Pro, line them up exactly the way they showed up, and create that screenshot screen
myself, which is tedious, but with ScreenFloat, you can actually capture those sub menus as they appear when you access them on your Mac, making the whole process a lot simpler. So if you've got like complex screenshotting requirements or you're doing research over time, I think this is a really, really great alternative for that. Nice. Nice. I,
I wish this sort of app was possible on the iPad. I know, I know. It's a shame that that kind of stuff can't be done, but maybe someday. My next hidden gem is a bit controversial even for me. Okay. Because I don't fully... I think I know what you're going to say. Because I don't fully love it, but I'm fascinated by it. The context here is that...
As we explore more and more AI tools that are web services, I think it's clear that, you know, some people have been making this argument for many years. But the more I sort of explore this territory, the more I realized the importance of just
I know that it sounds silly, but like the importance of the web, just web services that are platform agnostic, that work everywhere, that are consistent in how they work everywhere. Right. And it's funny, just a few days ago on Blue Sky, I posted a photo of me browsing Mac stories on my old PlayStation Vita. Yeah. And that was a silly picture. It has become one of...
one of my posts on Blue Sky with the most engagement, which is like hundreds of favorites. Sometimes these things take off in unexpected ways. But I got a couple of comments there saying, oh, this is the beauty of the web. It always works. And there's something to that idea as I explore more and more of these web services. But in any case, my hidden gem is Google Keep. Now,
Google Keep, I'm fascinated by it because I'm fascinated by the idea of a web-based inbox. Google Keep is not a note-taking app in the sense of Obsidian, in the sense of Notion. It's a web-based inbox for you to drop text, images, or links. Like, it doesn't even have folders, I think. Like, it's supposed to be a place where you...
Keep stuff and then you archive it. It's like, what if Gmail was an inbox but for your text and links? And then you literally archive items in Google Keep just like you archive them in Gmail. It's a temporary place. And I'm fascinated by temporary places. I'm always on the lookout for things where I can just get something out of my head and drop it there. Now you may say, well, but you use Obsidian. And I do. I still do.
Use Love Obsidian, process my daily notes on a regular basis. What I think is interesting here is that if you use, like we do at Mac Stories, a bunch of Google services like Gmail or Google Drive or Google Calendar, if you use them for work, it becomes this interesting tool
Integration, where Google Keep is integrated everywhere on Google platforms. This is part of the Google workspace thing or whatever they call them, where you basically have in any Google web app, you have a sidebar where you can invoke these services like Google Keep or Google Tasks is another one. Google Tasks is especially bad. I'll tell you this. And Google Keep is also kind of bad. But there are a couple of things that I want to mention here.
First off, they have apps everywhere. iOS, iPadOS, the web, Android, the Mac. I'm sure there's an extension in Google Chrome that you can use. They have direct integration with Gmail. So you can save a Gmail thread to Google Keep, just like you can save a Gmail thread to Google Tasks. But that I think is interesting. What I think is even more interesting is that they have a native Google Keep integration in Gemini.
I've been using more and more Gemini as my sort of default base level sort of like LLM, like for like typical LLM queries. Like the other day I was looking like, how do I enter BIOS mode on my Legion Go? Like these things that I would typically Google, I just use Google Gemini for these days. And what I think is interesting is that
When you have a conversation with Gemini, you can then invoke the Google Keep extension by at mentioning the extension, which is a whole other discussion that is kind of weird about Google Gemini, but this is not the place for it. But you can save a deep link to that conversation, to that sort of session with Gemini in Google Keep. And so, for example, I was looking up
This is a cross-pollination with Unwind. A few weeks ago, we did an Unwind episode about me trying to find the perfect recipe for a cacio e pepe. Go listen to that episode of Unwind to understand what I mean here. The update for you here, John, is that I tried the recipe. Yes. And it works. Oh, nice. Last night, I did the best cacio e pepe I've ever made. I love it. Incredible.
I did that research in Gemini. I started asking questions like, how do you achieve the perfect balance of the pecorino cheese and the pepper? How do you make the perfect cream? Turns out it's all about starch. Again, go listen to Unwind. I saved that conversation from Gemini to Google Keep. And I also saved the YouTube video that I found via Gemini to Google Keep.
Last night, when it was time for me to finally say, "Okay, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try and make the perfect catch-up pay-pay." I opened Google Keep on my phone. There was a deep link to Gemini. I clicked it. It took me back to that conversation. I followed the instructions again. I was like, "Okay, I think I can do this." And I did it. So this is why I'm fascinated by this idea of this integration between a simple, very basic note-taking app and the Assistant.
to the point where I really wish that this summer I will be able to do the same with Siri and Apple intelligence on my phone. Like I want to be able to have a conversation and do some research with Siri
Ask about, you know, a pizza or whatever that I want to try. Yeah. And have all this data coming to me inside Siri and then say, OK, fine. Save all of, park all of this for now into Apple Notes and later to be able to go back and reopen that conversation. It's like having this perfect memory and sort of to go back in the past and
to a conversation that you had weeks ago. I'm fascinated by this idea. For now, it works with Gemini and Keep, which is why I'm bringing this up. Google Keep is very basic and it's also very bad, just like any other Google app.
it's very bad if you use multiple Google accounts. So like I do, I have, that's a problem. Like I have, I have a real, I have so many Google accounts that I switched between now and it's, I, every now and then I just have to log out of absolutely everything and start from scratch. But, but the problem with all, with all these Google apps is that,
they don't support the equivalent of the all inboxes view of Gmail. With Gmail, you can view all of your inboxes from multiple accounts at once. You cannot do the same with Google Tasks or Google Keep, which is silly, and I think they should do it, but they don't. So yeah, Google Keep, very bad in a whole bunch of ways, which is why I said this is a little bit controversial, but it's very interesting for this integration alone.
Yeah, that integration sounds fantastic. I mean, I could see you doing something similar by using an app like Good Links. However, then you'd have to be switching from Gemini to YouTube, then using the share sheet, or to the web, and then the share sheet, and then Good Links. It's just a lot of extra steps. I mean, it's not a huge amount of work, but this all happens right within Gemini itself, which is a pretty efficient way to do things. Yeah.
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using our link and get 60% off an annual plan. That link is incogni.com slash appstories. It'll be in the show notes too. Our thanks to Incogni for their support of the show. My second pick is an app that maybe will be controversial too because I know that a lot of people, when they see an app that hasn't been updated in years, just turn their back on it and walk the other way. But I think that that's less
That is less of a factor for a utility that does one simple thing really well. Because I think it is possible with utilities to get them into place
where they're kind of feature complete for what the developer wants to do. And it doesn't matter if it hasn't been updated in a while. The app that I want to talk about is called Mass Replace It by Hexmonkey Software. Hexmonkey, that's a great name. Okay. Hexmonkey. Now, Hexmonkey's app, Mass Replace It, has a very strange UI. It's a small, narrow, vertical, rectangular window on your Mac.
And it's a throwback in design to an earlier era of Mac OS. But it's also, even putting that aside, like it's a single window that you switch between views using the segmented control at the top, which is just not something you see a lot in Mac apps today.
What it does that is great is that it allows you to do two things. You can apply multiple rules, search and replace rules, to a single file very quickly. So...
Or you can apply all of those rules to multiple files at the same time. So what you do is you go in and you define a bunch of search and replace rules. And where this has come in handy for me is that I have been trying to improve our subtitles for our YouTube videos, including the ones for this show. And so what I do is I run these things through either Mac Whisper or another app that I've been using called Video Cap, I believe it is.
And when that comes out, it usually has made a bunch of mistakes. It typically has trouble with your last name. Of course. It has trouble with my last name too, for that matter. It has problems with Mac stories and app stories. It usually puts a space in there. Sometimes it just puts a Y at the end instead of IES. You know, there's a bunch of common mistakes there.
that those AIs make. And so what I've done is gone through some transcripts that have been generated, found all the common ones, and I have a list of about 30 different search and replace functions. Each one's a rule. Here's what to look for. Here's what to replace it with. And when I have that subtitle file, it's a .srt file for YouTube,
And it's really just an extension means that there are time codes in there as well as the actual text, but it's really just a plain text file. But in any event, I run that through mass replace it. And with one click, I've made all those changes. Then I can kind of scan through it. And if I see, if anything catches my eye that I haven't seen before, I can add that rule to it, run it through again.
take all those changes and make all those changes all at once. And if I have multiple files,
I can do the same thing because one of the things I do is I have an archive of all of our old episodes of app stories that have been transcribed by Mac Whisper. And I can take all those. I can take 400 of those files and do the replace, mass replace it all at once. And it just takes a matter of when you're doing one or a handful of files, it only takes a matter of a couple of seconds. I haven't tried it with 400. I don't know how much long that would take, but I don't think it would take that long because we're only talking about plain text here.
And you can save these definitions as a single set of definitions. You can have multiple sets of search and replace definitions if you want and apply them in different contexts. I only use it for this one purpose, so I only have one set of rules. But it's been a fantastic way to take those transcripts
which are pretty good now with Whisper, but not great still. And get them like from 90% to like 95 plus percent. So, you know, there's not, I have not gone through every transcript of the fine tooth comb and found every single mistake that
But it does clean up a lot of the obvious stuff like names of products, our names, and other things like that. So it's a lot better experience on YouTube as a result. So I highly recommend it. Nice. Okay. Well...
Those are our hidden gems. We are going to be sharing some more pics that we have in the post show. So if you want to get more of this, well, you got to sign up for AppStories Plus and you can do that by visiting AppStories.plus. That gets you access to the podcast only benefits. That's the ad free benefits.
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All right. Well, thanks, Federico. I am going to thank two of our sponsors for this episode. That's Memberful and Incogni. And of course, you can find the two of us over at MacStories.net. And we're on social media. Just look for at Vittici. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I and at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-E-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.