Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► So are we starting a tradition, Myke?

00:00:01 ◼   ► I think we have just in the sense that we're doing the thing we did last year again.

00:00:06 ◼   ► I think that's how traditions begin, right?

00:00:09 ◼   ► You just do something more than once with a set period of time in between.

00:00:12 ◼   ► I guess so. I guess that is how traditions start.

00:00:15 ◼   ► There's something kind of funny about like we did State of the Apps 2018, right, in December of last year.

00:00:21 ◼   ► About actually pretty much a year to the day since the last one was released.

00:00:28 ◼   ► That was episode 61, and we're at episode 78, and it's been a year.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Wait, that doesn't make sense.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Well, how does, wait, how does.

00:00:37 ◼   ► That doesn't make sense at all.

00:00:39 ◼   ► I don't understand.

00:00:40 ◼   ► How can that possibly be?

00:00:41 ◼   ► How can we, how can we both have 78 episodes and also only have made it 10

00:00:47 ◼   ► episodes in a year, I don't understand.

00:00:49 ◼   ► That's I think you're doing your math wrong, Myke.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Who can argue with Corteximus?

00:00:54 ◼   ► No one can argue with Corteximus.

00:00:58 ◼   ► The year-long celebration.

00:01:00 ◼   ► Oh good, you're finally on board. Cortexmas, it lasts all year.

00:01:04 ◼   ► There's nothing I can do about it. I have to agree.

00:01:06 ◼   ► Perfect.

00:01:09 ◼   ► Well, welcome to the state of the apps people, the traditional state of the apps.

00:01:12 ◼   ► So like last time, the way that I figure we'll do this is we'll go through some categories.

00:01:19 ◼   ► Again, so this idea was based on a blog post

00:01:22 ◼   ► that Gray wrote many years ago. I think it was

00:01:26 ◼   ► 2014 was the original state of the apps. Oh god, who was that guy? You were trying to be a blogger then

00:01:32 ◼   ► I think I think that was what you were what you were going for back in 2014

00:01:36 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, do you think that's what I was trying to do? Okay, I think so

00:01:39 ◼   ► I think so

00:01:40 ◼   ► But it's it's there some cgp gray calm and and there is a list and many people have been asking for an update on this

00:01:47 ◼   ► So we decided to do it last year and we're gonna do it again this year

00:01:50 ◼   ► So based upon the previous work

00:01:53 ◼   ► We've got some categories and we're going to talk about some of our favorite and most

00:01:58 ◼   ► used apps within those categories.

00:02:00 ◼   ► But before we actually do begin, I have some thoughts of my own about applications in general

00:02:05 ◼   ► in 2019.

00:02:06 ◼   ► But I wanted to get from you some feelings about your app usage because the last we heard

00:02:14 ◼   ► you were very shortcuts and action based.

00:02:17 ◼   ► So I wondered if you even think about apps in the same way on your iOS devices as you

00:02:22 ◼   ► did a year ago.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Oh, you mean because of my fantastic home screen that I'm really happy with?

00:02:27 ◼   ► You're a different home screen.

00:02:28 ◼   ► No, no, Myke, it's fantastic.

00:02:31 ◼   ► There's no way around it.

00:02:32 ◼   ► It's a fantastic home screen.

00:02:34 ◼   ► It makes me happy every time I look at it to see visual consistency without words.

00:02:40 ◼   ► It brings warmth to my heart.

00:02:43 ◼   ► But no, I wouldn't say I think about it completely differently.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Shortcuts is great.

00:02:48 ◼   ► It's opened up a lot of ability to do things directly,

00:02:53 ◼   ► but apps and their limitations are still the beating heart

00:03:00 ◼   ► of what you can do on the platform.

00:03:02 ◼   ► So, no, I don't feel like I've ascended to a level of nirvana

00:03:07 ◼   ► where I'm just thinking abstractly in terms of actions.

00:03:10 ◼   ► Perhaps one day, perhaps on a future state of the apps,

00:03:13 ◼   ► but not yet this state of apps.

00:03:17 ◼   ► I guess I'm only slightly more elevated than I was last year in terms of that kind of thinking.

00:03:22 ◼   ► But what about you, Myke?

00:03:24 ◼   ► I think I am mostly unimpressed or dissatisfied with the current application crop that I'm

00:03:35 ◼   ► using.

00:03:36 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:03:37 ◼   ► Okay.

00:03:38 ◼   ► Because I've been trying to think about one of my favorite apps of this year, right?

00:03:43 ◼   ► Because that's the time for that kind of thing.

00:03:48 ◼   ► Doing the Upgradies Awards show, right?

00:03:50 ◼   ► What is my favorite app of this year?

00:03:53 ◼   ► And I was kind of looking at the stuff that I use and there are a bunch of apps that I

00:03:57 ◼   ► really like and we'll talk about them today, right?

00:04:00 ◼   ► But most of them don't really necessarily feel like that they have come on leaps and

00:04:06 ◼   ► bounds since last year.

00:04:08 ◼   ► A lot of the applications that I swear by as being the best in their class, I actually

00:04:13 ◼   ► think whilst they continue to be best in class, I'm mostly stagnated and not really adding

00:04:21 ◼   ► things at a rate that has been consistent with previous years.

00:04:26 ◼   ► So I think at the moment, looking at the applications that I use, a lot of them are kind of...

00:04:34 ◼   ► I'm mostly just ambivalent towards a lot of them.

00:04:38 ◼   ► is particularly standing out for me as being this like, "Oh, this app this year

00:04:44 ◼   ► that I found, I'm so excited that I found it." A lot of the stuff that I'm using now

00:04:48 ◼   ► is increasingly cross-platform and service-y, so that tends to take away a

00:04:52 ◼   ► lot of the really exciting stuff when they're made by big teams rather than

00:04:56 ◼   ► like individuals. And I know there are apps out there that people are

00:05:00 ◼   ► really excited about that I'm just not, I just haven't gotten around to using. Like,

00:05:05 ◼   ► I have a bunch of stuff that I keep meaning to try out, but just for whatever reason I'm

00:05:10 ◼   ► not getting to it.

00:05:12 ◼   ► But I just think the stuff that I'm using right now, I feel like I'm mostly using

00:05:16 ◼   ► because of inertia as opposed to there being a real like, "Oh, this or that feature keeps

00:05:22 ◼   ► me stuck to it."

00:05:23 ◼   ► Interesting.

00:05:24 ◼   ► That's a somber note to strike at the beginning of the state of the apps.

00:05:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:31 ◼   ► I mean, I don't really know what it says.

00:05:32 ◼   ► I actually think it's probably a mark on the ecosystem for application development right

00:05:37 ◼   ► now to be honest.

00:05:38 ◼   ► There's a couple of things going on here.

00:05:41 ◼   ► I think that a lot of developers are changing the way that they run their businesses.

00:05:46 ◼   ► Many developers are transitioning to recurring revenue streams if they have not already,

00:05:52 ◼   ► right?

00:05:53 ◼   ► So there's probably a lot of work going on in business model development as opposed to

00:05:57 ◼   ► feature development.

00:05:58 ◼   ► And I also think that we're at a point right now in Apple's iOS software stack where we are probably on the precipice of a change

00:06:07 ◼   ► So no one's going crazy, right?

00:06:10 ◼   ► Like everyone can see some stuff's about to happen whether it's iOS apps coming to the Mac or another iOS

00:06:16 ◼   ► redesign or some kind of new power user features

00:06:19 ◼   ► So I think that there is a little bit of like resistance right now for big change

00:06:24 ◼   ► Because there is probably big change on the horizon

00:06:27 ◼   ► horizon.

00:06:28 ◼   ► I think those are good points.

00:06:31 ◼   ► I mean, again, I'm always in favor of apps switching over to a subscription model because

00:06:37 ◼   ► that makes me feel more secure in using them.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Anything that I use significantly I want to pay for regularly if I want it to stick around.

00:06:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's like I have a number of little utility apps that I even wish like, oh, could

00:06:51 ◼   ► you just, I wish you could just charge me like a dollar a year, two dollars a year,

00:06:56 ◼   ► and I'd be happy to pay for it

00:06:57 ◼   ► and you'd have recurring revenue from this thing.

00:07:00 ◼   ► I'll give an example.

00:07:01 ◼   ► There's one I was really sad about.

00:07:02 ◼   ► There's a little total utility app.

00:07:05 ◼   ► It's just called Sol, S-O-L.

00:07:08 ◼   ► And it's a very simple app.

00:07:09 ◼   ► All it does is it shows you sunrise and sunset times

00:07:14 ◼   ► and the golden hour for photography

00:07:16 ◼   ► and what's called civil dawn and civil dusk.

00:07:19 ◼   ► Like what does the sky look like during the day?

00:07:21 ◼   ► But it does it in like a nice, beautiful, simple way.

00:07:24 ◼   ► and I've always loved it.

00:07:26 ◼   ► I was like, man, I wish this developer,

00:07:28 ◼   ► because it's clearly abandoned now

00:07:29 ◼   ► and has been for many years,

00:07:31 ◼   ► I'd sign up for a dollar a year subscription.

00:07:33 ◼   ► - Oof.

00:07:34 ◼   ► This is an unfortunate looking application

00:07:36 ◼   ► in today's wallet, I think.

00:07:37 ◼   ► - If you're looking at the pictures of it,

00:07:38 ◼   ► I think it doesn't translate to the way you use it.

00:07:41 ◼   ► Like it's pleasant, it's simple, it's straightforward.

00:07:44 ◼   ► And I have tried a whole bunch of other

00:07:46 ◼   ► Sunrise and Sunset apps,

00:07:47 ◼   ► and I like none of them as much as I like this one.

00:07:50 ◼   ► But it's like--

00:07:51 ◼   ► - I have this with,

00:07:54 ◼   ► like world clock applications.

00:07:57 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:07:58 ◼   ► - So I have been using an app called Clock, K-L-O-K.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - K-L-O-K, yep, I have that same one.

00:08:04 ◼   ► - It's a very, very good widget,

00:08:06 ◼   ► but it doesn't get a lot of love.

00:08:10 ◼   ► I mean, it's had some bug fixes and stuff,

00:08:12 ◼   ► but there's kind of, there's not really much there to it.

00:08:15 ◼   ► And there have been other apps that I've seen since

00:08:17 ◼   ► that are like, that seem to have more features,

00:08:19 ◼   ► but don't do the things that I want exactly

00:08:21 ◼   ► in the way that I want them, right?

00:08:23 ◼   ► But this is like one of those apps where I'm like, everything else that I've seen, I

00:08:27 ◼   ► don't like.

00:08:28 ◼   ► This one doesn't seem to get updated that often, which makes me consider that maybe

00:08:31 ◼   ► it's not necessarily making the developer that much money.

00:08:35 ◼   ► So it makes me concerned that it's going to go away.

00:08:37 ◼   ► But it's an app that I use probably every single day, just in the widget and the notification

00:08:42 ◼   ► shade thing.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Yeah, Clock fits into that same category for me.

00:08:46 ◼   ► Little utility apps.

00:08:48 ◼   ► And I would be thrilled if there was some amount of money per year or per quarter that

00:08:53 ◼   ► was small just to keep them updated.

00:08:56 ◼   ► I'd be happy to do that.

00:08:57 ◼   ► So if developers are this year, like it's a little bit all quiet on the Western front,

00:09:02 ◼   ► if it's because they're changing their business models to be more sustainable, I

00:09:06 ◼   ► give that two big thumbs up.

00:09:08 ◼   ► I'd be thrilled for that.

00:09:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not complaining in that regard.

00:09:13 ◼   ► It's just my point is that I don't really feel like there's a lot of super exciting

00:09:17 ◼   ► stuff going on with the apps that I am using.

00:09:20 ◼   ► Everything is working mostly fine and I'll get to some issues with some stuff

00:09:24 ◼   ► later on, which I'm happy with, right?

00:09:26 ◼   ► Because please don't upend what I'm doing.

00:09:28 ◼   ► But it's just a case of like, I think I've struggled this year to really find

00:09:33 ◼   ► stuff that I'm like really excited about when it comes to applications.

00:09:38 ◼   ► And my hope is just that we're in like a holding pattern period

00:09:42 ◼   ► and there might be some stuff coming around the bend.

00:09:47 ◼   ► You know, I actually think there might be an element of I'm the problem as well,

00:09:51 ◼   ► where just like, oh, I'm getting more boring

00:09:54 ◼   ► with what I need to do on my devices.

00:09:58 ◼   ► Right. So like, I am more hesitant to try out that new app

00:10:02 ◼   ► because it's going to ruin everything or like, you know, this could be me.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Maybe I'm the problem here, actually.

00:10:07 ◼   ► I'm just I'm just I'm just a boring business person now.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And like so like I'm like, oh, I didn't go near the application

00:10:14 ◼   ► because of my precious, precious workflow.

00:10:17 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:10:18 ◼   ► - Well, I was going to agree with you

00:10:20 ◼   ► that you have articulated something

00:10:22 ◼   ► which I hadn't really thought about,

00:10:23 ◼   ► but I do feel myself.

00:10:24 ◼   ► But now that you have framed it in terms of,

00:10:26 ◼   ► oh, the problem is with you

00:10:28 ◼   ► because you're just a boring business person now.

00:10:30 ◼   ► I do not wish to agree and put myself into that frame.

00:10:32 ◼   ► So I'm gonna slowly back away.

00:10:34 ◼   ► - You're an exciting business person, right?

00:10:36 ◼   ► - Yes, very exciting.

00:10:37 ◼   ► - Well, that's good 'cause now you're telling me

00:10:38 ◼   ► it's not me, so that's great.

00:10:40 ◼   ► So it's just been a little quiet this year, I think.

00:10:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too.

00:10:46 ◼   ► All right, Myke, let's get started.

00:10:48 ◼   ► The first category is productivity.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Now, I think that people probably know

00:10:54 ◼   ► where I am with productivity apps,

00:10:56 ◼   ► but I wanna know because it always feels like,

00:11:00 ◼   ► like a real problem for you.

00:11:01 ◼   ► Where are you with to-do apps?

00:11:04 ◼   ► Where have you landed at the end of this year?

00:11:08 ◼   ► - All right, I'm still, for the majority of my tasks

00:11:11 ◼   ► and just my daily work stuff, it's still in Todoist.

00:11:15 ◼   ► - Oh, God. (laughs)

00:11:18 ◼   ► Okay. - All right.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And look, Todoist is fine, and I like it,

00:11:23 ◼   ► and it's doing its job, and they've got some interesting

00:11:27 ◼   ► stuff that they're working on.

00:11:29 ◼   ► I saw this tweet go by the other day

00:11:31 ◼   ► that they're gonna add a new feature next year

00:11:33 ◼   ► which can turn your projects into cards

00:11:36 ◼   ► in a Kanban system.

00:11:38 ◼   ► - Okay, that's interesting.

00:11:39 ◼   ► and you can choose either view.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And I was like, okay, Todoist.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And like, look, this is an application where like,

00:11:46 ◼   ► again, Todoist suffers from the cross-platform thing, right?

00:11:51 ◼   ► In which Todoist kind of looks like a web app or something.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Like it has no real platform design.

00:12:01 ◼   ► It just looks like Todoist.

00:12:02 ◼   ► And Todoist looks the same on my Mac,

00:12:04 ◼   ► on my iPhone, on the web, and on my Pixel.

00:12:07 ◼   ► it's just todoist, right? Like that. So it's like,

00:12:10 ◼   ► and it doesn't really have exciting stuff,

00:12:12 ◼   ► but they are adding some interesting features. Like they just added a,

00:12:16 ◼   ► in their date picker, the ability to, to,

00:12:20 ◼   ► when you're setting up a task, choose fixed or floating time zone.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And they've recently overhauled their date picker, made it better in some ways,

00:12:30 ◼   ► worse in others, but like good, right? Like I'm,

00:12:34 ◼   ► I'm happy with the way that that kind of stuff is going right now. So much so that

00:12:38 ◼   ► like whilst I have kept an eye on OmniFocus and have a task that, a test task that pops

00:12:44 ◼   ► up every time I return home because of that, because of the location stuff that I've

00:12:49 ◼   ► been playing around with. And I plan to look at it, but I'm also like, Todoist is doing

00:12:56 ◼   ► the job for me, for what I'm using, you know, and how I'm doing it. And I thought

00:13:01 ◼   ► about like, oh, you know, there are these interesting things I could do with OmniFocus

00:13:05 ◼   ► and it's just like a slightly different design and their customizability when it comes to

00:13:09 ◼   ► the context and stuff like that. And, you know, I have some, we're going to talk about

00:13:13 ◼   ► yearly themes next episode. We'll talk about that later on. But as I'm like thinking about

00:13:17 ◼   ► some changes to the way that I want to run my business next year, I might want some different

00:13:20 ◼   ► views into stuff. But Todoist is working for me right now. But it's not the only to do

00:13:28 ◼   ► app that I use, obviously, I use things for one project, which is this show.

00:13:35 ◼   ► Woah, woah, okay. This is news to me. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, it kind of makes me happy

00:13:43 ◼   ► to know that Cortex requires an entirely separate to-do manager for you, Myke. Okay, can you

00:13:50 ◼   ► explain how and why?

00:13:55 ◼   ► Okay, so I have a shortcut that I trigger whenever this show begins editing that puts into Things

00:14:06 ◼   ► a selection of tasks under headings, which I really like that Things has,

00:14:11 ◼   ► with time set to them and all that kind of stuff. The posting process for Cortex is significantly

00:14:19 ◼   ► more complicated than the posting process for any of my other shows. And any mistake

00:14:28 ◼   ► with Cortex is much larger than any of my other shows as well. And this is in part due

00:14:35 ◼   ► to the fact that there are multiple people, me and you, that are involved in that process.

00:14:42 ◼   ► So it adds complexities and dependencies. And everything must be taken care of. But

00:14:49 ◼   ► are also many many problems that can occur. So like for example, I make my edit and then I pass

00:14:55 ◼   ► to you and you make your edit, right? I need to make sure that all of the clips and stuff are in

00:15:01 ◼   ► the right places because sometimes when you pass them back to me they're not. So like the ad sounds

00:15:06 ◼   ► and stuff are maybe off by 10 seconds because you made an edit, right? It's like all of that stuff

00:15:11 ◼   ► has to be checked but when I'm editing a show on my own well that's not going to happen because

00:15:15 ◼   ► I'm not giving it to anybody else to touch, right?

00:15:18 ◼   ► So there's stuff like that.

00:15:19 ◼   ► But then there's like.

00:15:21 ◼   ► Making sure the ads are recorded in the right way and added in the right way,

00:15:26 ◼   ► making sure that, you know, the Reddit post goes up

00:15:29 ◼   ► and the email is sent out to your subscribers like you do that.

00:15:33 ◼   ► But I'm checking it's done because it's part of the process. Right.

00:15:37 ◼   ► So then they go on for later on in the day.

00:15:39 ◼   ► And there's like it's like a long list of tasks. Right.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Like, do the chapters all work and testing all of that stuff?

00:15:46 ◼   ► They're making the YouTube video, right?

00:15:48 ◼   ► That's the whole thing I don't do for any other show.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And sometimes I'm only doing this stuff once a month, right?

00:15:55 ◼   ► So, yeah, if I'm not like all of my other shows, I'm doing them every week.

00:16:01 ◼   ► But the process is the same for pretty much all of them.

00:16:03 ◼   ► So I'm doing one a day on average, and that's pretty much the same process.

00:16:08 ◼   ► But then there's this other process that occurs once every four to six weeks

00:16:12 ◼   ► or whatever, which is very different and very complicated.

00:16:15 ◼   ► Yeah, that is prime "you need a checklist" territory.

00:16:18 ◼   ► Exactly. It happens rarely, it's high stakes, it's not hard, but there's a lot of parts

00:16:26 ◼   ► to it. And this is the problem with Cortex being

00:16:29 ◼   ► my biggest show. Every time there's an issue, it's amplified over other shows, right?

00:16:34 ◼   ► So if you do a thing where you call a sponsor by the wrong name, which is what I did once,

00:16:40 ◼   ► you get a lot of tweets about that, where if I did it on another show, it may have been

00:16:45 ◼   ► like a quarter of those tweets, right? So there's just a lot on the line every time

00:16:49 ◼   ► I'm posting an episode. So I this was a funnily enough, a system I learned from you, right?

00:16:55 ◼   ► Like, there is like you spoke about this on an episode in the past about like, your kind

00:17:00 ◼   ► of templates that you had going off in OmniFocus to like, so this is what I did, like you have

00:17:06 ◼   ► all of the different steps. So that all lives in things for me. And there's a couple of

00:17:10 ◼   ► reasons for that. One, the layout options you can have with things are really nice.

00:17:16 ◼   ► The way that it's all formatted I like. I know you can like hack headers into Todoist,

00:17:22 ◼   ► but I don't like the way it looks. I like the design of things when I open up my Cortex

00:17:26 ◼   ► project and it's broken down into like audio, video, post-production, promotion, right?

00:17:32 ◼   ► I have these big headers and all the tasks go in there. And I also like is that then

00:17:37 ◼   ► I have those 20 tasks not in my regular to-do manager messing everything up for that for

00:17:43 ◼   ► those two days. Right?

00:17:44 ◼   ► So it's a way that it allows you to focus on, I'm just doing Cortex now, you know, in

00:17:51 ◼   ► this span of time from preparation to recording to post publication, checking up on things

00:17:59 ◼   ► and you don't want it. It's just easier to access it in this one separate place.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Yeah, because then it's not like... because I spoke about this before, right? Like I try

00:18:07 ◼   ► and keep my to-dos pretty lean. You know, like I said, like if I have over seven tasks

00:18:12 ◼   ► that are due on a day, that's a terrible day for me. Like it's too much, right? Because

00:18:16 ◼   ► I try and keep things really focused. I don't just throw everything in to my to-do manager.

00:18:22 ◼   ► So the Cortex task list is like 25 tasks over 24 hours.

00:18:27 ◼   ► My brain would explode, right?

00:18:29 ◼   ► Like if I saw all of that mixed in with everything else.

00:18:32 ◼   ► Because it's not like for that 24 hour period from when like the edit begins to when it's

00:18:36 ◼   ► posted or whatever.

00:18:38 ◼   ► That's not the only thing I'm doing.

00:18:39 ◼   ► I'm also doing all my other stuff.

00:18:41 ◼   ► So I don't want those two things to cross over.

00:18:44 ◼   ► So I use a completely different application just for that.

00:18:47 ◼   ► And then I use Todoist for all of my other stuff.

00:18:50 ◼   ► And then like some of the things that a lot of people would put into a to-do manager,

00:18:54 ◼   ► I still put in Dew because Dew is incredible for little tasks.

00:18:59 ◼   ► I absolutely love it.

00:19:01 ◼   ► That is an application actually that has gotten a lot better this year.

00:19:04 ◼   ► So that's one.

00:19:05 ◼   ► I'm going to give that one Dew.

00:19:06 ◼   ► They added a feature for their notifications where you can pull down the notification and

00:19:13 ◼   ► snooze it by a custom amount of time whenever you want by pressing these little buttons.

00:19:18 ◼   ► And it's amazing.

00:19:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm gonna reiterate, I do love Do,

00:19:21 ◼   ► I love the ability to snooze notifications,

00:19:25 ◼   ► and it is one of mine for the same kind of thing

00:19:27 ◼   ► that you mentioned.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And I think according to Screen Time,

00:19:31 ◼   ► Do is very frequently the second most sent notifications app,

00:19:36 ◼   ► because I'm always employing it in scenarios

00:19:40 ◼   ► where I know I don't wanna do something,

00:19:44 ◼   ► and it's like, Do, your job is to annoy me

00:19:46 ◼   ► into doing this thing.

00:19:48 ◼   ► So it's like, it's always, it always makes me smile because

00:19:51 ◼   ► Dew being the second most notified app is often a sign of like,

00:19:55 ◼   ► you know what I didn't want to do?

00:19:57 ◼   ► I didn't want to go to the gym.

00:19:58 ◼   ► You know what I didn't want to do?

00:19:59 ◼   ► I didn't want to start getting ready for bed, right?

00:20:01 ◼   ► And I just kept saying like, ah, remind me in five minutes,

00:20:04 ◼   ► remind me in five minutes, right?

00:20:05 ◼   ► That's, it's, it's a great little app and it just,

00:20:07 ◼   ► it makes me smile though, because it's like,

00:20:10 ◼   ► it's a perfect nag and that's exactly what I want it to be.

00:20:13 ◼   ► - It's like, take out the trash, right?

00:20:14 ◼   ► That's where that stuff goes for me.

00:20:16 ◼   ► and then DOO will just keep reminding me about it

00:20:18 ◼   ► for four hours until I actually get up and do the thing.

00:20:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's fantastic. (laughs)

00:20:23 ◼   ► - So yeah, that's kind of where I am

00:20:25 ◼   ► with to-do apps right now, I think.

00:20:27 ◼   ► You know, I've got my eye on OmniFocus still.

00:20:31 ◼   ► I wanna play around with it,

00:20:33 ◼   ► but maybe you can tell me why I should,

00:20:37 ◼   ► 'cause I assume that you're all Omni.

00:20:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, aside from the minor things with DOO,

00:20:43 ◼   ► which again feels like a totally unrelated set of tasks.

00:20:47 ◼   ► I have been all Omni, I mean, I guess since version three,

00:20:51 ◼   ► so I guess pretty much since the beginning of the year.

00:20:54 ◼   ► And yeah, that is 100% where I am.

00:20:59 ◼   ► Although, Myke, you do, you do,

00:21:03 ◼   ► you know that you're poking me with mentioning

00:21:05 ◼   ► that Todoist has added the option for floating time zones.

00:21:08 ◼   ► (Myke laughs)

00:21:09 ◼   ► You know what you're doing.

00:21:12 ◼   ► because it's like, even though Omni promised me

00:21:16 ◼   ► that this was coming and they said,

00:21:17 ◼   ► "Oh, don't worry, 3.1, it'll totally be in there."

00:21:20 ◼   ► 3.1 came, 3.1 passed, no floating time zones.

00:21:24 ◼   ► It's still not there and it kills me.

00:21:27 ◼   ► But I have a, okay, here is going to be

00:21:32 ◼   ► the world's worst hack that I figured out

00:21:34 ◼   ► because I have recently come back

00:21:37 ◼   ► from a long trip to America, where again,

00:21:40 ◼   ► this thing with OmniFocus was driving me crazy

00:21:42 ◼   ► because I was traveling between East Coast,

00:21:44 ◼   ► West Coast and Mountain Time,

00:21:46 ◼   ► which every time I change time zones,

00:21:48 ◼   ► it messes up all my little reminders in OmniFocus,

00:21:51 ◼   ► but it dawned on me on the plane what I could do.

00:21:56 ◼   ► Okay, now, Myke, OmniFocus has an option

00:22:01 ◼   ► where you can export items as task paper.

00:22:07 ◼   ► So you can just copy a bunch of projects,

00:22:10 ◼   ► paste them into a text file,

00:22:12 ◼   ► and it's in this format called task paper,

00:22:15 ◼   ► which is like markdown for to-dos, right?

00:22:17 ◼   ► It's a way to specify structure

00:22:20 ◼   ► just using the character of texts.

00:22:22 ◼   ► It's not like a real database.

00:22:24 ◼   ► And I was flying over to America

00:22:26 ◼   ► and I had an epiphany on the plane.

00:22:29 ◼   ► I thought, I know what I can do.

00:22:31 ◼   ► This is gonna be completely ridiculous, but I can do this.

00:22:33 ◼   ► I went into OmniFocus on my laptop.

00:22:36 ◼   ► I copied out my entire database in task paper format,

00:22:40 ◼   ► pasted it into a note.

00:22:42 ◼   ► Then on my computer, which was of course,

00:22:45 ◼   ► disconnected from the world because it's an airplane,

00:22:47 ◼   ► I manually set the computer to the time zone

00:22:51 ◼   ► I was about to arrive in.

00:22:53 ◼   ► So OmniFocus thinks, "Oh, I'm on the East Coast now."

00:22:55 ◼   ► And then I repasted back in my entire database

00:22:59 ◼   ► from task paper format and everything worked, right?

00:23:03 ◼   ► like reminders that are supposed to go off at eight o'clock,

00:23:06 ◼   ► they went off at eight o'clock on the East Coast

00:23:08 ◼   ► because task paper doesn't have any time zone information.

00:23:13 ◼   ► So by doing this ridiculous copy paste back and forth,

00:23:15 ◼   ► I was able to strip all the time zone information out of

00:23:19 ◼   ► and then back into my OmniFocus database.

00:23:22 ◼   ► And I think I did that five times while traveling,

00:23:26 ◼   ► every time I was gonna cross a border.

00:23:28 ◼   ► It's like, okay, on my computer,

00:23:29 ◼   ► set it to the time zone where I'm gonna go

00:23:32 ◼   ► and paste back in the database and it worked.

00:23:35 ◼   ► But of course, that is a ridiculous workaround,

00:23:38 ◼   ► but I mention it here.

00:23:38 ◼   ► - That is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard.

00:23:41 ◼   ► - I mention it here in case there is anybody else

00:23:44 ◼   ► who uses OmniFocus who travels through this infuriates.

00:23:47 ◼   ► - I implore people not to do this.

00:23:50 ◼   ► - Okay, well listen, I will mention,

00:23:52 ◼   ► there's gonna be one problem.

00:23:54 ◼   ► If you have attachments that are images,

00:23:57 ◼   ► those will not transfer either.

00:23:58 ◼   ► Now, fortunately for me,

00:24:00 ◼   ► I don't have anything like that in my OmniFocus database.

00:24:03 ◼   ► So look, I am not like recommending this.

00:24:06 ◼   ► I'm simply saying if you are exactly me,

00:24:10 ◼   ► this is a great solution to what is the most long-standing

00:24:15 ◼   ► and ridiculous limitation of OmniFocus.

00:24:17 ◼   ► So I'm just throwing it out there, people.

00:24:21 ◼   ► You can get around it

00:24:21 ◼   ► instead of manually readjusting the time on 50 items.

00:24:25 ◼   ► - So I will say you've reminded me again

00:24:27 ◼   ► why I will not move to OmniFocus in the near future.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Because every time when I get off a plane

00:24:33 ◼   ► and I open Todoist and it says,

00:24:34 ◼   ► "Hey, would you like to change the time zone to this one?"

00:24:37 ◼   ► I thank my lucky stars that I use an application

00:24:40 ◼   ► that understands time zones.

00:24:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, and like all joking aside,

00:24:44 ◼   ► while I do love OmniFocus,

00:24:47 ◼   ► I am not in this moment seriously suggesting,

00:24:50 ◼   ► "Oh, you should give OmniFocus a try."

00:24:52 ◼   ► Because I really do think if you're someone who travels

00:24:56 ◼   ► and has the kinds of reminders that we do.

00:24:58 ◼   ► It's just a total deal breaker if you have a lot of them.

00:25:01 ◼   ► Like it's just too frustrating.

00:25:02 ◼   ► So I'm not seriously suggesting that you try it.

00:25:05 ◼   ► I'm just gonna keep waiting until OmniFocus fixes this

00:25:07 ◼   ► and then try to bully you into switching.

00:25:09 ◼   ► - Because the fact that I can now set like,

00:25:13 ◼   ► if I ever, 'cause what I would do, right,

00:25:15 ◼   ► I have all my tasks, they just float.

00:25:16 ◼   ► And then when I get to a place,

00:25:18 ◼   ► I will change anything that I need to be in

00:25:20 ◼   ► like the home time zone back manually, right?

00:25:24 ◼   ► - Right.

00:25:25 ◼   ► If I ever have a task, it's very rare I have these tasks,

00:25:29 ◼   ► but now I can just, when I initially set it up in Todoist,

00:25:32 ◼   ► fix it to this time zone.

00:25:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's exactly what I want, and that's really nice.

00:25:38 ◼   ► It's really good that they've implemented that

00:25:41 ◼   ► so that it doesn't even have to,

00:25:43 ◼   ► or you can be more confident that you have set this task

00:25:48 ◼   ► in explicitly the way you want it to be,

00:25:51 ◼   ► which is what a deadline should be.

00:25:54 ◼   ► But all of that aside, that one grinding issue,

00:25:59 ◼   ► I do really love OmniFocus.

00:26:04 ◼   ► And I mean, I've mentioned this before,

00:26:07 ◼   ► but the thing that's the really big deal for me

00:26:10 ◼   ► is the fact that you can tag your tasks

00:26:14 ◼   ► and you can give them an arbitrary number of tags.

00:26:17 ◼   ► And so like, if I'm looking at my OmniFocus right now,

00:26:20 ◼   ► why does this matter?

00:26:21 ◼   ► Why do tags matter?

00:26:22 ◼   ► For me, it amplifies what is the strongest point

00:26:27 ◼   ► of OmniFocus that no other task manager does as well,

00:26:31 ◼   ► which is I only want to see exactly what I can work on now.

00:26:36 ◼   ► And it drives me nuts when task managers show you

00:26:42 ◼   ► all of the things that you can theoretically do today, right?

00:26:45 ◼   ► Or stuff that has to happen later in the day,

00:26:48 ◼   ► but you can't actually start now.

00:26:50 ◼   ► Like, maybe it's just me,

00:26:53 ◼   ► but I'm very sensitive to that kind of thing,

00:26:54 ◼   ► and it just breaks my brain.

00:26:56 ◼   ► It's very frustrating to see actions

00:26:58 ◼   ► that I cannot act upon.

00:27:00 ◼   ► And by using tags,

00:27:04 ◼   ► you can specifically exclude items

00:27:08 ◼   ► from a view that you're looking at.

00:27:10 ◼   ► And so here's how my day goes in theory.

00:27:14 ◼   ► I have three what are called perspectives in OmniFocus,

00:27:18 ◼   ► which are ways of looking at your tasks.

00:27:21 ◼   ► And the top one I call like executor,

00:27:26 ◼   ► which was very funny when we did our last book club for me,

00:27:30 ◼   ► because he's talking about being like the executor

00:27:33 ◼   ► of your own life.

00:27:34 ◼   ► And I have used this word as like my top level perspective

00:27:37 ◼   ► for a long time.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And executor, what I wanted to show me are,

00:27:44 ◼   ► Here are the things that are the most important things,

00:27:49 ◼   ► but they're not necessarily urgent tasks.

00:27:54 ◼   ► But if I'm hitting stuff out of the park,

00:27:56 ◼   ► this is what I should work on.

00:27:57 ◼   ► So these are like, no surprise basic items like,

00:28:01 ◼   ► go into the office and spend some time writing.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Go to the library, spend some time following up

00:28:09 ◼   ► research questions that you had from yourself

00:28:11 ◼   ► during the writing session.

00:28:12 ◼   ► go to the gym after you've done these things, right?

00:28:15 ◼   ► These are like basic tasks,

00:28:18 ◼   ► but what I want to be able to see is like,

00:28:20 ◼   ► I want to open up my task manager

00:28:21 ◼   ► and I don't want to be flooded

00:28:23 ◼   ► with everything else from the day.

00:28:24 ◼   ► I just want like, here are the big ones.

00:28:28 ◼   ► And so it's great that in OmniFocus,

00:28:29 ◼   ► no matter where those items are,

00:28:31 ◼   ► like anywhere else in the system,

00:28:33 ◼   ► I can tag anything executor and it will show up

00:28:36 ◼   ► like in this top, top level thing.

00:28:40 ◼   ► And then I can go through like the rest of the day

00:28:43 ◼   ► working through more specific ones.

00:28:44 ◼   ► So I have a thing called Soon, right?

00:28:46 ◼   ► Which is just what it sounds like.

00:28:48 ◼   ► It's just gonna show me anything that has a due date

00:28:50 ◼   ► that's available and anything that's flagged.

00:28:52 ◼   ► So it's like, okay, I should work on those.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And then I have another one which just shows me

00:28:56 ◼   ► everything that's available in the whole system

00:28:59 ◼   ► for me to work on.

00:29:01 ◼   ► And like, I just love that I can get as picky

00:29:05 ◼   ► as I want to get with these perspectives

00:29:09 ◼   ► because you can just set up any arbitrary number of rules

00:29:12 ◼   ► that can act on tags,

00:29:13 ◼   ► and it's functionally a Turing-complete system.

00:29:17 ◼   ► It just, it can be anything that you want.

00:29:20 ◼   ► And I'll show you, Myke, I'll show you now,

00:29:22 ◼   ► and you can put this in the show notes.

00:29:24 ◼   ► The one that I think looks the funniest for me

00:29:26 ◼   ► is the perspective of what do I want to see on my watch.

00:29:31 ◼   ► And I'm just gonna show you this

00:29:35 ◼   ► so you can get a sense of like

00:29:36 ◼   ► how complicated things can be.

00:29:38 ◼   ► So I've just sent you a screenshot of a perspective that I call widget, which is what do I want

00:29:45 ◼   ► to see on my watch and what do I want to see on the widget screen on my phone.

00:29:50 ◼   ► Okay, and why widget?

00:29:52 ◼   ► Just so I can understand the context of what I'm seeing.

00:29:54 ◼   ► What does that word mean to you?

00:29:56 ◼   ► The word widget means to me the widget screen on the iPhone.

00:29:59 ◼   ► That's where it originally started and then I just added it to the watch.

00:30:02 ◼   ► So the idea was what do I want to see if I'm looking at the widget screen of my phone.

00:30:07 ◼   ► So that feels like a high level, urgent, that type of dealio, right?

00:30:12 ◼   ► So yeah, you've got that available, due soon.

00:30:16 ◼   ► So here's the interesting thing, is the watch one, I theoretically want that watch to always

00:30:24 ◼   ► show me exactly what I want to see at any point in time.

00:30:27 ◼   ► And so that means a pretty complicated array of things.

00:30:31 ◼   ► Like in the morning, I want to see the executor items on the watch, and I don't want to see

00:30:37 ◼   ► something that's due later in the afternoon. And so I've built up over time these rules that

00:30:43 ◼   ► every time I see something on the watch that I feel like, I don't want to see that at this moment.

00:30:48 ◼   ► Is there some way I can express this in terms of a, if then rule based on tags, then I add it.

00:30:55 ◼   ► I'm looking at this now like this is a very complicated set of rules.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Yeah, it like that's why I wanted to show you and you can put it in the show notes so that people

00:31:04 ◼   ► can see the kind of thing that you can do.

00:31:07 ◼   ► I'm not expecting that it makes sense to look at it,

00:31:10 ◼   ► but it's how you can build up a thing over time.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Like I didn't sit down and write that one day,

00:31:17 ◼   ► and it continues off the page, like it goes for a while.

00:31:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, I kind of imagined that was the case.

00:31:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, so like, just so people can see,

00:31:25 ◼   ► here is what my soon one is, which is much more,

00:31:30 ◼   ► like a much more understandable set of rules.

00:31:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, okay.

00:31:34 ◼   ► - But these two things are for me,

00:31:37 ◼   ► the reason I love OmniFocus

00:31:39 ◼   ► and the thing that just no other app does as well.

00:31:43 ◼   ► And it's why I will tolerate exporting

00:31:46 ◼   ► and re-importing the entire database

00:31:48 ◼   ► into and out of task paper format, right?

00:31:50 ◼   ► Is because I'm able to keep all the rest of this stuff.

00:31:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, this is very much

00:31:55 ◼   ► like a form of programming, right?

00:31:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, it is funny 'cause the only other app

00:32:01 ◼   ► I've ever seen that did anything like this

00:32:03 ◼   ► was my beloved Remember the Milk back in the day.

00:32:07 ◼   ► And, but that one really had you learn

00:32:11 ◼   ► like a little tiny Excel programming language

00:32:14 ◼   ► in order to make it operate.

00:32:15 ◼   ► But that's also why I love that one

00:32:16 ◼   ► because you could do the same kind of thing.

00:32:19 ◼   ► And yeah, this is like Excel-y in the way

00:32:24 ◼   ► that it works in setting up these rules.

00:32:27 ◼   ► and I hope they keep adding to the rule set over time,

00:32:31 ◼   ► but it's really great.

00:32:33 ◼   ► And it has just made a huge difference for me

00:32:37 ◼   ► with task managers and just having a place

00:32:41 ◼   ► where I feel like, okay, I'm just here.

00:32:43 ◼   ► No other app is gonna come close to this.

00:32:45 ◼   ► So I'm just, I'm gonna stick with OmniFocus

00:32:48 ◼   ► and I don't have to, you know,

00:32:50 ◼   ► as in the earlier days of the show,

00:32:53 ◼   ► be flipping back and forth between things

00:32:55 ◼   ► always feel kind of unsettled and yeah, so I'm, I have a very happy home with my task

00:33:01 ◼   ► manager now.

00:33:02 ◼   ► Okay. Yeah, see that's funny compared to last year. On last year's episode, you weren't

00:33:08 ◼   ► using any.

00:33:09 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right. I had gone over to paper briefly or I'd thrown up my hands in frustration.

00:33:15 ◼   ► I don't remember.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Just not—at that point, it was just nothing. Like there was just nothing and I couldn't

00:33:21 ◼   ► conceive of it.

00:33:22 ◼   ► I remember that time of life, right? I remember that now.

00:33:26 ◼   ► That was, yeah, that was a void where I was just like, I'm not doing anything.

00:33:29 ◼   ► I forgot about that.

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00:36:22 ◼   ► Thank you so much to away for their support of this show and relay FM. I wanted to touch on time tracking

00:36:28 ◼   ► to give an update on

00:36:31 ◼   ► the time tracking app that I've been using.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Because I'm not kidding, I think it's an almost daily

00:36:37 ◼   ► occurrence now that people are asking me, like,

00:36:40 ◼   ► does the time tracking app that you spoke about that's in beta exist yet?

00:36:43 ◼   ► The answer is no. It's still being worked on, the developer's

00:36:46 ◼   ► still putting a lot of time into it, a lot of features into it,

00:36:49 ◼   ► and they're still, like, nailing down the branding of it. I don't know the timeline,

00:36:52 ◼   ► but it is being developed, and what I'll say is

00:36:55 ◼   ► you can rest assured that when this application comes out,

00:36:58 ◼   ► comes out, I will talk about it on the show to let everyone know that it's available.

00:37:03 ◼   ► So this is basically a third party app to integrate with toggle, which is the only app

00:37:09 ◼   ► that I use now to manage my time tracking. It has great Siri shortcuts support if you

00:37:16 ◼   ► want to do that, but I just like that I can get everything set up. It remembers a lot

00:37:20 ◼   ► of my preferences and it's just a really nice design. But my understanding is there's still

00:37:26 ◼   ► quite a bit of work to go for the developer to be happy and get everything that they want

00:37:30 ◼   ► to put in the app. But it's really great and it will be available at some point.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, just to quickly follow that up, I'm still using toggle. I'm still I'm

00:37:39 ◼   ► still using a derivation of Viticci's toggle shortcuts that he made available on his website,

00:37:47 ◼   ► taking those and customizing them for my own needs. So that's, that's still what I'm using

00:37:50 ◼   ► for time tracking. Although just as a just as a point of interest, we may retouch upon

00:37:54 ◼   ► on this when the yearly themes come up.

00:37:56 ◼   ► But for the past, whatever it is,

00:38:00 ◼   ► five weeks that I've been traveling,

00:38:01 ◼   ► I made a decision not to do any time tracking

00:38:05 ◼   ► during that period of time.

00:38:06 ◼   ► So I'm on a temporary hiatus from time tracking,

00:38:10 ◼   ► but yeah, Toggle is still what I think is the best tool

00:38:14 ◼   ► and Shortcuts I think is a pretty good way

00:38:16 ◼   ► to interface with it.

00:38:18 ◼   ► And I did take a look,

00:38:20 ◼   ► their initial Shortcut support was pretty terrible,

00:38:23 ◼   ► but it looks like they have now properly integrated with shortcuts.

00:38:26 ◼   ► So I will probably redo my Vittici shortcuts at some point.

00:38:30 ◼   ► The official toggle apps series shortcut support has gotten better over time,

00:38:35 ◼   ► but the official toggle app is still not very good.

00:38:38 ◼   ► Yeah, no one should use the app directly.

00:38:41 ◼   ► My god, like don't look directly at it.

00:38:43 ◼   ► You have to use something else, right?

00:38:46 ◼   ► It's like the face of Medusa and you need a shield called shortcuts,

00:38:49 ◼   ► you know, in order to actually interact with the thing.

00:38:51 ◼   ► I mean, toggle, you're great, but your app is not.

00:38:54 ◼   ► And I'll give you money forever, right?

00:38:56 ◼   ► Like give you money, you just keep being a service of an API

00:38:59 ◼   ► and I can use other services and tools with it. That's awesome.

00:39:02 ◼   ► So you remember when I was talking earlier about applications that I use

00:39:07 ◼   ► that I'm dissatisfied with?

00:39:09 ◼   ► Yes.

00:39:10 ◼   ► Calendaring is probably the biggest one.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, I'm going to agree with you there.

00:39:16 ◼   ► I am and have been for many years a devout Fantastic

00:39:17 ◼   ► I am and have been for many years a devout Fantastical user.

00:39:21 ◼   ► Fantastical in my opinion is still the best calendar application that you can get today.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Unless you use one of the new iPads where it is a design disaster.

00:39:31 ◼   ► They have not updated it and there is some kind of visual bug where sometimes half of one month and half of the other month just overlay on each other.

00:39:41 ◼   ► I've seen that. I've seen that bug.

00:39:43 ◼   ► Let alone the fact that their iPad app has never really been that great in full screen

00:39:46 ◼   ► anyway, there's a lot of wasted space.

00:39:48 ◼   ► But I really feel like at this point, like I'm stuck into Fantastic Cal because of the

00:39:53 ◼   ► natural language input.

00:39:55 ◼   ► Like I really understand, like without even thinking how to format an event in Fantastic

00:40:01 ◼   ► Cal.

00:40:03 ◼   ► And that kind of quick entry is really keeping me locked in.

00:40:07 ◼   ► The iPhone app is still very good.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Like I'm still very happy with the iPhone app.

00:40:12 ◼   ► Like I do wish that there was more stuff just going into it.

00:40:17 ◼   ► I'm frustrated that I'm having to make the same feature request which is that I made

00:40:23 ◼   ► in last year's episode which is that the Mac app has a thing called calendar sets where

00:40:28 ◼   ► you can set up different sets of calendars so you don't have to see them all at the same

00:40:31 ◼   ► time.

00:40:33 ◼   ► The iPhone app still doesn't have that and I don't know why.

00:40:36 ◼   ► It's the same developer, they made this feature on one platform, I don't know why they didn't

00:40:41 ◼   ► put it on the other one.

00:40:42 ◼   ► because they made a big song and dance of it on the Mac.

00:40:44 ◼   ► It's like this is this great feature we've created, which is a great feature,

00:40:48 ◼   ► but it's not on the iOS version.

00:40:50 ◼   ► So it doesn't really feel like a lot is going into Fantastical on the iPhone.

00:40:53 ◼   ► But like the iPads have been out for about six weeks at this point.

00:40:58 ◼   ► And the app has visual bugs as well as not being fully optimized.

00:41:03 ◼   ► I'm a little bit perplexed as to why they haven't done anything about it

00:41:06 ◼   ► from a developer that in the past seems to have been very on top of things.

00:41:11 ◼   ► So this is why I'm a bit like, you know, this was when, when I was like thinking yesterday,

00:41:15 ◼   ► like in like kind of mulling the episode over in my brain, this was one of the things that

00:41:20 ◼   ► really stuck out to me was my calendaring system where I kind of feel like it's not

00:41:27 ◼   ► where I want it to be right now.

00:41:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:31 ◼   ► And Fantastical is also right in my cross hairs of an app that should be a subscription.

00:41:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:37 ◼   ► And we're like, please let me.

00:41:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, please let me subscribe to your app

00:41:41 ◼   ► so that it can be continually updated,

00:41:43 ◼   ► because I agree, FantasticAl is a great app,

00:41:46 ◼   ► and the calendar sets is the best feature of it.

00:41:51 ◼   ► I just, I've never gotten into using

00:41:53 ◼   ► the natural language processing part of it,

00:41:57 ◼   ► so I can't speak to that, but yeah,

00:42:01 ◼   ► like I use FantasticAl, and I'm very aware

00:42:05 ◼   ► that on the phone and on the iPad,

00:42:07 ◼   ► it doesn't have the calendar sets.

00:42:09 ◼   ► Now it's not a huge deal for me

00:42:11 ◼   ► because the thing that I've done for many years now

00:42:16 ◼   ► is using two calendars.

00:42:18 ◼   ► I use Apple's calendar, which by default

00:42:21 ◼   ► just has all of my calendars turned on, which is a lot.

00:42:25 ◼   ► I mean, I think I have something like 20, 25 calendars.

00:42:29 ◼   ► So when I wanna see everything,

00:42:32 ◼   ► I just open up Apple calendar.

00:42:35 ◼   ► And then Fantastical, I set into

00:42:38 ◼   ► what I think of as planning mode.

00:42:40 ◼   ► So just before we started officially recording the show,

00:42:45 ◼   ► Myke and I were talking about when are we going

00:42:47 ◼   ► to try to record the next episodes of Cortex?

00:42:49 ◼   ► And that's when I open up Fantastic Cal,

00:42:52 ◼   ► which I always leave in this planning mode,

00:42:55 ◼   ► which is show me the calendars that are going to affect

00:43:00 ◼   ► anything where I'm trying to set up a meeting with someone,

00:43:04 ◼   ► or I'm trying to do a podcast recording.

00:43:05 ◼   ► - It's gonna show you your available time.

00:43:08 ◼   ► Yeah, or not even available time,

00:43:11 ◼   ► it shows me just a bunch of things that are useful to know.

00:43:16 ◼   ► Like one of the calendars,

00:43:18 ◼   ► which I'm pretty sure I first heard about this idea

00:43:20 ◼   ► from Merlin Mann is Landscape,

00:43:22 ◼   ► which is things that don't affect me in any way,

00:43:27 ◼   ► but it's useful to know.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And so something I'll put in Landscape is

00:43:32 ◼   ► there are conferences that happen throughout the year.

00:43:35 ◼   ► I can't attend all of those conferences,

00:43:38 ◼   ► But it's often useful to know that the conference

00:43:40 ◼   ► is happening on these dates, because it means that,

00:43:44 ◼   ► oh, other people might be less available during that time.

00:43:47 ◼   ► So it's like, okay, landscape is one of those calendars.

00:43:50 ◼   ► Or like, someone is visiting,

00:43:52 ◼   ► they haven't locked down all my time,

00:43:54 ◼   ► but it's good to know that that person is going to be

00:43:57 ◼   ► in the city during these spans of time.

00:44:00 ◼   ► But that's how I use these two things,

00:44:02 ◼   ► is switching back and forth between calendars

00:44:05 ◼   ► and FantasticAl is those two modes,

00:44:09 ◼   ► but it does feel like I should just be able to do this

00:44:11 ◼   ► solely in FantasticAl, but they just don't have that option

00:44:15 ◼   ► to switch back and forth on the phone or on iOS.

00:44:17 ◼   ► So that's why I ended up using the two of them.

00:44:19 ◼   ► And then I just recreate that behavior on the computer,

00:44:22 ◼   ► even though it's totally unnecessary there,

00:44:24 ◼   ► but it's just out of habit that I use these two calendars

00:44:27 ◼   ► for these two things.

00:44:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know,

00:44:31 ◼   ► like I'm looking at it now, right?

00:44:33 ◼   ► Fantastic Al receives regular updates, but it kind of just feels like the things that

00:44:37 ◼   ► I want, they're not doing.

00:44:39 ◼   ► I feel like it hasn't changed in five years.

00:44:41 ◼   ► From my perspective, it seems like it's exactly this.

00:44:43 ◼   ► It still gives me that same frustrating tutorial every time I install it on a new device, where

00:44:47 ◼   ► it's like, "Pull down up here!

00:44:49 ◼   ► Pull all the way down!

00:44:50 ◼   ► Push back up!"

00:44:51 ◼   ► It's like, "God damn it, Fantastic Al!"

00:44:54 ◼   ► The iPad app really does need some general work.

00:44:57 ◼   ► I think it could be rethought to be more visually responsible.

00:45:04 ◼   ► Some of the features they've added, like they have a customizable notification thing, kind

00:45:09 ◼   ► of like DUE.

00:45:10 ◼   ► I don't use that.

00:45:11 ◼   ► I just don't use that.

00:45:13 ◼   ► I don't ever snooze a calendar event.

00:45:16 ◼   ► That's what it's all about.

00:45:17 ◼   ► It's like, "But this is a thing I never do."

00:45:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I can't even conceive of how that...

00:45:22 ◼   ► My concept of what a calendar event is, yeah.

00:45:24 ◼   ► It's like, "What?

00:45:25 ◼   ► I don't understand."

00:45:26 ◼   ► calendars to-dos systems, which just I can't abide by.

00:45:31 ◼   ► Not even Jason Snell does that anymore. He's left that.

00:45:35 ◼   ► So nobody does that.

00:45:37 ◼   ► So if I'm thinking about why do I feel like kind of my application use or like my excitement

00:45:43 ◼   ► in applications has calmed down this year, maybe one of those reasons is I'm not trying

00:45:48 ◼   ► new email apps anymore.

00:45:52 ◼   ► The wheel.

00:45:53 ◼   ► Two of the big email apps have been purchased recently. There was another one that I think

00:45:58 ◼   ► just got bought. So a lot of the third party apps are going away. But now I am pretty much

00:46:05 ◼   ► stuck in Spark, which is the app by Reidl. I don't really like the application very much.

00:46:12 ◼   ► That hasn't changed. I find their design choices to be peculiar in places and it's just not

00:46:21 ◼   ► an application that I find like really meets with what I think of as a iOS app.

00:46:29 ◼   ► It also feels very cross platformy even though it's not, which is kind of strange.

00:46:33 ◼   ► Right, it's like it's on Apple platforms only, but yet it feels like Todoist does

00:46:37 ◼   ► where it's just like, I don't understand the design that you're creating here.

00:46:43 ◼   ► Like it just doesn't gel with me. But their service, their team service is very

00:46:49 ◼   ► good. It has changed the way I deal with email. Like I could never move email app

00:46:56 ◼   ► now unless there is a shared team service built into it.

00:47:00 ◼   ► Oh interesting. Being able to, so like here's the thing right, email comes in

00:47:04 ◼   ► and it's for something that our sales manager will deal with instead of me

00:47:10 ◼   ► right, but it comes to me, they've sent it to me, but I'm not gonna take care of it

00:47:15 ◼   ► it's for her so I can just assign the email to her so she can deal with it.

00:47:19 ◼   ► Now, yes, I could forward the email to her, right?

00:47:22 ◼   ► If I was using a regular email.

00:47:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it's not the same.

00:47:25 ◼   ► - It's not the same.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Because let me tell you what happens.

00:47:27 ◼   ► Email comes in and it's like a company

00:47:30 ◼   ► that we don't work with that wants more information

00:47:33 ◼   ► about our advertising.

00:47:34 ◼   ► So I will assign it to our sales manager

00:47:36 ◼   ► and then she will talk to them, right?

00:47:39 ◼   ► That's kind of the typical flow

00:47:40 ◼   ► of where this sort of stuff goes now.

00:47:42 ◼   ► But when I assign it to her,

00:47:45 ◼   ► we both have it available to us.

00:47:48 ◼   ► we can have a conversation in line with the email without the recipient seeing it.

00:47:53 ◼   ► And then if we want to do this, it's possible for us both to see every email sent and received

00:48:01 ◼   ► in that chain together and we can continue talking about it as the emails are going backwards and

00:48:06 ◼   ► forwards. That method of inline conversation is so good because this enables us to have multiple

00:48:15 ◼   ► streams of conversation in different silos, which is something we spoke about

00:48:19 ◼   ► a bunch on this show. Silo in conversation is very good, right?

00:48:22 ◼   ► It's how like me and Gray have simultaneous multiple conversations, right?

00:48:27 ◼   ► Without getting things mixed up because we're having a chat in iMessage and

00:48:31 ◼   ► business conversation in Slack, right?

00:48:33 ◼   ► And like sometimes at the exact same time.

00:48:35 ◼   ► And this is how I work with our sales manager now, right?

00:48:38 ◼   ► Like we're talking about one thing in Slack and then we're talking about another

00:48:42 ◼   ► thing in email and then like in two weeks time that email is going to pop back up in

00:48:46 ◼   ► my inbox and she's going to say this is all done now right and like without her having

00:48:51 ◼   ► to like open it and be like do you remember when are you talking about that thing and

00:48:55 ◼   ► I don't know right like that there's none of that's needed because everything's in line

00:48:59 ◼   ► and it's all siloed so I love their Teams feature so much that I'm completely stuck

00:49:04 ◼   ► in it no matter like their app is fine right but one of my favorite things about email

00:49:09 ◼   ► apps is there was always a new amazing one with this beautiful design that did all this

00:49:13 ◼   ► wicked and wonderful stuff and I'm just not trying them anymore because the service is

00:49:17 ◼   ► too important and that's why I'm business boring Myke, right?

00:49:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, so my email app over the last year has been, I don't do email. Like I've,

00:49:38 ◼   ► for all intents and purposes,

00:49:40 ◼   ► just totally walked away from email.

00:49:42 ◼   ► - Did you say my email app is I don't do email?

00:49:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what I said.

00:49:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:49:48 ◼   ► - Can I download that?

00:49:50 ◼   ► Where do you get that one?

00:49:52 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, you get that one by sitting down

00:49:57 ◼   ► and thinking about a cost benefit analysis

00:50:01 ◼   ► and understanding that there will be costs,

00:50:04 ◼   ► but the benefit is you don't do email.

00:50:07 ◼   ► Is anybody checking these email inboxes?

00:50:10 ◼   ► - Well, okay, so here's the bigger picture, right?

00:50:15 ◼   ► That the important thing that's in email for me,

00:50:21 ◼   ► I have moved almost everything

00:50:23 ◼   ► into either my own company Slack,

00:50:26 ◼   ► or it exists in the Slacks of others, right?

00:50:29 ◼   ► So like, Myke, you don't email me,

00:50:32 ◼   ► you send me a message on your Slack,

00:50:34 ◼   ► and I get it and I respond.

00:50:36 ◼   ► And I don't know, I think I'm a member of five or six Slacks

00:50:41 ◼   ► now and that Slack has ended up capturing, let's say 95%

00:50:46 ◼   ► of all of the valuable communication that used to exist

00:50:54 ◼   ► in email over the past few years.

00:50:57 ◼   ► And it's had this feedback loop where over time

00:51:02 ◼   ► it has made my email less valuable to check,

00:51:05 ◼   ► which then makes me want to check it less.

00:51:08 ◼   ► And then when I go in there, it's like,

00:51:09 ◼   ► oh, there's just a mountain of spam

00:51:12 ◼   ► and automated notifications from things.

00:51:16 ◼   ► And so I'm going to say my email use is something like,

00:51:19 ◼   ► once every couple of weeks,

00:51:25 ◼   ► I open it up and kind of skim over it

00:51:27 ◼   ► to see if there's any disaster that's in there.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And the answer is almost never.

00:51:33 ◼   ► Nobody else is checking my personal email accounts,

00:51:36 ◼   ► but I have redirected essentially everything

00:51:39 ◼   ► that's important to Slack.

00:51:41 ◼   ► - I.e. the people, not the messages you're saying, right?

00:51:45 ◼   ► You've redirected the people to Slack.

00:51:47 ◼   ► It's like the email's not getting sent to Slack.

00:51:50 ◼   ► - Yes, yeah, to be clear, I always forget

00:51:52 ◼   ► that that's a thing that you can do,

00:51:53 ◼   ► that you can have emails sent to Slack,

00:51:54 ◼   ► which seems like an ouroboros eating its own tail.

00:51:58 ◼   ► I don't understand why people would do that.

00:52:00 ◼   ► I mean, I kind of do, but it's just,

00:52:01 ◼   ► That's crazy to me in my workflow.

00:52:03 ◼   ► So I don't do that, but there is one thing that,

00:52:09 ◼   ► so there's a downside of this,

00:52:14 ◼   ► 'cause I've really doubled down on Slack in the past year

00:52:16 ◼   ► in a way that I would not have expected.

00:52:19 ◼   ► But this also means that I used to use Slack

00:52:21 ◼   ► as like an instant message conversation.

00:52:24 ◼   ► So it was only just direct messages between people.

00:52:28 ◼   ► But as the number of projects has kind of multiplied,

00:52:32 ◼   ► I've ended up being like,

00:52:34 ◼   ► "Oh, this is what Channels is for.

00:52:36 ◼   ► So let's make Channels for the individual projects

00:52:39 ◼   ► and talk about things in there."

00:52:41 ◼   ► But man, one thing email has,

00:52:43 ◼   ► which as far as I can tell,

00:52:45 ◼   ► there's no way to mimic in Slack,

00:52:47 ◼   ► is there's no way to mark like,

00:52:50 ◼   ► "Okay, this conversation is done now.

00:52:53 ◼   ► And I've cleared this."

00:52:55 ◼   ► Like it's one thing I really miss from email

00:52:58 ◼   ► is the concept of I am going to archive this thread

00:53:02 ◼   ► and it is going to go away because it is done.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Okay, how do you think you can do that in Slack?

00:53:10 ◼   ► Because Slack always shows you all of your threads,

00:53:14 ◼   ► but here's the kicker.

00:53:15 ◼   ► There's a thing that lets you clear a thread,

00:53:19 ◼   ► but if anyone ever replies, you will never know

00:53:22 ◼   ► because you have been taking off that as like getting replies?

00:53:27 ◼   ► - As an admin, you can just close them.

00:53:29 ◼   ► - Okay, explain.

00:53:30 ◼   ► - If you're setting them up as channels, right?

00:53:34 ◼   ► - Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:53:35 ◼   ► Okay, I'm saying like,

00:53:36 ◼   ► I'm involved in a lot of conversations

00:53:38 ◼   ► across a lot of channels, across a bunch of slacks.

00:53:41 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:53:42 ◼   ► - And the thing that I would love is,

00:53:44 ◼   ► you know, like it's like the old dream, inbox zero.

00:53:49 ◼   ► I have turned around everything

00:53:51 ◼   ► that has come into my email inbox, right?

00:53:54 ◼   ► Well, in Slack, there's no equivalent to that.

00:53:59 ◼   ► And I feel like I've crossed some threshold

00:54:01 ◼   ► where it's a real problem now

00:54:03 ◼   ► where I can end up losing something in Slack,

00:54:05 ◼   ► where there's a thread that someone's waiting for me

00:54:07 ◼   ► to reply to something about.

00:54:09 ◼   ► And because I have 20 threads that I'm a part of,

00:54:12 ◼   ► it just gets shunted down the chain really far.

00:54:15 ◼   ► And it's hard to know at what point

00:54:18 ◼   ► I'm done with these threads.

00:54:21 ◼   ► So that's the problem that I have with Slack,

00:54:23 ◼   ► is this inability to know when is it cleared.

00:54:28 ◼   ► There's no place I can look and say,

00:54:30 ◼   ► I have dealt with all of the things

00:54:32 ◼   ► that people require from me in Slack.

00:54:35 ◼   ► Because-- - And like,

00:54:36 ◼   ► the all unreads and all threads things

00:54:38 ◼   ► are not helping you there?

00:54:40 ◼   ► - Well, so like when you go to all threads,

00:54:42 ◼   ► it's essentially a reverse chronological list

00:54:46 ◼   ► of all of the threads that you're involved in.

00:54:48 ◼   ► But that can mean it's showing you things

00:54:50 ◼   ► that are done, but below them might be things

00:54:53 ◼   ► that are undone, right?

00:54:55 ◼   ► There's no way to like mark this state

00:54:58 ◼   ► of this thing is done, this thing is not done,

00:55:00 ◼   ► and don't show me the things that are done.

00:55:03 ◼   ► So that is a frustration that I have with Slack.

00:55:06 ◼   ► I'd be very curious to know if people have solutions

00:55:08 ◼   ► to this, I've tried things like starring threads,

00:55:11 ◼   ► but that ends up being like a complication

00:55:14 ◼   ► where you lose track of the state of the stars.

00:55:16 ◼   ► It's not as clear as an email archive.

00:55:21 ◼   ► And I only bring this up because I find,

00:55:23 ◼   ► I've found myself on occasion thinking,

00:55:25 ◼   ► maybe I should go back to email.

00:55:26 ◼   ► So I know that these things,

00:55:28 ◼   ► and it's like, no, no, don't do that.

00:55:29 ◼   ► That's a terrible idea.

00:55:30 ◼   ► There's a reason that you went to Slack in the first place.

00:55:33 ◼   ► But it has crossed my mind that like,

00:55:34 ◼   ► I'm frustrated by the lack of clarity of clearedness

00:55:39 ◼   ► or clarity of finished-ness with Slack,

00:55:45 ◼   ► even though Slack has overall been great,

00:55:48 ◼   ► and I really like it as a tool,

00:55:51 ◼   ► that is a frustration that, for me anyway,

00:55:55 ◼   ► once past a certain volume of communication on Slack

00:55:59 ◼   ► has become a real problem for me.

00:56:01 ◼   ► - Because I'm assuming that you're,

00:56:04 ◼   ► 'cause it will show you what you have unread

00:56:05 ◼   ► in the sidebar, but you don't wanna check everything.

00:56:08 ◼   ► - Well, no, well, here's the problem with the unread status.

00:56:10 ◼   ► It's just like, it's the same problem with iMessage.

00:56:14 ◼   ► There's no clear way to be like,

00:56:15 ◼   ► "Oh, I've looked at this thing,

00:56:17 ◼   ► "but I can't do anything about it now,

00:56:18 ◼   ► "and I wanna get it later."

00:56:21 ◼   ► And it's like, there's this dumb Slackbot thing

00:56:23 ◼   ► to remind you later,

00:56:24 ◼   ► but that's not the same thing as like, clear.

00:56:26 ◼   ► - You can mark it as unread again.

00:56:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know.

00:56:29 ◼   ► I know you can do that,

00:56:31 ◼   ► but I often come to a situation where it's like,

00:56:32 ◼   ► you have 14 unread threads.

00:56:37 ◼   ► And then I click on the button to see them,

00:56:39 ◼   ► and it instantly marks all of them as read.

00:56:41 ◼   ► and it's like, oh, okay, it's not really what I wanted to do.

00:56:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, see, that's ruined everything.

00:56:46 ◼   ► Yeah, 'cause now what was I marking?

00:56:48 ◼   ► Because now I've lost everything.

00:56:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I get you. - I've lost everything.

00:56:51 ◼   ► - That's why I never use the all unread thing,

00:56:54 ◼   ► because it's just like, well,

00:56:56 ◼   ► that's not what I wanted to do, right?

00:56:58 ◼   ► Was just mark everything as read

00:56:59 ◼   ► when I haven't actually read it all.

00:57:01 ◼   ► Like, that's not helpful.

00:57:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I guess maybe what it is

00:57:04 ◼   ► is that all unread thing seems like a pseudo inbox,

00:57:07 ◼   ► which might be why I'm frustrated with it.

00:57:08 ◼   ► It's like an inbox that doesn't act

00:57:10 ◼   ► the way you expect an inbox to act.

00:57:12 ◼   ► Maybe I should try to get out of the habit

00:57:14 ◼   ► of using that thing, but--

00:57:15 ◼   ► - Oh, I can't believe you use it.

00:57:17 ◼   ► That's terrible, I hate it.

00:57:18 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:57:19 ◼   ► Really, I think, like I wish I could disable it.

00:57:21 ◼   ► Like it just gets in my way.

00:57:22 ◼   ► I never want all unreads, because it's like,

00:57:25 ◼   ► that's not how I look at Slack.

00:57:27 ◼   ► Like everything's compartmentalized,

00:57:29 ◼   ► you know, just throw it all together, that's not helpful.

00:57:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, whereas I feel like I wanna hit

00:57:33 ◼   ► that all unread thing and then just boom, boom, boom,

00:57:34 ◼   ► clear everything as fast as I can,

00:57:36 ◼   ► and then get out of there.

00:57:37 ◼   ► - Yeah. - But it just,

00:57:37 ◼   ► it ends up causing me more problems.

00:57:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, it'd be easier if things disappeared

00:57:42 ◼   ► from the list, right?

00:57:44 ◼   ► - Right, but they don't, that's the issue.

00:57:45 ◼   ► Is everything stays in there forever.

00:57:48 ◼   ► And all unread means everything

00:57:50 ◼   ► that you've ever interacted with forever.

00:57:51 ◼   ► Like you can scroll back for thousands of messages

00:57:53 ◼   ► and all unread, it's like, God damn it.

00:57:55 ◼   ► But anyway, that's my communications

00:57:59 ◼   ► for any and everything that's remotely business related

00:58:02 ◼   ► is all entirely Slack and email.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Like I live in a world without email basically

00:58:07 ◼   ► is where I am at the moment.

00:58:09 ◼   ► I'm off the wheel, I guess.

00:58:11 ◼   ► As I mentioned earlier on the show,

00:58:13 ◼   ► I recently spent a lot of time,

00:58:15 ◼   ► a lot more time than I expected

00:58:17 ◼   ► in America's mountain time zone.

00:58:19 ◼   ► And boy, is that

00:58:21 ◼   ► a beautiful time zone.

00:58:23 ◼   ► And what do you do in a place that's

00:58:25 ◼   ► filled with natural beauty? Why you

00:58:27 ◼   ► take a lot of photos? What do

00:58:29 ◼   ► you do with those photos? You let

00:58:31 ◼   ► them linger in your photo

00:58:33 ◼   ► stream forever,

00:58:35 ◼   ► un-viewed. So sad.

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00:59:12 ◼   ► There's no border. It's just all image.

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01:00:10 ◼   ► support of Cortex and all of Relay FM. There's one thing that you haven't touched on, Myke,

01:00:15 ◼   ► which I want to mention, which is automation tools. Ah, yes. Now, we mentioned shortcuts briefly.

01:00:22 ◼   ► Shortcuts would be my app of the year, obviously, although I would not want you to spoil the

01:00:28 ◼   ► the upgrade ease and make any remark on that point.

01:00:30 ◼   ► But I do just wanna have a quick mention

01:00:34 ◼   ► for Keyboard Maestro, which I was bullied into

01:00:38 ◼   ► by Rosemary Orchard at WWDC.

01:00:41 ◼   ► And I have barely scratched the surface with this,

01:00:46 ◼   ► but I love it.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Like it's automation for the Mac.

01:00:52 ◼   ► And to give you an idea of like,

01:00:54 ◼   ► I'm using it very, very simply,

01:00:56 ◼   ► but I'll tell you two things that I've done with it,

01:00:59 ◼   ► which I really love.

01:01:01 ◼   ► So one of the things is, on my laptop,

01:01:07 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro can look for certain triggers,

01:01:11 ◼   ► and I've set up an away from home trigger.

01:01:15 ◼   ► So if I disconnect from my home Wi-Fi,

01:01:19 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro will automatically launch

01:01:22 ◼   ► two power saving apps on my laptop,

01:01:25 ◼   ► One which is called Turbo Boost Pro, which shuts down,

01:01:29 ◼   ► it's not overclocking, but like the turbo mode

01:01:31 ◼   ► on your computer, which makes a huge difference

01:01:33 ◼   ► for battery life.

01:01:35 ◼   ► And another one called Endurance,

01:01:37 ◼   ► which once you hit 50% battery life on your laptop

01:01:41 ◼   ► will like really start flipping switches

01:01:43 ◼   ► to conserve battery life.

01:01:45 ◼   ► And then when I reconnect to the home wifi,

01:01:48 ◼   ► it quits those two apps.

01:01:50 ◼   ► So I really, I just, this is the kind of thing that I love.

01:01:53 ◼   ► I don't think Keyboard Maestro is a good name for this application anymore.

01:01:57 ◼   ► No, I completely agree, and I think it's one of the reasons why for years I just didn't...

01:02:01 ◼   ► I always thought it was a kind of Quicksilver competitor?

01:02:05 ◼   ► Well it was, I think, for a while.

01:02:09 ◼   ► Like it was just a keyboard replacement thing, where you could just do a bunch of stuff with your keyboard.

01:02:14 ◼   ► They should just call it Maestro.

01:02:17 ◼   ► Yes, Maestro would be a better name. Yes, it would be.

01:02:20 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro people, come on.

01:02:22 ◼   ► Like, because I have never used this application

01:02:24 ◼   ► 'cause it's like, I don't wanna use

01:02:25 ◼   ► keyboard shortcuts all the time.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Like, I didn't even know you could do stuff like that.

01:02:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, so that's a little thing that I love.

01:02:33 ◼   ► And there's another one which,

01:02:36 ◼   ► it took me a while to get it to work exactly the way I want,

01:02:39 ◼   ► but now saves me so much time.

01:02:42 ◼   ► I simply call it startup.

01:02:45 ◼   ► So when the computer reboots,

01:02:48 ◼   ► Keyboard Maestro gets my computer into

01:02:52 ◼   ► what I think of as the starting position.

01:02:54 ◼   ► And so I'm sure everyone's familiar with the idea

01:02:59 ◼   ► that you can have apps automatically launch

01:03:02 ◼   ► when you start your computer.

01:03:04 ◼   ► But I want them to automatically launch

01:03:06 ◼   ► and then be in particular places.

01:03:09 ◼   ► So when my computer starts up,

01:03:11 ◼   ► some of the things that happen, it's like,

01:03:12 ◼   ► okay, Keyboard Maestro will launch Fantastical,

01:03:16 ◼   ► which is in planning mode for me.

01:03:18 ◼   ► But it will also maximize Fantastic Al2

01:03:22 ◼   ► then be its own space on the computer,

01:03:24 ◼   ► which is exactly what I always want.

01:03:26 ◼   ► It will launch OmniFocus.

01:03:29 ◼   ► But now here's the thing,

01:03:30 ◼   ► I always want two windows for OmniFocus.

01:03:34 ◼   ► I want one little window in the top left,

01:03:37 ◼   ► which just shows the executor perspective

01:03:40 ◼   ► in a tiny little corner.

01:03:42 ◼   ► And I want another big window,

01:03:43 ◼   ► which opens up that shows me my all project lists

01:03:47 ◼   ► in case I need to mess around with something.

01:03:49 ◼   ► And Keyboard Maestro can do that.

01:03:50 ◼   ► It opens OmniFocus, it makes a new window,

01:03:53 ◼   ► it puts it into the executive perspective,

01:03:54 ◼   ► it smushes it up in the corner, it opens a second window,

01:03:57 ◼   ► it switches it over to projects,

01:03:58 ◼   ► then it makes projects full screen.

01:04:00 ◼   ► Like, it's great.

01:04:01 ◼   ► - 'Cause even though the Mac can relaunch stuff for you,

01:04:04 ◼   ► it maybe can't do all of those little independent parts.

01:04:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, it can't remember how are you fiddly about this.

01:04:12 ◼   ► And I've been meaning to do this for like a podcast

01:04:17 ◼   ► recording setup as well, which is,

01:04:19 ◼   ► there's always a way I want the computer to be

01:04:21 ◼   ► when I'm recording a podcast.

01:04:22 ◼   ► This is like an environment setup.

01:04:25 ◼   ► So I have made one for writing,

01:04:28 ◼   ► which is if I'm writing on the computer,

01:04:29 ◼   ► here's what you need to do.

01:04:30 ◼   ► Like I press a button, like it closes down everything

01:04:33 ◼   ► except the apps that I want open,

01:04:35 ◼   ► like it opens them up, it puts them in the right spots,

01:04:38 ◼   ► and it's all set.

01:04:40 ◼   ► Like the power of this is crazy

01:04:43 ◼   ► and I have barely scratched the surface with what it can do.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And I really have to say it's an app

01:04:50 ◼   ► that I'd heard about for years and had always vaguely avoided

01:04:54 ◼   ► and I was a fool to have avoided it.

01:04:57 ◼   ► Like what it can do is incredible.

01:05:00 ◼   ► So I just wanted to mention that in the automation category

01:05:03 ◼   ► as something that is brand new

01:05:05 ◼   ► and has a lot of potential for me.

01:05:09 ◼   ► What are you using for writing these days?

01:05:13 ◼   ► - All right, this is the second big switch of the year.

01:05:17 ◼   ► - Oh.

01:05:18 ◼   ► - Which is, oh, are you surprised, Myke?

01:05:20 ◼   ► - I don't, well, I don't know.

01:05:22 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:05:23 ◼   ► - I have for years used Ulysses,

01:05:27 ◼   ► but this year I decided to try another app

01:05:30 ◼   ► that I have also been avoiding for years,

01:05:33 ◼   ► which is Scrivener.

01:05:36 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

01:05:38 ◼   ► - Do you know of Scrivener, Myke?

01:05:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know, everyone knows of Scrivener.

01:05:41 ◼   ► It's been around forever.

01:05:42 ◼   ► Like if you've been focusing on Mac stuff

01:05:44 ◼   ► for any amount of time,

01:05:45 ◼   ► like you will have come across Scrivener.

01:05:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, Scrivener is,

01:05:50 ◼   ► it has been around for a really long time.

01:05:52 ◼   ► It's also cross-platform, so it works on Windows as well,

01:05:54 ◼   ► which surprises me because it doesn't feel

01:05:56 ◼   ► like a cross-platform app at all.

01:05:59 ◼   ► But I would say that Scrivener is like the complete opposite

01:06:04 ◼   ► of the types of apps that I have been using

01:06:08 ◼   ► low these many years. So I have been, for years and years, using markdown text editors

01:06:14 ◼   ► like Ulysses, where if you want to write something in bold, you put little asterisks on either

01:06:20 ◼   ► side of it, and that tells the computer, "Oh, this word is supposed to be bold." But you

01:06:25 ◼   ► don't select a word and do a keyboard command to like stylize it as bold.

01:06:31 ◼   ► Rich text versus markdown, right?

01:06:32 ◼   ► It's yeah, it's rich text versus markdown. Or like in the really old days, LaTeX is the

01:06:38 ◼   ► same idea. You're typing up what the formatting should be. You're not visually seeing what

01:06:44 ◼   ► the formatting is. Now, I don't know if I'm going to stick with Scrivener because constitutionally,

01:06:54 ◼   ► I greatly prefer marking up text with markers that I can see,

01:06:59 ◼   ► as opposed to picking text to be stylized.

01:07:05 ◼   ► But I do have to say that Scrivener

01:07:07 ◼   ► is really interesting to me,

01:07:10 ◼   ► because I've gone all in on styles.

01:07:14 ◼   ► And what this allows me to do in a way

01:07:16 ◼   ► that I could never quite get to work with Ulysses

01:07:19 ◼   ► or any other markdown text editor,

01:07:21 ◼   ► is to say, mark a passage as,

01:07:26 ◼   ► this is copy pasted from a book,

01:07:27 ◼   ► like this is reference material, right?

01:07:30 ◼   ► This passage is a note to myself in this document.

01:07:34 ◼   ► This paragraph is an actual paragraph of the script.

01:07:37 ◼   ► And by doing that, it allows me

01:07:43 ◼   ► to export different versions of the script.

01:07:46 ◼   ► So I can export to myself a version of the script

01:07:49 ◼   ► that has just the parts that are actually going to be in the script.

01:07:55 ◼   ► So you can not only visually see it, right, so like it's nice because when you're going

01:08:00 ◼   ► through your document and looking at it, you can like pick out all the notes and maybe

01:08:04 ◼   ► there's parts you have to add so you can visually see what's left.

01:08:08 ◼   ► But then also when it's done, you don't have to delete all that stuff.

01:08:11 ◼   ► You can just export the thing you need to read.

01:08:14 ◼   ► That's exactly right.

01:08:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:16 ◼   ► for whatever reason, like I want to leave a note that's a citation in some certain point,

01:08:21 ◼   ► it can just leave it there and mark it as like, don't export this part of it. It also

01:08:25 ◼   ► means what I have done is I can quickly send out versions to experts to be like, hey, can

01:08:31 ◼   ► you look over this, and it cuts out 90% of the like the garbage that I would have to

01:08:37 ◼   ► manually remove otherwise. And then on the other side, it allows me to export a version

01:08:43 ◼   ► to myself that does have my own notes in it,

01:08:46 ◼   ► which then I'll mark up in something like Good Notes,

01:08:50 ◼   ► where I wanna see my notes to myself,

01:08:53 ◼   ► and I wanna see the part that's actually the script,

01:08:55 ◼   ► but I don't need to see all the research material now

01:08:58 ◼   ► because I'm doing a particular kind of draft.

01:09:00 ◼   ► So it's very interesting.

01:09:03 ◼   ► Scrivener is way, way overkill for me.

01:09:08 ◼   ► I don't need 90% of what it does,

01:09:11 ◼   ► because I mean, you can write entire,

01:09:15 ◼   ► really heavy research thing,

01:09:16 ◼   ► like it has a whole ability to act

01:09:19 ◼   ► as a kind of Evernote replacement,

01:09:20 ◼   ► and it can do so very much,

01:09:24 ◼   ► but I'm only using this very limited part of it.

01:09:28 ◼   ► But so far this year,

01:09:30 ◼   ► I wrote the Statue of Liberty script in it,

01:09:32 ◼   ► and I wrote the Federal Land script in it,

01:09:36 ◼   ► and I'm working on the next two videos

01:09:38 ◼   ► I'm doing in Scrivener,

01:09:39 ◼   ► So like this has been an interesting trial and it's so far so good.

01:09:43 ◼   ► I like it.

01:09:44 ◼   ► I like it a lot.

01:09:44 ◼   ► It's worth taking a look at if you do writing of any kind.

01:09:48 ◼   ► It's interesting to me because a complaint that you had about Ulysses is that Ulysses

01:09:53 ◼   ► really tries to force you to think that you're a novelist, right?

01:09:57 ◼   ► Like that, that it does a bunch of stuff where it's like, it's clearly the

01:10:00 ◼   ► application wants to be used by people writing books.

01:10:03 ◼   ► Scrivener is even more like that.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:07 ◼   ► That's for sure Scrivener is its intended audience

01:10:12 ◼   ► is a novelist or someone writing

01:10:15 ◼   ► like a nonfiction historical book, right?

01:10:17 ◼   ► With a ton of notes.

01:10:19 ◼   ► One thing that is really great about Scrivener on the Mac

01:10:25 ◼   ► is good God, do they have settings.

01:10:28 ◼   ► They have settings for everything.

01:10:32 ◼   ► And that allows me to go in and turn off a ton of the stuff

01:10:35 ◼   ► that I just don't want to see. So that is helpful. I think if the app forced me to see

01:10:42 ◼   ► a bunch of, like, here's a way that you can look at your novel in terms of index cards

01:10:46 ◼   ► along with the character profile for each, like, I don't need any of this. I never want

01:10:50 ◼   ► to see it. I don't want to know that it's there.

01:10:52 ◼   ► They are legit features, by the way. Like, you can look at your book as if it's indexed

01:10:55 ◼   ► cards on a corkboard. It's very detailed and involved.

01:11:00 ◼   ► Yeah, it really is.

01:11:02 ◼   ► You can do a lot of stuff with it.

01:11:04 ◼   ► And what was it?

01:11:05 ◼   ► Several episodes ago, when I was complaining about Apple Watch faces,

01:11:09 ◼   ► I was learning how to use Scrivener at that point in time,

01:11:12 ◼   ► and I had imported all the screenshots of my Apple Watches into Scrivener

01:11:16 ◼   ► just because their ability to rearrange images in a research project

01:11:21 ◼   ► is like, "Oh, actually, this is a great tool for this,"

01:11:24 ◼   ► to visually line up a bunch of things,

01:11:26 ◼   ► like these things are similar, group all of those things together.

01:11:29 ◼   ► and also be able to make notes on the individual ones.

01:11:32 ◼   ► It's an incredibly powerful tool.

01:11:36 ◼   ► Now, if anything drives me away from it, it will be that,

01:11:40 ◼   ► that it's too powerful, and I still really don't like styles.

01:11:46 ◼   ► I don't fundamentally like the idea that there's some part of the writing that I can't see,

01:11:53 ◼   ► which is the invisible computer knowledge of what these sections are.

01:11:57 ◼   ► I wish there was a way I could do it using characters like you can in Markdown, but I'm

01:12:03 ◼   ► trying this trade-off and so far it's been very interesting.

01:12:09 ◼   ► And I'm kind of curious to know whether FutureMe ends up sticking with it, you know, when we

01:12:14 ◼   ► do State of the Apps next year or not.

01:12:18 ◼   ► Right now I don't know which way it is, but it's very promising and I really think if

01:12:21 ◼   ► you do writing you should check it out.

01:12:23 ◼   ► I avoided it pointlessly for many years.

01:12:26 ◼   ► So considering it has all these powerful research tools, I'm sure you're just gonna switch from

01:12:31 ◼   ► Evernote, right?

01:12:34 ◼   ► God damn it Myke.

01:12:38 ◼   ► So on the Apple App Store, they had a little thing one day, which was like, go look up

01:12:42 ◼   ► the oldest app that's on your phone.

01:12:44 ◼   ► I thought, oh yeah, let me go take a look at what that is.

01:12:48 ◼   ► And I went into my purchase history, I scrolled all the way down to the bottom.

01:12:55 ◼   ► And the first app that I ever bought on my iPhone was an A to Z London map guide, which

01:13:02 ◼   ► is hilarious because of course, it's like, oh, right.

01:13:05 ◼   ► I didn't actually have a phone.

01:13:06 ◼   ► I had an iPod and I needed to have offline access to maps in London, which is hilarious

01:13:12 ◼   ► now.

01:13:13 ◼   ► Number two was Remember the Milk.

01:13:16 ◼   ► And number three was Evernote.

01:13:19 ◼   ► It was my sixth.

01:13:24 ◼   ► Evernote was my third oldest app on the phone and is now officially the oldest app on my

01:13:32 ◼   ► phone that I still use that I still find the most frustrating.

01:13:36 ◼   ► I have some real crap in this list.

01:13:40 ◼   ► My gosh.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Down at the bottom.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Oh yeah, the early stuff is real garbage.

01:13:44 ◼   ► Like I had a ton of like throwaway games and a bunch of stuff.

01:13:47 ◼   ► A rotary dialer app.

01:13:50 ◼   ► Why do I have that?

01:13:52 ◼   ► Why did I get that?

01:13:53 ◼   ► Look in the early days we didn't even know what we could do with the phone so we were

01:13:56 ◼   ► just downloading whatever.

01:13:57 ◼   ► That's true.

01:13:58 ◼   ► You give yourself a pass but I thought my first three were quite funny.

01:14:01 ◼   ► I was like oh, A to Z maps, like god I remember having one of you in my backpack and you know

01:14:06 ◼   ► pre-phone days of having to look at it.

01:14:08 ◼   ► For some reason my first was iTunes remote.

01:14:11 ◼   ► Oh yeah I remember that.

01:14:13 ◼   ► I don't know, the Facebook app, an AIM app, Net News Wire which is an RSS reading app,

01:14:20 ◼   ► Shazam and then Evernote.

01:14:21 ◼   ► Why do I care so much about Shazam?

01:14:26 ◼   ► - I don't know, I don't know what to tell you, Myke.

01:14:29 ◼   ► But I'm willing to bet that for a lot of people,

01:14:31 ◼   ► Evernote is in the first 10, it's gotta be.

01:14:35 ◼   ► - Look, we rag on it a lot,

01:14:37 ◼   ► 'cause it is bad now by and large,

01:14:40 ◼   ► but back when it began, it was incredible,

01:14:44 ◼   ► like what you could do in Evernote

01:14:46 ◼   ► compared to what you could do

01:14:47 ◼   ► in literally any other note-taking application, right?

01:14:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, and especially considering

01:14:52 ◼   ► that Apple Notes was not good.

01:14:54 ◼   ► - Garbage.

01:14:55 ◼   ► - Right, it was terrible.

01:14:56 ◼   ► And Evernote was astounding compared to it.

01:14:59 ◼   ► I think one of my frustrations with Evernote is,

01:15:03 ◼   ► sort of like you were saying with the apps,

01:15:05 ◼   ► is like they're constantly doing stuff,

01:15:07 ◼   ► but it's none of the stuff that I care about,

01:15:09 ◼   ► and that always feels frustrating.

01:15:11 ◼   ► It's like, as the joke goes,

01:15:12 ◼   ► like they're busy selling socks,

01:15:14 ◼   ► and I want markdown support in my notes, right?

01:15:16 ◼   ► And it's like, well, no, tough nookies.

01:15:18 ◼   ► I do wanna give Evernote a little bit of a break this year

01:15:21 ◼   ► because like I was saying last episode,

01:15:25 ◼   ► finding this new place in my,

01:15:27 ◼   ► this new again place in my life for the iPad

01:15:29 ◼   ► as like research assistant,

01:15:31 ◼   ► I've realized that Evernote is much more tolerable for me

01:15:36 ◼   ► if I'm using it entirely as an iPad tool.

01:15:41 ◼   ► That I'm using, like I'm collecting stuff all over the place

01:15:44 ◼   ► and throwing it into Evernote,

01:15:46 ◼   ► but I'm reading through documents

01:15:48 ◼   ► and reviewing notes on the iPad.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And it makes it easier to deal with that.

01:15:55 ◼   ► So Evernote still has some killer features

01:15:58 ◼   ► that nobody else does.

01:15:59 ◼   ► I spent some time investigating

01:16:01 ◼   ► when I was looking around at Scrivener

01:16:02 ◼   ► of some of the alternatives,

01:16:03 ◼   ► and it was still the same deal breakers.

01:16:05 ◼   ► Nobody does image OCR the same way Evernote does,

01:16:09 ◼   ► which is a huge deal for me.

01:16:11 ◼   ► And yeah, I would say it's tolerable.

01:16:15 ◼   ► And in particular, Evernote did add one thing finally that made me very happy, which is

01:16:20 ◼   ► a dark mode, which makes a huge difference to me.

01:16:24 ◼   ► It really does.

01:16:25 ◼   ► I know that last time we spoke about them we were poking fun at their design and stuff,

01:16:30 ◼   ► and I still stand by a lot of that nonsense, but it does seem like they're trying to get

01:16:36 ◼   ► their house in order a little bit.

01:16:38 ◼   ► It does feel like they're trying to turn their ship a bit and try and focus more, right?

01:16:45 ◼   ► because they put all their prices up and I mean that's a key kind of way like they want to double

01:16:49 ◼   ► down on some stuff but a company as large and with a history like they've had it's going to take them

01:16:55 ◼   ► a long time if they do anything. Yeah so like I take the dark mode as like a goodwill gesture

01:17:00 ◼   ► yeah and sure there are a bunch of weird problems that I've run into with Evernote that just go away

01:17:05 ◼   ► if I never open it on the Mac and I just use it as an iPad only tool and so that's why like Evernote

01:17:14 ◼   ► you've been with me for however long,

01:17:17 ◼   ► you're probably gonna be with me until the last bitter day,

01:17:21 ◼   ► and at least you're tolerable now.

01:17:23 ◼   ► That's my feeling with Evernote.

01:17:24 ◼   ► - I would love if like during the course of our show,

01:17:28 ◼   ► we go from both like using Evernote a lot,

01:17:30 ◼   ► to hating it, to loving it again.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Wouldn't that be wonderful?

01:17:34 ◼   ► - That would be great, yeah.

01:17:35 ◼   ► There's nothing I want more than to really love Evernote.

01:17:38 ◼   ► - You know what?

01:17:39 ◼   ► - There is maybe no app that I feel that strongly about.

01:17:42 ◼   ► I feel like a bit of an idiot at the moment because I'm working on a new project that we're

01:17:48 ◼   ► going to be talking about in the next couple of weeks and I need an application that can store

01:17:53 ◼   ► a bunch of media types including text and I've been looking around and there's an app called

01:18:00 ◼   ► Keepit that I've been looking at and there's an app called Agenda that I've been looking at and

01:18:05 ◼   ► and Athens really worked.

01:18:06 ◼   ► Maybe it's Evernote.

01:18:08 ◼   ► I think it might be Evernote.

01:18:11 ◼   ► - You know, they also let you share notebooks with people,

01:18:14 ◼   ► which for that project might be useful as well.

01:18:16 ◼   ► So just saying.

01:18:16 ◼   ► - Holy crap.

01:18:18 ◼   ► Evernote, I'm coming back to you, baby.

01:18:20 ◼   ► We're gonna be friends again.

01:18:22 ◼   ► It could be Evernote.

01:18:24 ◼   ► Wow, I can't believe that.

01:18:28 ◼   ► All right, well, I'm just looking at their website

01:18:30 ◼   ► and it's just like, oh yeah, that's what you do.

01:18:34 ◼   ► Wow, Evernote! Look at you! I'm installing you again.

01:18:38 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to hearing what you think about Evernote, Myke.

01:18:42 ◼   ► Oh my god, I can't believe we're doing this! What is going on? 2019, it's all going crazy!

01:18:48 ◼   ► That's a real surprise.

01:18:51 ◼   ► That is, that is a real surprise.

01:18:53 ◼   ► I was not expecting to go there today. Huh, all right, well I'm gonna give Evernote another go,

01:18:57 ◼   ► I guess.

01:18:58 ◼   ► I really look forward to your feedback on that. That's gonna be great.

01:19:03 ◼   ► Look Evercore, it's part of the show. I guess so. We even got show artwork for it. We sure do.

01:19:07 ◼   ► We sure do. Some of my favorite show artwork.

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01:20:56 ◼   ► So we spoke about all the important business stuff.

01:21:01 ◼   ► Should we do a lightning round of some of the other things we want to throw out there?

01:21:04 ◼   ► Yeah, lightning round, for sure.

01:21:05 ◼   ► Yeah, let's do a quick lightning round, because I've got a bunch of things that I don't have

01:21:08 ◼   ► a lot to say about, but I just want to mention his apps I like.

01:21:11 ◼   ► Ka-choom!

01:21:12 ◼   ► Oh!

01:21:13 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:21:14 ◼   ► Was that lightning?

01:21:15 ◼   ► No, that wasn't lightning at all.

01:21:16 ◼   ► Yes!

01:21:17 ◼   ► No, no, that was lightning.

01:21:18 ◼   ► As the man who listens to thunder sounds and lightning.

01:21:19 ◼   ► But anyway, you keep going.

01:21:21 ◼   ► Okay.

01:21:22 ◼   ► I'll do the quick first lightning round.

01:21:24 ◼   ► Anki, the cross-platform flashcard memorization app

01:21:29 ◼   ► that I have used for years and years.

01:21:32 ◼   ► - It always pops up, this one.

01:21:34 ◼   ► - I always want to mention it because it's great.

01:21:37 ◼   ► If you are, like, I always recommended it

01:21:39 ◼   ► to my students to use.

01:21:41 ◼   ► It's not exactly user-friendly,

01:21:44 ◼   ► partly because of how old it is, but man, is it powerful.

01:21:48 ◼   ► Like, it is really powerful.

01:21:51 ◼   ► And if you need to know anything, I recommend you just throw a bunch of flashcards into

01:21:56 ◼   ► it and use it to memorize information.

01:21:59 ◼   ► Like my wife recently was using it for her citizenship application or citizenship test,

01:22:05 ◼   ► like to get all that information in her head.

01:22:06 ◼   ► Then I can only assume that it was the same thing that my wife used because they were

01:22:10 ◼   ► sharing some kind of cards together.

01:22:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:22:14 ◼   ► You can share cards, like you can give someone else the deck that you're using and I just

01:22:19 ◼   ► I have a bunch of random stuff in there.

01:22:22 ◼   ► And for any project where I feel like

01:22:25 ◼   ► I need to learn something,

01:22:27 ◼   ► like I throw keyboard shortcuts in there all the time.

01:22:29 ◼   ► That's one of the things I like for it

01:22:31 ◼   ► is every time I'm using an app

01:22:33 ◼   ► and I feel like I use a shortcut a bunch,

01:22:34 ◼   ► I should just memorize it

01:22:36 ◼   ► instead of looking it up each time.

01:22:37 ◼   ► I'm not in school, obviously,

01:22:39 ◼   ► but there are still things that you need

01:22:41 ◼   ► to have memorized in life.

01:22:43 ◼   ► And Anki is the best for that.

01:22:45 ◼   ► So I really like it.

01:22:46 ◼   ► I highly recommend it.

01:22:47 ◼   ► If you are a student, you are crazy to go be in school and not be using it.

01:22:52 ◼   ► I'm just gonna throw Discord into this.

01:22:55 ◼   ► Ooh, Discord.

01:22:57 ◼   ► Discord is a very powerful application.

01:23:00 ◼   ► It's Slack for gamers, basically.

01:23:03 ◼   ► And it has just a few features to it that I really like.

01:23:06 ◼   ► So I'm a member of a couple of Discords.

01:23:08 ◼   ► Dark Mode is one of them.

01:23:09 ◼   ► I'm a member of a couple of Discords, but I'm mostly lurking in them.

01:23:11 ◼   ► I don't really contribute too much.

01:23:13 ◼   ► I don't really spend a lot of time in there.

01:23:15 ◼   ► The game streams that me and Tiff have been doing for playing for fun, it's so useful.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Some of the features they have of like, you can set up a voice channel which is just always

01:23:26 ◼   ► open for people to join and leave, right?

01:23:28 ◼   ► Like it's just so useful for gaming.

01:23:31 ◼   ► Their video and screen sharing stuff is so good.

01:23:33 ◼   ► The way they think about streaming, you know like if you have a streaming application open

01:23:37 ◼   ► it warns you like, "Hey, you've got a streaming app open.

01:23:40 ◼   ► We're restricting the view of some stuff unless you tell us otherwise."

01:23:43 ◼   ► It is just a very focused application that I enjoy.

01:23:47 ◼   ► It is not a Slack replacement.

01:23:49 ◼   ► I mean a lot of people think of it to be a Slack replacement.

01:23:52 ◼   ► It's not a Slack replacement for what Slack is supposed to be used for, but it's a Slack

01:23:57 ◼   ► replacement for what a lot of people use Slack for.

01:24:00 ◼   ► You follow me?

01:24:01 ◼   ► Like, Slack is a business tool, right?

01:24:04 ◼   ► But people use it for social groups and Discord is maybe a better social groups application.

01:24:08 ◼   ► Yeah, for sure. And it is also the chat method for my very active YouTube gaming channel.

01:24:14 ◼   ► Like, it's perfect for that. I really like Discord. And I just like visually the way

01:24:19 ◼   ► it looks much better than Slack. Like, I wish Slack looked more like Discord, especially

01:24:24 ◼   ► because of that dark mode, which is great.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Great dark mode.

01:24:27 ◼   ► Yeah. Which will bring me to my next lightning round pick, which is a little extension called

01:24:32 ◼   ► dark mode for Safari.

01:24:34 ◼   ► It's the tiniest little extension for your Mac,

01:24:38 ◼   ► but man, do I love it.

01:24:40 ◼   ► Like honestly, I mean, you know,

01:24:44 ◼   ► I wrote an article about this a long time ago

01:24:46 ◼   ► about in particular, why I really like dark mode

01:24:49 ◼   ► because I have some like visual issues

01:24:52 ◼   ► that just dark mode makes a lot easier.

01:24:54 ◼   ► And Apple introducing dark mode onto the Mac

01:24:58 ◼   ► was like amazing, right?

01:25:01 ◼   ► like, mana straight from heaven.

01:25:04 ◼   ► And the last big thing that didn't play well

01:25:07 ◼   ► with dark mode is most web pages.

01:25:09 ◼   ► And the dark mode for Safari little extension,

01:25:13 ◼   ► it does like a surprisingly good job

01:25:17 ◼   ► of dark-moding a whole ton of websites.

01:25:20 ◼   ► And what I really like is if you install this,

01:25:23 ◼   ► I recommend you switch it into what they call

01:25:25 ◼   ► softer dark mode, where it tries to match

01:25:29 ◼   ► the very dark gray color that the Mac is using,

01:25:34 ◼   ► which isn't really black at all.

01:25:35 ◼   ► Like it's much, much lighter,

01:25:37 ◼   ► but it's a very comfortable color to look at.

01:25:40 ◼   ► And so this makes most web pages fit in perfectly

01:25:44 ◼   ► with dark mode on the Mac.

01:25:45 ◼   ► Huge quality of life improvement.

01:25:47 ◼   ► I totally love it.

01:25:49 ◼   ► And it's very simple to add a site as an exception

01:25:53 ◼   ► if you ever need to, to say,

01:25:54 ◼   ► "Oh, don't mess around with the display of this page.

01:25:57 ◼   ► This page has to be another way."

01:25:58 ◼   ► So big thumbs up for Dark Mode for Safari.

01:26:01 ◼   ► - Instagram.

01:26:03 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:26:04 ◼   ► Have you ever heard of this app?

01:26:06 ◼   ► It's called Instagram. - Are you recommending

01:26:07 ◼   ► Instagram?

01:26:07 ◼   ► I don't recommend Instagram.

01:26:09 ◼   ► I think Instagram makes you sad.

01:26:10 ◼   ► - I'm not recommending it.

01:26:12 ◼   ► It's just something that I use

01:26:14 ◼   ► and this year have found a new love for.

01:26:18 ◼   ► Instagram is my favorite social network.

01:26:21 ◼   ► Contrary to you, it's a social network

01:26:23 ◼   ► that makes me the happiest.

01:26:25 ◼   ► It's full of things that I like.

01:26:27 ◼   ► It's full of interests that I have, you know, that it's just like that of more

01:26:31 ◼   ► visual and it allows me to see them.

01:26:33 ◼   ► Right. So like I'm interested in pens and watches and like Instagram's great for

01:26:38 ◼   ► that stuff. Right.

01:26:39 ◼   ► Like I just get to see nice pictures of pens and nice pictures of watches as well

01:26:43 ◼   ► as pictures of my friends. I like Instagram stories a lot.

01:26:45 ◼   ► I've been using it more.

01:26:47 ◼   ► They just added a feature called Close Friends, which is awesome.

01:26:50 ◼   ► So you can set up a small group of people to share Instagram stories with maybe of

01:26:55 ◼   ► more like personal or private moments, as well as things that you can share with the

01:26:59 ◼   ► whole world. I think it's an app that has been developed very nicely. I wish they had

01:27:04 ◼   ► an iPad app, but I just figured I'm never going to get it, so it's just an app that

01:27:08 ◼   ► I use on my phone. I've been using it more and more and more. You should follow me on

01:27:13 ◼   ► Instagram if you don't already. I'm @imike on Instagram. I am YKE. And yeah, I like it.

01:27:20 ◼   ► It is my favorite social network to be on now.

01:27:23 ◼   ► It's not as sad as Twitter is.

01:27:26 ◼   ► For my next lightning round pick, then, I am choosing SelfControl, an app that will

01:27:31 ◼   ► allow you to block Instagram and any other sites that you may want to block.

01:27:38 ◼   ► SelfControlApp.com.

01:27:40 ◼   ► It is by far and away the most hardcore of the blockers.

01:27:45 ◼   ► If, like me, you are a person who has too much technical knowledge for most of these

01:27:50 ◼   ► blockers to be any kind of impedance on your laptop, self-control is for you.

01:27:56 ◼   ► Very good if you decide you want to quit the internet for a period of time, I suppose.

01:28:00 ◼   ► Yes, yes.

01:28:01 ◼   ► And I will also mention that if you scroll to their document support pages, you can find

01:28:07 ◼   ► the instructions for how to turn it into extreme mode, which can last for as long as you want,

01:28:14 ◼   ► as opposed to their normal use case which is just a couple hours.

01:28:17 ◼   ► I don't like that.

01:28:18 ◼   ► I do not like that.

01:28:19 ◼   ► Self-control app dot com.

01:28:20 ◼   ► Highly recommend.

01:28:21 ◼   ► Nope, not for me.

01:28:23 ◼   ► Thank you very much.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Overcast still I think the best podcast app on iOS purely because of the way it makes

01:28:32 ◼   ► podcasts sound.

01:28:33 ◼   ► I am not a believer in listening to shows like 1.5 or 2 times.

01:28:38 ◼   ► I know a lot of people do that.

01:28:39 ◼   ► like about Overcast is it does really nice and sensible speed changes with what they

01:28:45 ◼   ► call smart speed, what Marco calls smart speed, and it just removes the silences and just

01:28:51 ◼   ► speeds up things very gently in certain places. I like it a lot and I really like some of

01:28:55 ◼   ► the design changes that Marco did this year to like the nail playing screen and stuff

01:29:00 ◼   ► like that. I think it's given a new life to the app that I enjoy a lot. It's my favourite

01:29:06 ◼   ► and has been my favorite for a long time,

01:29:07 ◼   ► and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

01:29:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, we know Marco, but I could still say

01:29:13 ◼   ► like it's clearly the best podcast app,

01:29:16 ◼   ► and the reason it sounds the best

01:29:18 ◼   ► is because he's written this custom audio engine,

01:29:22 ◼   ► and yeah, when I was listening to podcasts.

01:29:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, back in the day.

01:29:26 ◼   ► - Back in the day, Overcast is the only one

01:29:29 ◼   ► where I found I could crank up the speed

01:29:33 ◼   ► without it sounding too choppy.

01:29:37 ◼   ► So especially if you do listen to podcasts fast,

01:29:40 ◼   ► you should probably go with Overcast, it's great.

01:29:43 ◼   ► My next lightning round pick is a little app

01:29:48 ◼   ► called AutoWake.

01:29:51 ◼   ► And if you wear your watch all day and all night,

01:29:56 ◼   ► as I do. - Like I do, right?

01:29:58 ◼   ► I wear my watch all day.

01:30:00 ◼   ► - Yes, like you do as well, Myke.

01:30:02 ◼   ► - Is that what we're talking about?

01:30:03 ◼   ► - That's not what we're talking about.

01:30:04 ◼   ► - Ah, different watch, okay.

01:30:06 ◼   ► - Auto-Awake, it's done by the same developer

01:30:09 ◼   ► who does Auto-Sleep, and Auto-Awake is the thing

01:30:13 ◼   ► that I have wanted on the watch for years and years,

01:30:16 ◼   ► which is an alarm in the morning that does two things.

01:30:21 ◼   ► One, it's vibration only,

01:30:24 ◼   ► so it's vibration on the watch alarm,

01:30:26 ◼   ► but that two is also keeping an eye

01:30:30 ◼   ► on how awake you are and trying to time that alarm

01:30:35 ◼   ► to wake you up at the correct point in your sleep cycle.

01:30:40 ◼   ► - How is this even possible?

01:30:42 ◼   ► - So I think it's running as an exercise

01:30:48 ◼   ► entirely in the background.

01:30:49 ◼   ► I think that's what it's doing.

01:30:51 ◼   ► But you have to have it as a complication

01:30:55 ◼   ► on the watch face that you are using.

01:30:58 ◼   ► So I have a bedtime watch face for my Apple Watch,

01:31:03 ◼   ► which is the modular mode, all in red.

01:31:06 ◼   ► And then one of those complications is auto-wake.

01:31:09 ◼   ► And I really love this.

01:31:14 ◼   ► Like if you haven't tried this, having a dynamic alarm,

01:31:18 ◼   ► it doesn't just wake you up at six o'clock,

01:31:20 ◼   ► but you can give it a window of time to try to wake you up.

01:31:24 ◼   ► And if it can't find a good spot until six,

01:31:26 ◼   ► like it will go at six, it's really great when it works.

01:31:30 ◼   ► Like you can completely tell the difference of like,

01:31:32 ◼   ► ah, it caught me at the right moment.

01:31:34 ◼   ► And one of the things I do really like about it as well is

01:31:38 ◼   ► the developer has allowed you to set like this custom

01:31:41 ◼   ► schedule so you can have different windows of time

01:31:45 ◼   ► on different days if you want to say like,

01:31:48 ◼   ► oh, you can only have a 15 minute window on this day,

01:31:50 ◼   ► but you can have an hour window on the weekend or whatever.

01:31:54 ◼   ► It's very customizable.

01:31:55 ◼   ► it works really well. I love it and it's a thing that I've wanted for years. So, AutoWake

01:32:02 ◼   ► is one of my lightning picks.

01:32:03 ◼   ► - This is really cool. - Yeah, it's great. It's really good.

01:32:07 ◼   ► - You can integrate with HomeKit as well? - Yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff in

01:32:11 ◼   ► there that I haven't even taken a look at. There's a lot of settings in AutoWake.

01:32:16 ◼   ► Very cool. Yeah, that's a very cool application. Huh. It's funny how the... I like seeing stuff

01:32:22 ◼   ► like that where you're like, "I don't even know if that's possible. I like apps where

01:32:25 ◼   ► don't even know it's possible. Typically means they're doing something great.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Yeah those are my favorite as well. Especially like sometimes you're with a group of people

01:32:32 ◼   ► and you're doing something and then someone leans over like "do you know there's an app

01:32:34 ◼   ► that makes this a thousand times easier?" Like oh fantastic right those are the best

01:32:38 ◼   ► moments in life. So you know I've spent a bunch of time on

01:32:42 ◼   ► this episode talking about like applications being updated and stuff like that. There is

01:32:47 ◼   ► an application that I use every day that I think is a shining example of the kind of

01:32:52 ◼   ► thing that I'm talking about about frequent and meaningful updates and it's carrot weather.

01:32:58 ◼   ► That is an application that is constantly being updated with new and useful features

01:33:02 ◼   ► in the way that I feel like more apps used to be.

01:33:06 ◼   ► And it is a wonderful app, they moved to a subscription model which maybe helped this.

01:33:10 ◼   ► Again I am not complaining if applications, if you're a developer who's not making any

01:33:16 ◼   ► money then fine, stop updating your app.

01:33:19 ◼   ► this isn't a business for you anymore, I don't want you to go hungry. That's silly.

01:33:23 ◼   ► But I also hope that more developers are spending time working on finding out how they can turn

01:33:28 ◼   ► their apps into subscription models if that's what they need to remain in business. Cool.

01:33:34 ◼   ► I actively encourage that people do that because what Carrot Weather did, and I think it's one of

01:33:40 ◼   ► the reasons that Carrot Weather has become even more and more awesome, is that the developers

01:33:44 ◼   ► have a recurring revenue stream now because of the different premium stuff that they added

01:33:50 ◼   ► and the features are so frickin' good. I love this app. It's so customisable. I love that

01:33:56 ◼   ► whenever I open this application, I get in a big, bold number the feels-like temperature

01:34:02 ◼   ► because that's literally the only temperature I care about but no other applications will

01:34:07 ◼   ► let me customise it that way.

01:34:08 ◼   ► I'm totally with you on this, yeah.

01:34:10 ◼   ► Because who the hell needs the actual temperature?

01:34:14 ◼   ► I get into arguments from people about like, I don't understand why anyone wants the actual temperature,

01:34:19 ◼   ► but I feel like I'm a like a man totally isolated in this until hearing you say it.

01:34:23 ◼   ► It was like, why do you want the real I want the feels like temperature? What other temperature matters?

01:34:28 ◼   ► I don't understand.

01:34:29 ◼   ► What am I supposed to do with it? Like, right now, the actual temperature in London is eight degrees Celsius,

01:34:36 ◼   ► which is 46 degrees Fahrenheit. But the feels like temperature is six degrees Celsius, which is 42 degrees Fahrenheit.

01:34:42 ◼   ► That is a meaningful difference.

01:34:44 ◼   ► That is definitely a meaningful difference.

01:34:46 ◼   ► Like what am I supposed to do?

01:34:47 ◼   ► Like, oh, great.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Like scientifically, I'm prepared for the weather.

01:34:50 ◼   ► No, I want the actual thing.

01:34:53 ◼   ► So it's great.

01:34:54 ◼   ► Like I absolutely love this application.

01:34:56 ◼   ► They're always adding like they just added a new feature.

01:34:59 ◼   ► Like if you use this specific type of weather station,

01:35:01 ◼   ► you can now integrate with that one.

01:35:03 ◼   ► And it's a great app, like really just a brilliant app

01:35:07 ◼   ► with loads of settings, which weather applications like,

01:35:11 ◼   ► yeah, give me all the sentence.

01:35:12 ◼   ► It's like, give me all of them, I'll take them.

01:35:13 ◼   ► It's great. - Yeah, 'cause everyone's

01:35:14 ◼   ► really fussy about their settings with a weather app.

01:35:17 ◼   ► So yeah, I love it.

01:35:19 ◼   ► It makes me smile because when they moved

01:35:22 ◼   ► to the subscription, like the premium club,

01:35:24 ◼   ► this is exactly the kind of app where it's like,

01:35:26 ◼   ► great, you're a perfect candidate, like utility app,

01:35:29 ◼   ► please let me give you some amount of money.

01:35:31 ◼   ► And I also love that they were,

01:35:33 ◼   ► and again, app developers, take note of this.

01:35:36 ◼   ► They were totally shameless when they added more stuff

01:35:39 ◼   ► that they decided to add a super premium club.

01:35:42 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:35:42 ◼   ► So it's like there's two levels of subscription.

01:35:45 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, go for it guys.

01:35:47 ◼   ► Like don't be shy about this.

01:35:49 ◼   ► If you've added like a whole level,

01:35:51 ◼   ► 'cause that's like integration

01:35:52 ◼   ► with your own personal weather station, like yeah.

01:35:55 ◼   ► If there are super nerds that you're building a feature for

01:35:59 ◼   ► that only a tiny portion of your users will use,

01:36:02 ◼   ► but they'll love it,

01:36:03 ◼   ► like that is what a super premium subscription is for.

01:36:06 ◼   ► Like that's, do that.

01:36:08 ◼   ► So yeah, I totally back it.

01:36:11 ◼   ► I absolutely love Carrot.

01:36:12 ◼   ► And I do have to say for me, Carrot,

01:36:14 ◼   ► thing I love about it is they have what I would regard as,

01:36:18 ◼   ► sorry, Carrot, a tremendous amount of annoying bull (beep)

01:36:21 ◼   ► in the app, which is like,

01:36:22 ◼   ► there's hidden locations that you can find.

01:36:24 ◼   ► And like, Carrot wants to be snarky with you.

01:36:27 ◼   ► And there's little pictures of animals on the screen.

01:36:29 ◼   ► And I am like the anti-person for that.

01:36:33 ◼   ► But why I love Carrot is I can turn all of that off, right?

01:36:36 ◼   ► And the people who love it can have it on.

01:36:38 ◼   ► Like every app should do that.

01:36:40 ◼   ► Every app should do that.

01:36:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I like the design of it overall.

01:36:44 ◼   ► I think it's very attractive,

01:36:45 ◼   ► but also is useful for data.

01:36:48 ◼   ► I think it shows data, a lot of data in a good looking way,

01:36:51 ◼   ► which is an incredibly difficult thing to do

01:36:55 ◼   ► whilst having a personality.

01:36:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I visually like it a lot.

01:36:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, and then like, you know, you can,

01:37:00 ◼   ► and it has, it's like the little personality.

01:37:02 ◼   ► I like, you know, I have it, I did a change,

01:37:04 ◼   ► I have made a change.

01:37:05 ◼   ► I have it set to, like it's friendly.

01:37:07 ◼   ► so it just says nice little things to me.

01:37:09 ◼   ► Like it says blast, rain's about to begin.

01:37:11 ◼   ► That's cute, I like that, why not?

01:37:13 ◼   ► I don't need rain, give me the information I want in a way that I want it.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Carrot weather is just a wonderful application that I enjoy greatly.

01:37:23 ◼   ► Okay, I've got two final very...

01:37:26 ◼   ► Actually, I'll do three...

01:37:28 ◼   ► Four, no wait, five!

01:37:31 ◼   ► Okay, no, I'm gonna finish up with three quick things, super quick lightning round, and then

01:37:36 ◼   ► - All right, okay.

01:37:37 ◼   ► - JustPressRecord is a great voice recorder for iOS.

01:37:42 ◼   ► I don't use it often, but when I do,

01:37:44 ◼   ► it's the nicest, the fastest,

01:37:48 ◼   ► and also will automatically do a transcription

01:37:50 ◼   ► of your voice recording, which is great.

01:37:52 ◼   ► - Good Apple Watch app too, if you have an LTE Apple Watch.

01:37:55 ◼   ► - Yep, also works on the Apple Watch.

01:37:57 ◼   ► And then two Mac apps that you'll know if you need them.

01:38:01 ◼   ► The first one is called Gemini 2,

01:38:03 ◼   ► which is a duplicate file deleter.

01:38:05 ◼   ► I've tried a bunch of these, Gemini 2 works the best.

01:38:08 ◼   ► I ran into a situation where for various complicated reasons

01:38:11 ◼   ► I had hundreds and hundreds of duplicate video files

01:38:14 ◼   ► and boy did Gemini 2 make that day go by much faster

01:38:17 ◼   ► than it would have otherwise.

01:38:19 ◼   ► And the last one, if you're back to the Mac,

01:38:23 ◼   ► is very old app called Fluid.

01:38:27 ◼   ► But Fluid is an application that will allow you

01:38:30 ◼   ► to turn a website into a standalone app.

01:38:33 ◼   ► - Oh, I remember that one.

01:38:35 ◼   ► - Yes, and I want to end on that one,

01:38:36 ◼   ► 'cause I think that was in the first article that I wrote.

01:38:40 ◼   ► That one was included in there.

01:38:42 ◼   ► But boy, that's really nice.

01:38:44 ◼   ► And I use it for brain.fm and a few other places

01:38:49 ◼   ► that they just don't have a Mac app,

01:38:51 ◼   ► and I don't want to open up Safari every time.

01:38:54 ◼   ► So Fluid, if you're on the Mac a lot

01:38:56 ◼   ► and there's some annoying website,

01:38:57 ◼   ► you want it to pretend like it's a standalone app,

01:39:00 ◼   ► Fluid will do that for you.

01:39:01 ◼   ► So that's the end of my lightning round, Myke.

01:39:03 ◼   ► What you got?

01:39:04 ◼   ► can confirm that Fluid was not in the original post.

01:39:07 ◼   ► - Oh, interesting.

01:39:08 ◼   ► Okay, I thought it was.

01:39:09 ◼   ► - I was gonna give a couple of extras.

01:39:10 ◼   ► Deliveries, which is the best package tracker around.

01:39:13 ◼   ► Love that app.

01:39:14 ◼   ► Just a nice little application.

01:39:16 ◼   ► Narwhal, which is my Reddit app of choice.

01:39:19 ◼   ► I recommend Narwhal because everybody else recommends Apollo

01:39:22 ◼   ► and I really like Narwhal

01:39:23 ◼   ► and I think they don't get enough love

01:39:25 ◼   ► because I think it's just, it's much more simple

01:39:27 ◼   ► and I really like it because I'm not a power user of Reddit.

01:39:31 ◼   ► I just have like a couple of subreddits

01:39:33 ◼   ► that I poke around in.

01:39:34 ◼   ► And I think that Narwhal deserves a shout out

01:39:36 ◼   ► every now and then,

01:39:37 ◼   ► 'cause I think it just doesn't get them.

01:39:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I'm good at that.

01:39:43 ◼   ► Like obviously there's a bunch of stuff I use,

01:39:45 ◼   ► but a lot of it is just stuff that everybody uses.

01:39:48 ◼   ► I still use Pipedrive, my sales CRM tool.

01:39:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:39:53 ◼   ► You can throw that one in there.

01:39:57 ◼   ► - Part of your very important workflow, Myke,

01:39:58 ◼   ► you can't change it.

01:39:59 ◼   ► - Very important, very important.

01:40:01 ◼   ► (chime)

01:40:02 ◼   ► - Cortexmerch.com.

01:40:03 ◼   ► - Cortexmerch.com.

01:40:06 ◼   ► - If you wanna have merch arrive with you,

01:40:08 ◼   ► I'm never ready, I'm never ready.

01:40:11 ◼   ► I know it's coming, but I'm never ready.

01:40:13 ◼   ► - It makes me laugh every time that you,

01:40:16 ◼   ► like I can hear you hesitating and you're thinking,

01:40:18 ◼   ► is he gonna do it?

01:40:20 ◼   ► And then it, yeah, it's always a disaster.

01:40:22 ◼   ► - 'Cause most of the time,

01:40:23 ◼   ► I don't know you're ever gonna say any of it,

01:40:24 ◼   ► so my brain's already going.

01:40:26 ◼   ► - Right, I know.

01:40:27 ◼   ► - So cortexmerch.com.

01:40:30 ◼   ► CORTEXMERCH.COM

01:40:38 ◼   ► If you want to have any Cortex merch arrive with you or a loved one for Christmas, December

01:40:44 ◼   ► 19th is the last day to order to be confident that it will arrive if you live in the US.

01:40:51 ◼   ► We still have a small number of the limited edition Cortexmas pins in stock so you can

01:40:56 ◼   ► get those along with a lot of the other stuff that we have, hats, hoodies, tees, and other

01:41:02 ◼   ► regular pins as well. So go to cortexmerch.com to get those.

01:41:10 ◼   ► I want to – I'm scared you're going to do it again.

01:41:12 ◼   ► No, Myke, I wasn't going to do it again because I know you're going to transition

01:41:16 ◼   ► into the next topic now. So I would never do cortexmerch.com then unless I did. I don't

01:41:22 ◼   ► know.

01:41:23 ◼   ► I want to talk about PodCon.

01:41:24 ◼   ► PodCon?

01:41:25 ◼   ► I'm going back to PodCon.

01:41:28 ◼   ► Going back to PodCon.

01:41:29 ◼   ► Going back to PodCon.

01:41:30 ◼   ► It's in January, January 19th to 20th.

01:41:33 ◼   ► It's in Seattle, Washington again where it was last time.

01:41:36 ◼   ► I'm going to be there.

01:41:37 ◼   ► I'm doing a bunch of stuff.

01:41:40 ◼   ► I'll be able to share more about exactly what I'm doing soon, but I'm going to be on some

01:41:44 ◼   ► panels and some fun stuff.

01:41:46 ◼   ► I'm going to be doing something called a Creator Chat, which I did last time, where 12 people

01:41:52 ◼   ► or in a room with me for an hour

01:41:54 ◼   ► and we talk about the ins and outs of podcasting.

01:41:56 ◼   ► It's a really valuable thing.

01:41:57 ◼   ► I find it valuable for me.

01:41:58 ◼   ► And I've heard from some people actually

01:42:00 ◼   ► who are in my creator chat last year

01:42:02 ◼   ► who have now gone on to start podcasts of their own.

01:42:05 ◼   ► So I'm really excited to hear that, right?

01:42:06 ◼   ► 'Cause that's like exactly what it's for.

01:42:08 ◼   ► That is something that there is limited space for.

01:42:11 ◼   ► So you need to sign up for.

01:42:12 ◼   ► So if you buy a ticket,

01:42:13 ◼   ► you'll be sent a link to sign up for that.

01:42:15 ◼   ► And I'm gonna be doing a meet and greet like last time.

01:42:19 ◼   ► - Ooh.

01:42:20 ◼   ► - And I've got a new poster.

01:42:22 ◼   ► So you may remember, I had a custom poster designed

01:42:25 ◼   ► for people coming to my meet and greet signing

01:42:28 ◼   ► at the last PodCon.

01:42:30 ◼   ► It was only available to people that came,

01:42:32 ◼   ► and I've been working on another one

01:42:34 ◼   ► with the wonderful illustrator that I worked with last time,

01:42:38 ◼   ► CJ Rowland, so just does incredible stuff,

01:42:40 ◼   ► and I've got another one which I'm gonna share this with you

01:42:42 ◼   ► in a moment, Grace, so people will know.

01:42:44 ◼   ► 'Cause I'm not gonna share this ahead of time.

01:42:46 ◼   ► You have to be there if you wanna get it.

01:42:49 ◼   ► This is gonna be like a first come, first serve event.

01:42:51 ◼   ► There will be information about this later on.

01:42:55 ◼   ► You'll be sent all the information

01:42:56 ◼   ► about when all this stuff will be happening.

01:42:58 ◼   ► If you sign up for a PodCon ticket,

01:43:00 ◼   ► once they've got all of that nailed down,

01:43:02 ◼   ► but I think it's a hundred people.

01:43:05 ◼   ► So if you want to get one of these amazing posters

01:43:08 ◼   ► and you can get it signed by me,

01:43:09 ◼   ► if you're going to be at PodCon,

01:43:11 ◼   ► it's the only way to do it.

01:43:13 ◼   ► Now, Gray, I'm going to send you this incredible image

01:43:17 ◼   ► that I have here.

01:43:18 ◼   ► - I like that you're doing the poster again, Myke,

01:43:20 ◼   ► because obviously it was a big hit last year.

01:43:23 ◼   ► - Yep.

01:43:24 ◼   ► - But I also find this sort of cute

01:43:25 ◼   ► because I know you did the poster last year

01:43:27 ◼   ► because you were terrified that you might be

01:43:30 ◼   ► sitting at a booth, sad mic, with no one there,

01:43:34 ◼   ► coming to visit you.

01:43:34 ◼   ► And you were actually quite a huge deal at PodCon.

01:43:38 ◼   ► So this year I expect you will also be quite a huge deal.

01:43:42 ◼   ► - Don't get me wrong, Grey.

01:43:43 ◼   ► I'm still doing it because I'm still terrified

01:43:45 ◼   ► nobody's gonna show up.

01:43:46 ◼   ► - Well, no, okay, but see, that's why,

01:43:49 ◼   ► that's what I was working towards here.

01:43:50 ◼   ► is I think it's sweet because I know that you're like,

01:43:54 ◼   ► deep down, still a little worried,

01:43:56 ◼   ► even though big podcasting deal, Myke Hurley,

01:43:59 ◼   ► running a network on a thousand and two shows

01:44:03 ◼   ► as far as I know.

01:44:04 ◼   ► So it's sweet that you're still having the poster made,

01:44:07 ◼   ► but it was really awesome last year and,

01:44:10 ◼   ► oh, it's just come through?

01:44:11 ◼   ► - Holy moly.