857: Sparmerica

welcome to the mac power users i'm david sparks and joined as always by mr stephen robles how are you stephen i'm doing well i'm sporting some new glasses uh in case you couldn't tell and i'm gonna be reviewing them they're rather large yeah i was thinking about that so you're wearing some some fancy glasses these are the meta glasses i'll be doing a review on them and you know i've never had wearable smart tech, aside from Apple watch, obviously, but like the glasses, I did have a pin. I wore that for a day, but I've always been interested on the glasses part. And, uh, I have some thoughts, you know, accessibility wise immediately useful. You know, I could see that, but everything else, uh, you know, there's a cost to wearing a computer on your face like this. And so anyway, we'll see. Yeah. We're going to talk about that in the episode today. I, I definitely have concerns about the fact that they're from meta. Am I now being indexed somewhere? That's what I want to know. Well, I wore them on the show only because I'm like, you're already being recorded. So I hope that's all right. You know what I mean? We're already capturing all this. But yeah, we'll talk about that. We got a lot to talk about today. It is, gang, a feedback episode. Believe it or not, we've hit another one. Steven, I've lost track of how many we've done since you've joined the show now. It's true. But we have a lot of great feedback in the pile here to get through today. And I'm looking forward to getting started. That's right. And on more power users, we're going to talk about Creator Studio updates because it's been updated recently. And I use a ton of Creator Studio apps. So I think it'd be fun to dive into that too. Yeah. Just also how it's evolved and where it fits. It was a little controversial when it came out. And I think it'd be fun to kind of check in with that. So we're going to do that today. And more power users. That's the ad-free extended version of the show. We'd love to have you join. You can learn about that at relay.fm slash MPU. I think our show is special, Stephen, for membership, because we don't just give you the one episode a year like most relay shows do. We give you a show monthly-ish. I think we've already done three or four now. We've done three bonus episodes. That's right. It is a lot of fun making those, and it's where we get to let our hair down a little bit. That's right. Sorry, Stephen. I didn't mean to say that. I'm bald if you've never seen a picture of me. yeah but the uh we we get to have fun with that episode and we'd love to have you have you join and if i if i could say a one one word about being bald my daughter she did not want me to go bald at first and so i convinced her by saying well a we'll do a little video of you shaving my head which we did and b i can i'll buy you suction cups if you want to try and throw them onto my head after i'm bald okay so we have these little work it works a little too well david because i don't know if you'll be able to see on camera you might see in some of my videos there's like a red splotch right here on the front of my forehead. Uh-oh. And that's what happens with two seconds of a suction cup on my head. And it takes days to go away. So that's what that splotch is, in case you were wondering. Oh, now you got to get them. I'm going to send them for Christmas. I'm going to send your kids some of those dart guns with the suction cup darts in them. Oh, my goodness. It's going to look terrible. You're going to walk around the house with just darts sticking out of your head like a porcupine. Oh, my goodness. I was surprised. She did it the first time. I was like, we can't do this ever again. It's just splotchy everywhere. anyway so that's that's what happened there all right all right um before we get into the actual feedback we had some show discovery feedback that i thought was kind of fun we should share um we're we're in the corpus now we are i thought this was super fun we got a couple youtube comments uh one was from btech 611 said chat gpt recommended mac power users and i'm glad it did so wow i don't know what they searched for i asked a follow-up like how did you search that we came up and just chat GPT search results, but that was pretty cool to know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we know we do a lot of evergreen content, you know, and maybe you ask it a question and it's probably scrubbed us as well as everything else. So it probably pointed it to us as a resource. That's right. And I thought this was a fun YouTube comment. Uh, this, uh, I've been listening to MPU since 2012, 14 years of MPU and just discovered that love that, that, uh, we have a YouTube channel. So yes, there is a YouTube channel. If you want to see my splotch on the, on my head, uh, you can see that this entire episode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there, there is a YouTube channel. It's a, it's a, just a, it's a pittance, a very small fraction of our audience when you look at the numbers, but, but some people do like it. And I know a lot of folks, uh, like to, you know, play their podcasts on YouTube. We started doing it. The production value went up dramatically when Steven Robles arrived because he's managing that and he does a better job at it than I did. But go check it out if you're interested on YouTube. It's kind of fun seeing this. Yeah, it's fun. So I thought that was cool. So next, let's do some follow-up on iOS 27 and Siri AI because Data 3 came out earlier this week. There's been a bunch of changes there. And we had some questions like this one from YouTube from Matthew. And when I finally upgrade my phone, will that phone have to index or will it take for my old phone's index. And this is something that's Apple made very clear. Every device that you update to iOS 27 come this fall will have to index itself. No index goes to the cloud and then sinks back down. So your own iPhone, your iPad, your Mac, your Vision Pro, every Apple device has to index by itself. That's part of the privacy and security of it. It does take a while. It's going to be, your phone and other devices are going to be a little warm those first few days or week. Some people experienced even up to a week of indexing, but that's the deal. Every device has to do it on its own. Yeah. The good news is Apple isn't saving your index. They don't have your data. The bad news is your devices have to build it independently every time. And when you upgrade, you know, you're going to have to do it again. Right. Yeah. Even a device to device transfer does not carry over the index. It's every time. Yeah. And beta three, you have to re-index as well because I updated to beta three on my iPhone air and it's now indexing again, but there's some interesting followup that we'll get to in a moment. Sure. Uh, multi ecosystem Siri limits, um, from several emails, uh, is there a workaround for surfacing personal context across Gmail, iCloud office 365, or is it just a permanent Siri blind spot? That is a good question. so apple has built-in support for siri ai and it works on app intense and we've heard from a lot of app developers that are embracing it uh the question is your third-party app are they going to embrace it and i feel like that's a good case for first-party applications i was just reading this morning note plan an app that we talk about a lot they've got a ton of uh built-in support for app intents and all the users are looking forward to getting all their note plan data into siri ai will google will microsoft do it that's a different question and the workaround will be if you're willing add those email accounts to the stock mail app on your iphone on your ipad you will have to add it to every apple device like yeah so they can actually be indexed but that would be a way to, even if the third-party apps don't adopt these Siri AI features at first, to at least be able to search your emails that way. Even if you never open the mail app, never send an email that way, turn off all the notifications, at least add those accounts, especially if you sync your contacts, your mail reminders and notes, you know, sometimes people do that. So that's the workaround for right now. And hopefully that will change when apps actually update with some of these app intents come this fall. Yeah. And that sounds crazy, but it's not, I have been doing that Steven, because I've been testing this out and like just yesterday, cause I've really been trying with Siri to push the limits and, um, you know, some of the labs members, the max market labs are saying, you know, I want to try it, but I just don't trust it anymore. I'm like, you got to like, get over that and just ask it questions. Like yesterday I, uh, I ordered a new shirt. I wanted to know when it was going to arrive. And I just said, Hey, when's my new shirt going to arrive? That was the whole question. And because it was mirroring my Gmail into the mail app, it went in, it found the purchase email, it found the ship notice, and it told me right there in chat when my shirt's getting delivered. And to me, that's like, yeah, this is what I've always wanted. I wanted a truly useful assistant. And so feeding it that data is really important. And I think there'll be an ongoing discussion here on Mac Power Users. we're going to be calling out third-party apps that really embrace it and telling you about it but it's really it works guys don't trust us you know it's pretty good it really works my son was flying out this past weekend and i tried multiple times putting videos just asking vague questions like what time should i leave for the airport not even telling it a day not telling who's going to the airport and with very little context siri ai has been able to pull those things up consistently well. And then you can even send that information to someone, you know, if you want to say in a follow-up, we'll text this information to my son. It will just do that. And if you have your contact set up where your family relationships are connected, so it knows who your spouse is, who your kids are, it will just intelligently know. And because the name on the booking of the ticket was Jordan, and it knows that I have a son named Jordan, even though I have two sons, it will send it to jordan uh because that's who's traveling so it is really smart it's impressive yeah i i asked it who won the uh did canada win the world cup match over the weekend no it didn't it lost i said okay i tell chris i'm sorry and so it creates a uh a text message to my friend chris who's a canadian you know and um like all right the other one i did that was kind of shocking to me just as an experiment i said set a timer for 20 minutes and play a pat metheny album you know like just come just jamming two things together and it said a timer for 20 minutes started playing pat metheny music it's just like it's kind of nuts um you you know you just have to to try and you have to let go you have to let go steven of your prior um angst over siri and just let go and ask it questions that's right search your feelings you know search your feelings uh pat metheny also So you just had a wave of nostalgia come over me because my dad was a huge Pat Matheny fan. Yeah. He's still, he's still, he's still making the hits, man. That's wild. That's wild. Yeah. So beta three came out earlier this week and I updated a bunch of devices and was able to get some more information and some answers on a couple of things I wanted to bring up. One, Siri AI in beta three, you can start to try and ask it for things, information from third party apps. Like we were just discussing. And I actually had this come up on my phone where I asked Siri AI, what's the charge of my car? And Siri AI actually put up a yes, no prompt. And it said, I'll need to access your app data. Is that okay? And I could say yes or no. Now it was broken after that. It actually didn't give me the information. Some people on social media have successfully gotten that information through Siri AI right now. And I don't think the Tesla app has been updated to plug into that, but there are app intents for the Tesla app. So some of that stuff is starting to come through. So that's, that's pretty exciting. I will test cause I'm on, I'm on the other team, I'm on team Ruby and I will test mine. Listen, I get, well, I would love to switch teams. We'll see when the art, the cheaper R2 comes out. Yeah. Yeah. It's very popular. Well, as you test that, I also want to mention there's some features in Mac OS 27 for renaming files. And if you go to Finder Settings in macOS 27 beta, you can check this box that says auto suggest titles. And if you click a file name to where you're starting to type to rename it, suggested names will actually pop up based on the file's content, even things like images, which is really cool. But I asked because there's no way to do that in bulk. And so I asked like, can I do this in bulk? I know I can select multiple files and do an ask Siri. And turns out right now there's no bulk renaming stock in the finder of macOS 27, I was pointed to shortcuts is the tool for that if you want to rename multiple files. But I think it's unfortunate because I can select multiple files, ask Siri, and Siri AI app will open up and give me names for all the files I have selected, even multiple files, but it says I just can't physically rename them, which is, it kind of stinks. Yeah. It's like you hit those little dumb things once in a while. I think the security stuff sometimes goes a little too far. There's that. And two other quick updates. On macOS, if you're on a MacBook Air or Pro, you may notice in macOS 27 that even if you don't have a menu bar manager, which we talked about on one of our first episodes together, there's these two little arrows that now appear that will automatically hide menu bar items. And then you can click the two arrows to expand them specifically across the notch. One, there's no manual controls for that. So there's no toggle to turn that on just when you want. It only appears when there's enough icons to fill the menu bar past the notch. What's also means on a desktop, you really can't use it and you can't adjust its placing. But I'm like, man, Apple just built this great feature and it seems to work really well, but there's no manual controls. It just appears when it wants. There's no way to control it. Well, I mean, it was shameful that they shipped an OS that hid operational units, menu bar items under the notch. I mean, I don't even, I don't have words for it. Yeah, that was not good. So this is kind of a fix for that. And last two updates, shortcuts. We got a toggle where if you want shortcuts to default to the actions view or the editor view, you can now do that. The Robles feature. Yes. Listen, I asked for this at DubDub at Apple Park. And so I will take credit for this. I'm not going to lie. And that toggle is there now, which is wonderful. And there's a syncing, a force sync button now in shortcuts. where it will say this many shortcuts are on your device, but not synced. Do you want to sync them? And this was very concerning to me because A, all my Apple devices tell me they have the same number of shortcuts. So I don't know what shortcuts it's talking about. And B, I had a shortcut syncing issue a couple months ago that I lost a bunch. So I don't want to mess with it. Federico Petitici, who was on the show a couple weeks ago, he did it. And he said it basically took all the shortcuts that weren't in a folder. so in the all shortcuts thing and just pushed those up again which i think created some duplicates so don't hit that button right now if you're on if you're on the beta you might not have a good experience yeah that that's a problem with shortcuts that's been i'm going on for years where like you have duplication or disappearance of shortcuts and uh yeah i feel like the icloud sync code needs a another pass that's something with the shortcuts library and i get weird behavior on my Mac that's not on the beta. So that's, it's a little unfortunate. Yeah. Speaking of the Roblox feature years ago, I was on the show just railing against the way the shortcuts naming and tagging worked. Like it was in the very first release of it, it worked fine. And then it was bad for like two or three years. And then I was at WWDC and some random Apple guy walks up to And he says, okay, we fixed it. Are you happy now? Nice. Nice. You know, and you used to be able to specify a voice command for a shortcut different than the shortcut name. I don't remember that. And now it's just, yeah, whatever the shortcut name is, that's locked in. So I kind of liked the before, but anyway. And the last thing I'll mention, this was actually in the release notes. And I don't have 100% clarity on this. But apparently the Apple Intelligence Home features, which include things like natural language search for things like package delivery, the notification consolidation so you don't get a thousand notifications for different things. It's a little unclear, but apparently you're going to have to be on the two terabyte iCloud plan or Apple Premium, Apple One Premium subscription to access some of those features. Apple has not made it clear what features specifically are behind that paywall. Of course, HomeKit Secure Video was already, it required an iCloud subscription one way or another, even if it was just the 200 gigabyte plan. Unsure what features are going to fold in here. So just wanted to point that out. Keep an eye, keep an ear out. We'll follow up. And also just related as iCloud storage, Maestral, the Dropbox client announced its end of lifing at the end of July. Yeah, sad. we actually mentioned that on our uh on our menu bar app show yeah so it was a third party app that did a cleaner job of a dropbox ink yeah and it was uh open source and someone might pick up the project and continue it but it's unknown and the creator has said uh they're not they don't use dropbox anymore number one and uh number two they just can't it's not beneficial for them so that'll be going away. Yeah, I get it. Ah, poor one out. Don't you wish that these companies like Dropbox would make a more efficient client though? I mean, that's one of the reasons why I stopped. I stopped, I got away from Dropbox because the client felt so heavy. I also had a bunch of shared folders that would sometimes start syncing randomly, like recording a podcast. And iCloud could do that too, but I don't know. I've had a good experience with iCloud. So I still pay for Dropbox and use it, but I don't have it syncing to my Mac. Yeah, I know you do. And that, I can't bring myself to that. I actually have the app running still because I've got enough stuff I'm collaborating on that, you know, the automation routines I have to automatically put it in the local file so it syncs are convenient. But it's a real challenge sometimes. There's a part of me that wants to follow you down that path. Somewhat related on the AI stuff, because we talked about it in relation to the Siri AI stuff is I got a bunch of various emails asking questions like so does this mean we can drop you know open AI does it mean we can drop the cloud you know do we need local AI anymore a lot of people are just having questions about how it fits together and I wanted to just kind of talk about that I like to think about it kind of like as an AI stack. And an emerging issue of thought for me is what is the AI stack for me currently? What is it going forward? What do we talk about for people on the show? And I think for most small business and personal users, I think there's really three elements of the AI stack to consider right now. The first one is the newest is Siri AI. Suddenly Siri is part of the conversation. I mean, And a few months ago, Siri wasn't even, you didn't even discuss it. It wasn't an option. But Siri AI, as we talked about last week, has a lot of real advantages because it has access to your local data. It knows a lot about you that the other models don't know. So like when my shirts are going to deliver, when I'm taking my son to the airport, that kind of stuff, that is the piece of that stack that I think we're all going to be adopting come September. and then there's the high end which is the frontier models you know open ai anthropic gemini and those things can do real heavy work for you and you know i talk i have a whole course on it robot assistant field guide steven's done a bunch of videos on it this thing can do a lot and it's kind of shocking i'm going to talk later in our automation corner about something i'm doing with it that i didn't think i'd ever be able to do that is great but they come with a monthly fee they come with a privacy sacrifice because you're sending data up to these big companies and honestly they're trying to hook you i mean they want you to be paying them monthly forever and there is a real cost to that but there's also a real advantage to some of the things you can do and in the middle is kind of the gray area of local ai and i can tell you since i upgraded my computer i've been experimenting with lm studio and there's a real there's some real pay dirt there if you've got a modern Mac and you're in a local model, it kind of fits between the two. It's not as solid yet. The harness isn't really there, but like if you use a Devon thing, for example, it's a real advantage to use that local AI to drive Devon think and save yourself money and privacy by doing that. But there's that is kind of the spectrum of it that I see today. The AI stack is your your personal assistant Siri kind of thing, your local stuff. If you've got sufficient hardware and the frontier model you subscribe to. And the lines being drawn between those are constantly moving, but I think that's a good framework for this stuff. Uh, when these questions come in to think about, well, what is the, the AI stack for me? Yeah. And I've been thinking about what will I transition to Siri AI on the Mac for maybe general knowledge questions. one of the things i'll do i'll use ai with is like i have a pdf and i have questions from the pdf and syria is good at that as well give it a file it'll do it obviously for renaming files i go back to cloud co-work because syria i can't do it in bulk yeah i do have you could do that with a local model and dev and think or you could do with a local model just in and finder so like there's just there's areas of play there and one of the things we'll actually get to later from a listener is subscription fatigue. And in my mind, I'm like, all right, I'm going to keep paying for Claude because it gives me the most value regularly. I use it to help me build shortcuts. I have my projects. I have a lot of custom workflows in Claude, not leaving it. But I also do not feel the need to keep paying for ChatGPT and Gemini. And one or maybe both of those need to go. And the one thing I've not been able to replicate elsewhere is I have a custom GPT that still performs the best. And I continually compare it to Claude because I want to stop paying for it, where I make a YouTube video, give it my transcript, and I have a special prompt where I ask it for title and description ideas. And that custom GPT is still the best for that. And because it's such a key part of what I do every week, multiple times a week, I'm sticking with it for now, the $20 ChatGPT Plus plan. But man, I would love to move that out if I can figure out how to either get Claude to give me the kind of results I want or maybe Siri AI can do it and it, it will do it. If I give it a transcript and I ask it for title and description ideas, Siri AI will deliver. They're just not as good as a like basis to work from as the chat to BT option. So I'm, I'm still deciding. Yeah. I'll tell you on the topic of world knowledge, I think Siri AI is probably going to be my number one player because it's private, it's free and it, it does good for, you know, I know people listening are, most of you are not on the beta yet so you don't have this experience but the uh in september when this comes out you know world knowledge is pretty good with siri but like you i'm also on all three of them at this point largely mainly i do the work in claude but i'm keeping the other two just because i'm talking about it so often in the robot assistant stuff and here on the podcast so i want to kind of keep it but if it wasn't my job i think i would if i had to pick one it would be claude but but also claude is very behind the times on image generation if you need it like like or thumbnails and things like that but that's that's kind of like a weird thing that you and i do so right i don't think most people need that the one that i did stop paying for and i have no regrets about it perplexity i stopped paying for it i want to talk about that on the show at some point i'm not sure if we have room in the outline today because i i have i fell off the perplexity bandwagon when they were doing all the weird data collection stuff and i know a lot of people really like it and i don really understand where it fits Well tell me right now Steve where where does it fit when you already got a you know the stack I just described For deep research people still like perplexity. I've run into a number of people because they've asked me to build shortcuts that can do it. Like give me a shortcut that will do deep research from a prompt. And I even heard, John Gruber and Stratechery, Ben Thompson, I heard them on the Dithering podcast just this morning, and they were saying that ChatGPT deep research has gotten less good in recent months. Now, Claude does great at deep research. I'll use it for deep research. Like when the John Turnus transition was happening, I told it, like, give me a bunch of information on this, and it did great. I don't do it very often, so maybe people who do deep research regularly, they still prefer perplexity for that. But I would be curious if there's listeners out there and maybe in the forums talk about deep research. What is everyone's best experience right now? I think that's the holdout for perplexity users. Yeah. And also just make the case for perplexity. We have a forum, talk.mpu.com or macpowerusers.com, talk.macpowerusers.com. Make the case because I don't honestly get it. I got a free year of it because of something I bought at some point and I tried to use it and I just didn't find much use for it the year expired but I'm I'm always curious this episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Squarespace go to squarespace.com slash mpu and save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code mpu Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings with a professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. When I first heard of Squarespace when they first launched, I immediately got it. I've been a subscriber since. Putting together a website should be easy, and it is with Squarespace. 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And none of them regret it because it's affordable and yet powerful and it's easy to build. anybody can do it. Head over to squarespace.com slash MPU for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the code MPU to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash MPU with the offer code MPU to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the Mac Power users. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of the Mac power users and all of relay. Steven, we talked about Siri AI and some of the things last week, and we did not talk about the new photo features. We just ran out of time, frankly, but a lot of folks wrote in not happy about that. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. Mel Gross on YouTube said he has had a great experience with AI and photos. And I have two, you know, cleanup has been there since iOS, 18, I think, when Apple Intelligence first came out. But with iOS 27 and across all the platforms, we now have the extend and the reframe features. And it's pretty interesting. The extend is really good. And if you're wondering why might you do this, obviously, if you didn't frame the photo ideally at first, maybe you want to extend it. But even something like maybe you have a photo that you want to use as a poster or in a bulletin or in a program or something. And you just need a little more space above the heads to put text or something like that. The Xtend feature is actually really good for that. Or you want it on your lock screen, you know, and you just want a little room above your wife's head, you know? Right, exactly. And I will say the cleanup, which is interesting, in iOS 27, you'll actually have the option of choosing thinking or fast models for cleanup. So if you wanted to spend a little more time and do a better quality job. but I just over the last year have used cleanup many times to remove a subject from the background to you know slightly clean up a photo and I've had a really good experience and I was curious your experience with cleanup or any of these features in 27 yeah let's work through the whole stack first cleanup is better um I did a comparison you know we take a lot of pictures the sparks family because uh my wife works at Disneyland we go there probably once a week so we have a lot of pictures with people in the background so we're always working that cleanup button and that is my wife's favorite feature that's the reason she got a new phone last year because she wanted you know the ai feature to clean up photos but i have mine on the beta hers is on the standard one so we had a real life comparison and like there was a birch tree behind me and the new version did a much better job of drawing that in than the old version did so and it's just cleaner and so the the feature that I think people use probably 90% of the time cleanup actually is better with iOS 27 so good on them like you said there's a setting to have it like work on it extra hard although there's a caveat there this is the one feature of a Apple AI where you are token limited you're rate limited you can't do an unlimited number of cleanups it will tell you okay that's enough for now that's right or the fast one is local so if you want to do the fast cleanup however often you want that you can do but it is just the the fast on-device model the thinking one like you said is rate limited and apple is not really given any kind of you know they said you'll have high rate limits if you're on iCloud plus and you pay the subscriptions but no actual data as far as like this many cleanups or this many minutes of cleanup, nothing that specific. Now the extend is very interesting. So I took a picture of the two of us together and said, extend it. And that day I was wearing a black shirt with blue jeans and the picture did not have my jeans in it. But the extension added them and it added my brown belt and blue jeans that I was wearing in the accompanying photos because it had photos near that. And I'm thinking, is it looking at the, does it know what pants I'm wearing? Because I really have questions about this. I'd love to get somebody to answer these questions. But it looks to me like it figured out what clothes I was wearing and extended those clothes onto the extended image. That's interesting. I don't know if that's true or not. The other thing is it drew my hand because my hand was out of frame too. my hand was at my side and it was the shot was like from my belly up and the um when it drew it in my hand was there and it drew a generic watch on me didn't put my watch on and my wedding band was gone you know and um it just it's just interesting you know i it's a fun thing to experiment with and you can see it like the hand looks very generic white man hand you know what i mean it doesn't look like really my hand but but um at the same time it's kind of interesting you know to look at this now like expanding up where there were trees and fences and stuff totally believable it would work for a lock screen i'm not sure i would take that picture and print it out though as a print because i had a weird hand uh but it's just kind of kind of funny some things i noticed about that and then finally that that third feature that reframing feature i was blown away by that in the keynote you know and i thought wow can they really do this and the answer is yes so the way that works is it takes the background and it basically extends it in all the areas wherever you do the rotation and again looks very believable i don't know how often i'll actually use that semen i try to frame my pictures when i shoot them but you know sometimes you get a picture and there's just like a pole sticking out of the back of your head or something you can reframe it out or at least um i guess you could also just take it out with the um with the uh with the background removal tool but if you wanted to like reframe that to move it so it's not sticking out of your head you can do that and uh very impressive feature probably the least useful of the three to me yeah let's i'm gonna do a live one i'll put links to these images in the show notes uh this was a picture that we went to for july 4th and my wife is off the corner of the photo. Like all you see is a little bit of her arm. So we're going to try and extend and see what kind of wild stuff it comes up with. But I will also say that I have seen videos online where people will try to reframe to go 180 degrees where they will, if the picture is, you know, someone's face, they will just keep reframing to try and go 180 degrees behind the head and that breaks like that that does not work eventually that's not the idea guys yeah like someone did it to the steve jobs photo with the iconic photo where he's like leaning over his desk and his desk is a mess and he has the eyesight camera someone tried to do it there and try to turn it so you'd be behind steve to see what was on his desk and that one did not uh yeah work well i could have told you that yeah and uh the one uh this photo of my wife it is not extending very much. I think it is struggling to know what to add there. And even now, like it won't let me, because when you do the extend, you can kind of recrop it to tell it where to extend. And it's actually forcing me to snap the original photo into the corner rather than letting me extend it to where the person is. So it does seem like it's trying to be careful of not just generating random people or like creating a face where there is not a face in the actual photo. But if you're just trying to put more space around subjects that are already taken well, like it works really well. All right. So I just went and got it, Stephen. I'll put it in. I'm going to put the source picture, which I think is the source picture and the resulting picture. And my genes were in the first picture. In my memory, I thought they weren't, but the top of my genes are there. but it did draw my jeans down and did give me a fake hand. My wife was wearing camel pants and it extended them. And like there was a fence there and it did that as well. So it's just kind of wild. And that picture also has been reframed. If you look at it, the altered version is from a different angle. That's really interesting. Like they, there wasn't a lot of camo to go off of in the first picture, but it's still generated that pretty well. Yeah. And yeah, your hand, I mean, put a watch on your hand, but there's no watch face. That's wild. Yeah, exactly. That's interesting. I had a wedding ring on and it's not there. So you didn't want to assume. Yeah, I guess. That's fascinating. Okay. Yeah. Links, links to those in the show notes. If you want to see that, that's wild. Yeah. So I, I, but overall I'm actually really impressed with this. Um, I think for like normal people out there, this is artificial intelligence and Apple is putting it down. I can tell you from personal experience not only my wife but several you know people who are not mac power users in my life love these features like they think apple invented it they have no idea that this has been things people have been doing with professional software for a long time and they love it and i can tell you my wife it seems like every picture it's it's almost like a problem like every picture looks like we are you know after the apocalypse because there's nobody else in it in any public right and that's you know i've heard merlin talk a lot about that it's like some photos when you look at it years from now the random stuff in the background is the really treasured part of the photo just to see if it's a house in the background or you know it's a family you're trying to get a nice family photo but there's just random junk in the back sometimes that's the kind of stuff you want to see so you know i always duplicate when i want to make a significant change on a photo i I like having the original. Not my wife. Everybody in the background is gone. Just gone. Yeah. Just nuked them. They're gone. That's funny. All right. Well, we had a great question from a YouTube. Blake asked, I want to see more of the lightsaber holders. David, talk about your lightsaber holders. Okay. Well, it's a little bit of a sickness. You know, when I was a kid, Star Wars was a new thing. They didn't even have toys. nobody expected this movie to be what it was right so our lightsabers were generally gift wrap cardboard tubes and you know you got so many wax in it before they broke then you wrapped them in with duct tape and then you started literally it was like hitting your hands with a baseball bat so it got kind of wild but so as an old man now i do buy the lightsabers they sell the character ones at disneyland and when i released a new field guideers and i usually buy myself so i've got a nice little collection now and by the way Stephen they are all white side I don't own a single dark side lightsaber now wait now wait a minute okay first of all there's a picture in the show notes so you can everybody's check that out the second row far left what whose is that because the label has fallen off uh that is the dark saber that is the dark saber now isn't that a dark side one no it is not that's a mandalorian lightsaber let's just be clear okay fair okay fair i guess used by din jarin it is not sure sure anyway so um but i wanted to display them and uh i looked into holders uh there's a couple online etsy's got some but i wasn't happy with any of them so i designed my own it's a little hook i made it's uh it's you know i did i mocked it up designed it i 3d print them and they're very solid so i don't want them to fall off i live in the land of earthquakes if you look at the picture closely we'll put a picture in the notes um there are tiny bits of velcro straps that are strapping so the the display maybe if i get fancy's email i'll be and take a picture of one of the um the display holders without a lightsaber in it but there is a there's a little slot that you can run this velcro strap through so they're velcroed into it so if we have an earthquake they're not gonna all fall off the wall and i love them i take them down i take them to disneyland with me once in a while they make me happy it is definitely a obscure thing for an old man i i you know people come over the house and they say hey do you have kids here i'm like no it's me that's i think that's totally reasonable i mean these look like cool lightsabers too you have two obi-wans yeah the other thing i did with it is i made the the um holder with a a blank plate on the bottom and then i 3d print separately the name badge for whoever belongs to and my my now aging um my now aging 3d printer like the new ones have like dual ink slots they do very fancy things mine only has one print slot in it at a time but i print it in the layers to the bottom Some of it's gray and the top of it is bright orange. So it looks like it was done very fancy, but it's just a clever trick with my bamboo printer. But I print up name badges with them and I stick those on as well. So I will share my, my wall of lightsabers with you guys. It looks very cool. And you know what? I'll put the model up too. So if somebody wants to make their own, you can just download it and print it. Very nice. That's very cool. Very cool. We have some app follow-up want to get to, but before we do real quick, Matthew M wrote an email asking about text messages. He gets on marketing lists and messages from roofing services as a way to filter incoming texts. I wanted to take this opportunity for one, make sure you have the spam filter on. So if you go to settings, this is an iOS 26, as well as 27, go to settings, apps, and messages. You can turn on message filtering. I have all of these turned on the most. So I have screen, unknown senders. I have filter spam. The text message filter is on. And this way, your main conversation view should just be your contacts, people you know. And then in the messages app, you'll have this little filter option where it'll put transactions in one area, unknown senders in another, promotions and spam. It's all there. And so I would highly recommend turning on the message filtering, just the built-in features on your iPhone. but also shortcuts is getting more messages actions in iOS 27 and you can set up automations for when text messages are received and there's even a new delete messages action so if you wanted to if there's a sender that you just want to delete the message as soon as it comes in you can create an automation and when it's from this sender delete the message automatically be careful with that of course because if you have that set up and you didn't intend to delete those messages, you know, they might be gone, but there's a bunch more actions coming in iOS 27 for deleting, for finding messages, for including pre-made groups when you're sending messages through shortcuts, which before, if you wanted to send a group message, you had to put all the contact names individually. And then if you already had a group that was labeled, like I have a group called the fellowship, a Lord of the Rings reference, I couldn't send a message to the fellowship. I would have to select the contacts and then it would create another group message. If I ran that shortcut, no longer the case in iOS 27, you'll be able to add one of your named groups as a recipient in a shortcut section and it's going to work way better. So all of that's coming. iOS 27. I'm so impressed with that group name, the fellowship. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yes. I have the fellowship and I think it's the only kind of fun one, but although my wifi name, are we, are you okay telling your wifi name for security? My wifi name is Minas Tirith. What's yours? Mine is Spar America. hold on maybe that's the title how do you how do you how do you have you ever watched seinfeld remember i did but kramer had all his companies craymerica oh that's right so spar america that s-p-a-r-m-e-r-i-c-a yeah yeah that's the title i'm sorry that's that's the episode title spar america industries far america wait is that the full is Is that the full name? Industries? In my head canon it is. Oh, okay. Network is just called Spar America. That's amazing. I mean, it's another one where like young people come over like, I don't get it. I'm like, yeah, I get it. And my kids' friends don't understand it. But anybody who watched Seinfeld is like, oh, I love that. Yeah. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by NetSuite. They say that every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind. How do you keep up? The competition is only moving faster. Well, fortunately, there's NetSuite Next. 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Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. that's netsuite.ai slash mpu that link is also in the show notes our thanks to NetSuite for their support of this show and all of Relay alright well we have a bunch of app follow up we wanted to get to because we had our obscure gems which some people said some of these are not obscure fair, there were some big ones in there but I think some of them were obscure and Dusty Ying in the forums regarding Chalklift which was an app where you can run it on your iPhone or iPad and then have quick actions on your Mac, like launching apps or running shortcuts, pointed out Alfred remote, which I was not familiar with, but you knew of. Well, I covered, I made an Alfred field guy. I covered it in there. It's, it's a really cool iPhone app that allows you to control your Mac, turn off the screen, turn off. I mean, you stop the music, you know, like just silly things that your Mac may do in the other room. If you've got Alfred installed and Alfred remote on your phone, it takes care of it for you. Very nice. Now we also, a lot of people ask about launchers and I'm curious in your mind, when Siri AI comes out, Spotlight and Siri AI are going to be one thing. And will you have other, I'm still just a Spotlight vanilla guy. Like I don't have another launcher right now. A lot of people love Raycast. Some people use Alfred. What is your plan? What is going to be your methodology when this comes out? I think maybe we need to revisit launchers. We've done it on this show in the past, but it's been many years. And I think we've done it old enough that we covered Quicksilver at one point when that was a thing. But I currently am primarily using Alfred. And I like it. I made a field guide on it. The reason I like Alfred is they're just so open to third-party plugins. um i know the cool kids like raycast and i hear about that every time we talk about on this show and i have actually a paid license for raycast so i'm playing with it in the background but it's the third party integrations and the ability for me to generate my own with alfred that make it so powerful and in the age of ai it's even easier because i can write my own scripts to put in um so alfred is very customized as i use it so i have a very customized version of it currently and generally i have alfred on command space and i have spotlight on control space so i can run them both there's certain things spotlight does better than alfred and you know vice versa so i kind of i'm bilingual and you're using keyboard maestro for clipboard management still uh yeah okay actually um that's not true i use alfred's clipboard manager oh yeah i switched over i think stephen hackett convinced me to do it and i never switch back um it less powerful than the keyboard maestro one but it does the job for me and you know I use I been using the Alfred one now for a year or two Interesting Okay I, well, I can't talk about what I use just yet because, well, it's not out yet. So anyway, I'll follow up. I'll follow up in another episode later. Wow. So then look forward to, yeah. If you guys are interested though, listeners, if you're interested in a, in the launcher show, let us know if there's enough interest, we will do one. Cause that stuff is constantly, evolving spotlight gets better, but so does Raycast and Alfred. And that would force me to finally, I mean, I've tried Raycast multiple times. I just couldn't get past the hump. You know, I feel like with any app, there's the learning curve and then there's like the usage hump where like, is it actually becoming a part of your daily workflow where it becomes natural? And that's one of the things where spotlight was already a natural part of my workflow, just command space and launching. And I taught myself two things that became really useful. And I think we talked about it before, but command space, typing the beginning of an app name like Pixelmator. We'll talk about this in more power users. Pressing tab and then starting to type a file name. It will give you results of files specifically for that app. And because I launch Pixelmator so often and I have multiple projects, I can quickly do command space, PIX, tab, MPU thumb. and our my pixel meter thumb is immediately visible and i know there's faster ways to do that in other launchers or whatever but it's fast for me i would love for you to like as somebody who's kind of green on this not like you're you don't have a dog in the fight right i'd love for you to spend a week with alfred and a week with raycast and recording like make that a show okay because they are uh they take different approaches but there's like so many more things like one of my favorite things with Alfred. And it's funny to me when I made that field guide, so many people wrote in that didn't even know this trick existed, but you just hit the space bar and you can search all your files and folders. So you invoke Alfred, hit space. Like one of the ones I do all the time. I just want to quickly get to my downloads folder. I hit command space, then space, and then D O. And then it opens my downloads folder in the finder. See, that's, that's the thing. So I'm just now as you were saying that i was trying to do spotlight to see how could i quickly get to my downloads folder and if i do command space down downy four comes up first and even if i do command two which supposedly searches files and folders not apps it's still downy as the number one option and i would have to like go down a folder to get to download so oh man and then like and then there's like a whole world of workflows around alfred like just just to tell you a couple color picker you know that color picker thing when i was going to figure out the color got it data arithmetic battery status um there's one that steven millard made called dr drafts if you're a drafts user it's a must use home kit controller i got like link cleaner i've got all these little things i do all the time and i've just you know turn them into alfred workflows and then also they've got the own built-in system so it's like i can trigger shortcuts with it i can yeah it's just it's it's pretty wild um but you're right there's a hump you've got to figure out like do i really want to go down this rabbit hole you know and um but once you you get it under your fingers right you I used to go speak at Mac user groups when they had them. And my computer would be on the screen, and I was going to give a presentation about whatever, and I would go with my keyboard, and suddenly the keynote was running, and somebody would be like, wait a second, before you talk, what did you just do? That's always a fun way to intro it, for sure. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we've got to bring you into this world. I think the one week with Raycast, one week with Alfred, and then doing a head-to-head spotlight, Alfred, Raycast. I think that'll be pretty good. I'm sending you my field guide. I want you to watch it. It's not very long, and it'll get you going on, Alfred. Very good. Well, I feel like this next question might be Jermaine, which is from Michael Frannis in the, I believe, the talk forums, subscription fatigue. It feels like sometimes, and I saw after our last apps episode, there were people in the forums that were like made it out clean like didn't made it out without any subscriptions right you didn't and uh i'm now trying whisper flow which we still have to get to but i'm curious do you have a limit do you have a practice for cleaning subscriptions i well i try to really keep my subscriptions into the in the app store this way cleaning through them or seeing like you know it's much easier to go through it but you can't always do that and there's still lots of things. I actually use, they sponsor my videos, but I actually use it myself, which is Monarch Money because I can see all my recurring subscriptions and that's an easy way to see. And there's lots of apps that do that, but just keep an eye. But what is your threshold? Like what, how do you clean it up? What do you do for that? Yeah. I just have a number sheet. Every time I had a new one, I put it in, I actually shared the sheet at maxbarkey.com years ago. And I know a lot of people are using it. Um, but as you were talking i was thinking this would be actually an excellent ai tracking thing like just to feed that number sheet to to clod and put that in a record so it could nag me about stuff like are you still using this and give me better numbers um but yeah there's a there's a lot of ways to to solve that problem but i'm also not as averse to subscriptions as a lot of people are and i know people listening like oh yeah of course because you have the labs you charge subscriptions you know so of course was going to say that but the the real truth is i've gotten to know a lot of app developers over the years and it costs money to make apps and it costs money to keep making them good and the original model of you know paying me five bucks in the app store and then you have this great app that you know i need to maintain for the rest of your life doesn't work they they go out of business they just stop doing it because you can't afford you know imagine if you made a thing and then you had to support it for the rest of the user's life but you never got paid again and uh i understand why they make subscriptions and i think that with a subscription comes an implied contract that i'm going to pay you but you're going to continue to give me good stuff and make updates so for an app developer that does it right that charges me a fair amount and continues to make it better i am 100 down with that and when i look at the money that gets wasted on dumb things like starbucks or whatever compared to how much these apps cost it's not that much money and if it means that like drafts is a good example i use drafts daily and uh the developer of drafts continually makes it better i think i pay 20 bucks a year for this app yeah that i use all the time and it's so useful to me and i want it to continue to exist with the old model if he can't make money on it he'd have to give up on it and then somebody else would make a new version of drafts that they sell that you buy and a year or two later they'd give up on it and you were jumping around with this new model i think it's fine so that's my defense of subscriptions i'm not saying you should just subscribe to everything but if developer is giving you value for money and it's something you can use then i'll pay it and that's exactly what i I was going to say the value is really what it's about. You know, when we do, when we do an app roundup or menu bar apps, you know, we talk about a lot of apps, not because we think you should subscribe to all of them. Cause we probably don't, but if there's one that provides value to your workflows that would make your life easier, well, then it'd probably be worth it. And I think a great example of like kind of this tiered pricing value is flighty. and I don't travel very often during the year. So I don't pay annually for flighty, but my son was traveling. He's got a couple of flights the next couple of weeks. And so I signed up for flighty. I could have just done the free version and they, and flighty again, this is the app developer tight rope walk of, do you give enough features on the free version where it's still useful, but that you put something behind a paywall that would bring value, but is worth it. And flighty, like there's a $5 a week plan, which initial reaction might be like $5 a week, you know, a renewing scripture in a week. That sounds like some of the scam apps you might've heard of before. But if you think about it, like you might only travel a few weeks a year and that's probably worth it. But if you travel more often, you know how valuable flighty is, especially when you're flying, they have an annual plan. $60 annually is not that bad. And what I really appreciate is when app developers put that lifetime purchase, which like you're saying, it's a tough sell because that user might use it for the rest of their lives and the developer never gets paid again for it. But if the developer puts that price way up and if someone's just so averse to subscriptions but find value in the app and want to do the $300 one-time purchase, then they have that option. And so I see Flighty as a great example of a subscription done well. And it's always the question of, do you, as the user, find value to it? And is it a one-time, to pay enough one time because it's going to be valuable long-term or you just want to try it out. So anyway, it's tough, but. Yeah. But, but to your original point, when you can do it through Apple, it's so much easier to manage because you just go in there. Apple handles it. Exactly. As being another, another app, just want to mention this real quick. Ed sent by email. We talked about Chalklift, the Alfred launcher. He uses an app called MetaGrid Pro, which I had not heard of this, but this is another, you know, you can use your iPad as this wild launcher for your stuff. And it's pretty cool. And so if you're looking for another kind of launcher, he talks about his crazy setup that he has for different apps, Bamboo Studio, CAD, all this stuff. And so I'll put a link to MetaGrid Pro if you want to just have a crazy launcher. Kind of a Stream Deck alternative, like with an iPad. 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You know, he just kept talking about it. And I've been seeing, like they're advertising on Instagram. I've heard like The Verge is writing about them. So I was like, let me try it. Let me try it for real. So I put it on my Mac. I put it on my iPhone. Number one, it is so clear how much better it is than the built-in dictation when you're trying to write something longer, like an email. I did an A-B test where I talked to my phone for a little while, trying to compose an email. The built-in dictation did okay. I had to fix a bunch of things. I did the same thing with WhisperFlow. And I was like, shoot, this is perfect. And I don't need to change anything. I was like, okay, that's really good. Now, I tried it on my phone first, and then I put it on my Mac, and it's, again, really good there. My question is, when you use on your phone, or if you use on your phone, is there any tricks or, like, how useful do you find it there? Because it's a third-party keyboard, basically, that you have to use, which is number one. So you have to switch to it. And number two, you don't get to see the dictation as it's happening. So there's like this trust level where when you start dictating, Whisperflow is recording and you can see like little waves, but you don't see words appearing until you're done talking. Once you're done talking and hit stop, it puts all the words immediately in the email or wherever. And it is really, really good as far as understanding like your cadence and spelling things properly. And it got iOS. Every time I said iOS, it actually said it properly. So I don't know. I'm curious your uses on the phone versus computer, how you do it on the phone it's more of a pain because of the security feature it like if you when you open it in an app for the first time it it dumps you to the whisper app where it's authorizing you have to swipe back which is kind of nuts you know and that wasn't always true in earlier versions it didn't do that once you approved it once but apple changed something and uh now that's that's a thing um so that that that's the big caveat on the mobile device But the way I use it on mobile is I primarily do short bursts of text with Siri. And the enhanced Siri in the beta is better than the currently shipping one. But it's not Whisper Flow good. But if I want to do an extended entry like I do, like I dictate journal entries sometimes into day one, that's always Whisper Flow. It's just so much better. So I use it on mobile all the time. I think I use it even more, though, on my Mac because I use it. That's the way I put text in. Way more than using a keyboard. Anything of extent. This morning I went through my dispatch, the report my AI prepares for every morning. All I do is I hit the open the mic button on Whisperflow and I just talk through the whole thing. You know, item two, I finished that last week. Market is done. Item three, push it to next Wednesday. that I see I have a calendar appointment Tuesday. Could you please prepare a draft reminder email? Yeah, I just kind of just narrate through it as one long piece of text, and then I just dump it back to the AI and let it process all that for me. I don't type that, you know. If you look at my statistics, I've written like the equivalent of three books using Whisperflow, and a lot of it is talk to AI or talk to journal entries or kind of long-form stuff. So that's the first answer. The second question is, what about this thing where you don't see your words? To me, that's a feature, not a bug. But that's because I think you get hung up on the words. If it's, you're constantly checking to see if they're right, you're not thinking about what you're saying. And as a baby lawyer, back in 1990, I was given a little dictation machine my first day and said, don't type, use this. We have people to type for you. And so you had to learn that skill anyway. And of course, back then there was no technology that would let you see the words as you say them. So I kind of got used to that and do a lot of my dictation with my eyes closed, you know, or walking around the room. So I don't, I don't need that. And, and I do think if you just kind of go with that and just focus on what you're saying, instead of checking the work, you'll actually find that that's actually better. Okay. Well, I'm going to stick with it. I skipped the whole swiping on the keyboard, even though you and Mike Hurley tried to do that. I skipped over that and just went right to Whisperflow. And I've kind of been doing what you're saying is if it's a quick dictation, I'll just use the built-in one. But if I'm going to like answer some emails and I'm sitting out on the patio and I just have my phone or my iPad, then I'll go to Whisperflow and start dictating. And man, it is impressive how good it is. And if you're not familiar in the iOS 27 beta, this is one of the features that are only available for the newer devices, M3, iPad, Mac, and newer, iPhone 17 and iPhone Air. you have to go to general keyboard and then there's an advanced dictation you can enable and it's supposedly better it's on device but it is better it is better but not as not as good as whisper flow though yeah exactly and and every time this comes up i get a bunch of emails saying oh but you're not talking about super whisper or like one of the other mini apps that that does this and i've tried a bunch of them but there's a new one every week because the whisper model is you know propagating and everybody's making an app to do it and my only response is just for me whisper flow is the goldilocks kind of spot it's got some advanced features it's got a custom dictionary which i think is essential for this kind of stuff so like it actually knows the word max sparky it doesn't write m-a-x space b-a-r-k-y you know and um like words i want it knows it's got a couple additional features but it's not overwhelming and it just kind of works and some of them actually try to rewrite for you that the ai layer is too aggressive this one they've got it tuned right so just seems to me like it's pretty great and um but to each his own if you've got a different one you like better that's cool too but uh yeah i this is a description i do pay for and willingly i have gone down the whole rabbit hole steven in the old days as a lawyer i used to pay i think when dragon made their iphone app it was i think the subscription was like 80 a month or something it was really expensive and it wasn't that great you know and um so when you look at these subscriptions for these modern apps that are run circles around what they used to do i really don't blink yeah do you last question on this do you say question mark exclamation point comma do you do any kind of punctuation? I grew up doing it that way and new paragraph and things like that. So I often revert to that because it's just kind of baked into my operating system. But you don't have to. You can just talk. It does that for you. Although one tip I would give to Whisperflow users is put new paragraph and say that because I feel like the paragraphs are too long. It doesn't do a good job of splitting them. I actually corresponded with their customer support and they told me the same thing. Just say it when you want a new paragraph. Okay, will do. All right, new segment here. Can we do an automation corner? Yes, yes, let's do an automation corner. Let's do it. I'm excited because I have some new shortcuts I recently discovered were possible. And so I just want to share these. One, I'll put all these links in the show notes. One is an upcoming movie shortcut, which uses the movie database API, shows you a choose from list. You can select movies that are about to come out in theaters. whichever ones you select will add them to a reminders list with the trailer link on youtube in the reminder the poster attached and the release date in the notes of the reminder i thought that was pretty fun so that's it's calling the api from a website movie database which is i you know it's free basically so i include the api key and you can just run as many times as you want And that's super fun. Yeah. Two, I saw someone, actually, Sarah Dietschy and Hank Green on social media. They were complaining how difficult it was to get an address from like Google Maps to Uber to like start hail a ride. And so I was curious, can I use a URL scheme to kind of hack that? And so I was able to make a shortcut. It works either in Google Maps or Apple Maps. that when you share a location in the share sheet, if you run this shortcut, it'll take the address of whatever business or location you were looking at. It'll automatically go to Uber app and hail a ride from your current location to that destination. And all you have to do is click book. And it's pretty fast. And there is Uber built into Apple Maps or at least ride sharing, but it is a couple taps away and still eventually kicks you over to the app anyway. So I like my shortcut. We had Sarah Dietschy on the show a few years ago. Why didn't you even get her back? She was, she was a fun guest. She's doing a lot of vibe stuff right now. And so yeah, that would be super fun. And then two other quick ones, multi-stop directions. I didn't realize that you can open multi-stop directions in Apple Maps in a single go. And the reason why I did this is I had someone in my shortcuts community, they have for their work, they'll have a bunch of events in their calendar for their stops for that day. and every stop has an address attached. And they were like, is there any way to quickly pull this up in maps? So I made it a simple shortcut that it looks at your calendar events for today and any events with an address, it adds those to a variable. And then it opens that variable in Apple maps as turn by turn directions. And it's just, you can press go and it'll have every stop from your calendar events in your turn by turn, ready to go as stops and you can be on your way. And so I didn't realize you could feed it multiple addresses. that's cool yeah i didn't know and i made another version i'll include which if you want to search for multiple stops let's say you're on a road trip and you're like give me a starbucks give me this and then here's the destination charging station charging station yeah you can have it like how many stops do you want you can search for each stop add it you know choose from list and then it will open multi-stop directions and apple maps app with what you chose which i thought was pretty cool. And last one, Apple Intelligence. I saw someone, there's an app that you can get that whether you take a photo or take a screenshot, it'll tell you the dominant color and give you the hex code, which, you know, if you're a web designer, graphic designer, that could be really useful. And so I was like, I think I can do this in shortcuts using Apple Intelligence, which I did, and it works great. But I also found a free API that will generate an image, like a square, in that color. So when you run my dominant color shortcut, you can either take a screenshot or just take a photo with your phone camera. Apple intelligence will find the dominant color. And then you'll see in a quick look, a square and the solid color of that square will be the dominant color that you just found. And the hex code will be overlaid on the square. Plus it's copied to your clipboard. And then you can put it in Pixelmator or Photoshop, whatever you want. you want to be cool if you like let's say you want a lock screen of your your wife or your dog or whatever and then you have the shortcut pull the dominant color and make that the um the wallpaper color so you get the dominant color out of the lock screen to make it the background for your icons That pretty good Now I going to write that down a lock screen dominant color. Oh, and one other one I will share. So there's a great app called Charty and Charty 2.0 recently came out. Oh, they're still developing it. That's good. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's really good. And so I did some shortcuts in my last video with it. And one of the things I did was based on the book, 4,000 weeks by Oliver Berkman, which is like the average human lifespan. I did it where when you download this shortcut, I'll put a link to this one as well. It asks for your birth date. So you put your birth date in and it will calculate how many weeks you've lived and using charty, it will create a circle filled in to the amount of life you have lived up to 4,000 weeks. How much gas is in the tank. And then, and then it will place that on your lock screen automatically as part of the wallpaper. So it overlays the chart or graph on a wallpaper that you choose. And then every day you can wake up and see how much you got left. How much closer you are to death. Like, I know that's morbid, but it's also like, I don't know. I think memento mori. You got to know. Memento mori. You only got so much time. Go make a difference. That's the thing. But you know, it's funny to me, two of my podcast hosts are doing this. you do this and mike schmitz does it in obsidian where his daily note every day shows him how much gas is in the tank so i i think that's kind of funny two two of you unknowingly both came up with that um yeah so steven thanks for sharing these he's got a lot of great shortcuts so go check it out we'll have links in the notes and um i have an automation to share it's not really deliverable but it's just kind of an interesting story i wanted to talk it through with you in the background over the last few months i have been setting up a circle community for my customers for the max bar key labs members and for the field guide customers historically i had them in two different platforms and a circle is just so much better and with the kind of stuff we've been doing in robot assistant and the labs having a place to talk to other nerds is really kind of important and it seemed like the thing but it also felt like a mission impossible because getting thousands of customers from one place to another and shepherding it and setting it up. It's really been challenging me. And of course, now that I've kind of opened the floodgates and the customers are coming over, there's a bunch of customer support problems, like a certain field guide didn't get provisioned or something or another. And so I've been getting bombed with with a lot of support and i decided to turn give the robot some email privileges which is new for me you know i've always felt like i don't want it touching email i could read it and give me analysis but i didn't want it writing it but it just you know when people send in a simple request and i can get it taken care of in an hour or two as opposed to the next time i'm in front of a computer to deal with this it seemed like it made sense so this is what i did i built a thing that It reads, because I have superhuman mail and there's an MCP. So I've got a routine that runs every two hours in Claude Cowork. And it's an automated routine. It reads the email for customer support problems. And then I broke them up into like four categories. And some of them require me and some of them the robot can do. But if it reads an email and identifies something that it can do, Like it says, somebody will say, hey, I didn't get my Alfred Field Guide. It has a database it can check and says, oh, Stephen Robles. Oh, yeah, he bought the Alfred Field Guide. He should have got it. And then it uses the MCP with Circle to go in and add that to his account. And then it prepares an email to him. And it says, hey, this is David's Robot. I read your email and I just did what you asked. and the last paragraph is by the way i'm a stupid robot and i make mistakes all the time so um i'm also copying this to david and jim jim's the guy who helps me out with this stuff so if there's any problem just reply to all and humans will take it from there and and it took me a while to kind of come up with that protocol because i didn't want people to feel like uh he's not even dealing with it anymore but i just but what i do like is i wake up in the morning and someone in Germany who wrote me at 1 a.m. California time got their problem solved even before I woke up. So it's working. Overall, people are like, wow, this is amazing. I can't believe you did it. A couple of people are like, I can't believe you did this. I used to like you because you didn't do stuff like this. So you get kind of a mix of things, but in general, the response has been positive. But for me personally, it's been really great because people's problems are getting solved much faster than if it waited for me to do them manually when I wake up. And, and, but it's an automation that I thought I would never make. And it's just shocking to me how far we've come with this AI stuff in the last six months that now this is the thing I'm doing. That's really good. I mean, I'm like you was gave Claude an MCP to fast mail so he could read everything. Yeah. And it was even drafting emails for me to potential sponsors, but I hadn't had it sending emails just yet. But I think I might take that step, at least for sponsors, because that's fine. I'd send them my rates and that's pretty much the whole conversation. My condition is I want there to be no question that it is from a robot and not me. So in addition to putting the text in the email, I created a new email account on my gmail called robot at max sparky.com so uh if the reply comes from that which has led to some funny instances because i'll i read them all you know i don't just ignore it in the morning i go through everything that happened over the night and a lot of times i'll send the the customer a note say hey sparky here is everything okay you know it it said it did the thing for you did it work you know but if I'm not careful, if I, if I jump into the robot thread, as opposed to the original thread to me, it says coming from robot. And a couple of times people have said, have written me back, say, Hey, just so you know, now your robot's writing and not disclosing that it's a robot. And no, it was me. I just actually was sloppy. And I, I replied from the wrong address, but, but the, but it's just kind of like learning curves. And you know, there's people out there listening and say, Hey, big companies do this all the time. You're not doing anything fancy, But for a small operation like mine to take that step, that would not have been possible without this technology. And I'm still very leery of it. I still have a hard rule that it always identifies itself. It comes from the robot email. But I do think overall, customers are getting a better experience because simple problems, password resets, course allocations, things like that, they're generally getting their problem solved within a few hours. Yeah. And the only reason I don't do it like every 30 minutes is because I am up against the wall on Circle API tokens. And, you know, it's like I've got to be, I've got to kind of like be careful about not overstaying my welcome with the Circle back in. But I think two hours is fair and it's definitely faster than I would do it. So there you go. That's interesting. Well, I'm curious too, because Circle, they had an eclipse event recently. and they actually said they're adding a bunch of AI tools just built into the platform themselves. And I'll be curious, maybe you can move some of those things directly in a circle. Obviously not the email, that'll still need to be a cloud thing because I have to connect to both. But with customer service type things, I'm curious. They have some very interesting AI offerings I'm experimenting with. I want to expand the use of it, but I actually really, really want to be in control of this. and um so i don't know if what they're doing is good enough the for my reading it looks like they've got some really great stuff when you're onboarding but i already did all that i'm not sure how much of that eclipse stuff i need but but i'm looking into it um but but also i like the idea of just driving an mcp from my robot that knows everything about me and my preferences and has more context that training behind this you know the background context is a huge deal yeah yeah but that that was an automation that i did not expect to write but it worked pretty good that's fun that's fun it's probably fixing somebody's problem as we record the show i mean that i mean i'm not being funny it's probably doing it right now exactly that's awesome all right so uh what are you playing with steven well i was like i'm a meta glasses and uh jury's still out we'll see how it feels but i did wear them to our july 4th celebration and you know the most useful thing is the built-in cameras and so i'd rather than holding my phone up and looking at the fireworks through a phone screen which we can debate whether you should even take videos because who looks back at these but i just recorded them with my glasses instead and that was kind of fun because i was recording a video of it and i was looking at it with my eyeballs and i got it all there and that was kind of fun so that's the metaglasses i'll put a link in the show notes, but everything records vertically, unfortunately, photos and videos. Yeah. It's like social media. Yeah. And you can, I did it while I was at the little lake firework show. You can tell it to take a photo and share it to your Instagram story just from the glasses and it'll just do it, which is kind of cool. I was hoping to use these as B-roll things for device reviews. Like I would love to be able to do an iPhone 18 review type video. and I have shots of me using the phone and I wouldn't have to hold a camera. I could just do my glasses. Yeah. But because it only shoots vertically, I don't know how possible that is. It's not going to be very crisp video cropping in to make it widescreen. So that remains to be seen. And I don't need to go into it here, but if you're interested in, um, metaglasses, look into the privacy piece of it, because there are some real dragons in there. I think the privacy is in the tubes. I would not recommend these for privacy and security. I also, I didn't want to wear them in public often because, you know, there's so many social media videos of people like getting upset that they're being recorded and they see the glasses. No one has, I wore these in a grocery store and then to that July 4th celebration and nowhere else publicly. No one's come up to me and said like, are you recording? Are those the glasses? Like no one said that. Of course there weren't many people around in the grocery store. And at the July 4th thing, there was so many people around. It didn't matter. Like nobody was looking. But I will say I felt weird because I had to use the restroom at the grocery store. And I immediately realized like I'm wearing a camera on my face. Yeah. And to go into a public restroom. And if everybody knows what these are, like that feels weird. And my vision is such that I could take my glasses off and still see okay. So if I go into a public restroom again, I'll just take them off and not have them on my face at all. but if you're using these for your glasses and you're like my wife her vision is such where without glasses she cannot see and would not be able to navigate the restroom that's a problem you know what i mean and that felt kind of weird to me i didn't i didn't like that feeling uh but we'll we'll see i'm gonna try them out the accessibility possibilities are obviously amazing like you can ask meta ai what am i looking at and it will describe it i even have pictures on one of my walls of photos i took in other countries when i used to work for the travel company and I would say, where was this, where is this photo or where was this photo taken? And it nailed it. It could name Amsterdam. It got the Rhine river in Germany. It got Canada. Like it's great at recognizing things, describing what it's seeing just on my desk. I could say, tell me what I'm looking at and it will describe everything on my desk. So like the accessibility thing is awesome. And some of that world knowledge is cool, but again, huge privacy costs and security costs. I also noticed my iPhone battery really taking a hit when I was out and about because I think the meta a glasses are constantly connecting. They're pinging your location all the time. And whenever you have to transfer, if you want to transfer photos and videos, it has to connect to the wifi network that the glasses put off. So there's not a easy way to do that. So a lot of caveats. I want to be doing a full review on my YouTube channel, but some cool things, some weird things, you know, And there is real solid smoke to the rumor that Apple's developing their own set of these things. That's the thing that what I've most realized wearing these for the last week has been, man, I would love for these to be Apple. Because if I could send text messages through the voice assistant, if it like when I was driving away, you know, I have the smart garage door opener. It's in HomeKit. I would love to be able to just tell my glasses, hey, close the garage door. But I can't because it doesn't talk to HomeKit and it doesn't talk to Apple Home at all. So I still have to like either tell my watch, my phone or whatever. So it's so clear, like how many benefits there could be if I could have something like this and it'd be Apple's ecosystem all built in. So I'll talk about that in the video. Yeah. And like, you know, there's the parallel path. There's the Vision Pro kind of full immersion glasses. and then there's these on your face walk around glasses and it seems like the the meta glasses are much more successful of course they're more affordable as well yeah and i think a lot of people are interested in them but i actually hope that that doesn't mean they stop on the full immersion stuff because i find that the most useful sure and uh i don't know it's just it's a weird time with that technology but you know the bathroom problem is real like what what's it going to be like when everybody's wearing these things walking around and you go pee like what you gotta, you know. It felt really weird. Even I was the only one in the bathroom at first and it still felt weird because like if someone walks in right now, like, and they know what these are immediate awkward situation. Yeah. And there's apparently very unsavory things you, people will get either stickers or take the light out, which a light turns on whenever you take a picture. And if you're recording video, it will glow kind of periodically and people try to hide that or put something on it to block that light that's not great so yeah we'll have to see we'll see all right well my uh my new thing i'm playing with is an offshoot of my new my new uh my new mac you know my new mac pro i needed to get a proper dock because you know i don't have the same io i had with the mac studio so i bought the big boy i got the cal digit ts5 plus which is kind of the newest shiniest one that CalDigit makes. And I've been using it a month now and without flaw. I mean, what people say is true. The one cable lifestyle is real. You can have everything plugged into one of these things when you want to take the laptop off. Make sure your drives are unmounted. But other than that, you just kind of unplug and go. And when you plug it back in, everything hooks up just fine. These CalDigits, you know, everybody says this is the one you get. And I think I would add on to that. one of the things i like about it as a micro sd card because some of my cameras have micro sd and it's always a pain to like plug them into a an adapter the the front facing inputs so there's just more of them than you get with a mac studio so that's kind of nice i use those quite often and there is so much io in the back it's got 10 gigabyte ethernet so you've got really fast ethernet going through as fast as i can get you know through it and it's solid with one big um asterisk what is that david this thing gets really hot i mean oh man i cannot get over how hot this thing gets this okay so i'm looking at the picture of this on bnh and this thing has all the ports yes this thing is like on the front it has the headphone jack 2sd card slot usba two usbc on the back got three thunderbolts three other usbcs headphone mic display port ethernet and four usbas my goodness it does everything and they send it to you with these little rubber feet with the impression that you can lay it down so you can have it vertically or horizontally right um but it got even hotter when i laid it down horizontally because the the bottom half of it even with the little offset was really trapping heat under there and it was too hot to like touch for an extended period of time so i turned it up vertically and i can keep my hands on it now for a while but it is not comfortable at all and um like i've been holding it here while we've been talking and it's like yeah i'm i'm heat sinking it with my body now does it if your computer is not connected i assume it doesn't get hot or does it just stay hot it stays hot it's just really it's like a heat source in the room my wife walked in here the other day and said i think it's hot in here what's going on you know okay i have an air conditioner in the studio but i don't run it most of the time i'm like yeah i have a space heater now i didn't explain anything further but yeah i do and um it's just really hot so i talked to some friends you know a lot of our creator friends use these same things they're like oh yeah this thing just gets really hot but don't worry it'll run forever okay and so i'm not going to worry about it but wow it is hot so what i'm doing is i'm making sure it has plenty of airflow i'm got it vertical and i'm generally not going to worry about it but yeah other than that um it's pretty good i mean cal digit i've always had a good experience yeah i use a cal digit the element 4 hub which is like three thunderbolts to the one thunderbolt to your computer and i use that for all my external ssds and never a problem you know and and that one does get warm too it's not doing as much as yours but it's like under the desk with a bunch of other cables and like i don't think about it so this thing is driving a pro display xdr and a studio display and like every i am certain that i'm kind of like doing more with this than most people do but boy it gets hot but yeah i mean i still recommend it i mean i think if you got a laptop and you want all the ports this is what you buy so now wait a minute you got your your pro display xdr and studio display in the thunderbolt ports right yeah what do you and then you have your what else do you have plugged into it backup drives i have two i have a um time machine drive and i have a clone drive i've got um audio interface stream decks i've got my audio interface like everything and you don't need anything else besides this like it's just this one hub for everything yeah and then i've got one cable coming out of it that plugs into my laptop and then when i decide to go uh sit in front of the baseball game and answer email i just you know like i said make sure your drives are dismounted and unplug and off you go i mean that's pretty nice like that that ability to just get up and every you know take the same computer out there that is yeah it's nice yeah well and you saved three thousand dollars buying it when you did so i did geez that's it that's it well uh well that's that's very cool i'll also maybe i'll do a follow-up uh in the next episode but i do have one more smart lock uh to talk about the schlag sense pro the second ultra wideband smart lock that you can get for apple home long story short it's very very good it's very expensive at $400 $130 more than the Akara U400 which also has the ultra wideband the Sense Pro also does not have a fingerprint or physical key unlock interesting so it's a trade-off some people like that it doesn't have a physical key because then it can't be picked but there's also no fingerprint so it just depends on your what you prefer but it is very good it is solid it unlocks quickly and I'm going to do a full video on the channel, but it's, it's very good. It's just expensive. But it is Schlage and people actually for the history, the security and just, you know, longevity. Yeah. So I mentioned this on a prior show. I bought the Acara version of this and the advantage of this technology for people who aren't plugged into this is it, it has that ultra wide band. It sees your phone or your watch approaching and it just unlocks. and you know the wife approval factor is off the charts for me because she just walks up to the door and it unlocks and she loves that um so uh i really like it but do you have enough of an opinion now to make a recommendation of the akara versus the schleg so i was testing both as i was making the video actually this morning because i wanted to make sure like that the akara is still solid yeah like it's still really good like walking up with just my watch the akara one unlocks ultra wideband no problem yeah i like the fingerprint unlock especially for if you have kids or someone in the family that doesn't have a device like that and the physical key it's good but i do like the schlag sense pros design it's much smaller and more just less a much smaller footprint more german it is yes exactly and i actually did some research on on that name the Schlage. It is from the German creator. That was the last name. But anyway, like it looks really nice. Comes in black or the satin nickel and it still has the pin pad. So if you want to unlock it that way. Yeah. Again, it looks very nice. They're both matter over thread, both the Akara and the Schlage. The Schlage also has a Wi-Fi backup, which the Akara doesn't have. But if you have thread devices, it's really not a big deal. You'd probably never use it. I think it's really just preferences. Like, do you want fingerprint and physical key? Go with the Acara. Uh, if you like the look of the Schlage better, you know, and you want to, you're okay paying the extra $130, the Sense Pro is a good option. But as far as performance, I think they're both on par. Um, sometimes the Schlage one was a little better at Apple watch unlocking, like approaching. And I didn't have my phone with me and I just had my Apple watch. Some, it felt like maybe it unlocked a little faster, but the Akara one does just fine. I never get like, it doesn't unlock when I approach. So they're both very good. The Schlage looks a lot better in my opinion, but it is a lot more money. And the advantage for me, the Akara stuff is I have Akara cameras and some of their other gear and they kind of, there's like a, there's a benefit from using their stuff together that you wouldn't get if you went to a third party. Yeah. And if you, if you get the Akara video doorbell thermostat and lock when someone rings your video doorbell you can see a picture of them on your thermostat and then you can unlock your door from the thermostat on that's a all a cara built an ecosystem it's not something you could piecemeal inside apple homes so little things like that you know i upgraded to the acara video doorbell and boy do i love the sound of having your home pods as your doorbell it's a pleasant sound and it announces who's there if it recognizes the face i've started to wire that up. I haven't gone entirely down that one. That's on my list. Either way, gang, feedback shows, they always go long. We can't help it. You guys have great questions. Just talking to someone recently about how the Mac Power Users audience is the best audience in all of podcasts. Thanks for sending the notes in, everybody. We are going to be talking about the Creator Studio check-in today, more Power Users, so make sure to stick around from that. You can find us at relay.fm slash mpu. Go check out all the shortcuts Stephen made. Man, these are great. So we're going to have all that stuff in the notes. Take a picture of my fake hand, whatever you want. If you want to watch it on YouTube, we got that too. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, NetSuite, and Decagon. And we'll see you next time.