838: iPhone Setup Showdown

Hello and welcome to MacPowerUsers. My name is Steven Robles and joined by my friend and yours, David Sparks. How's it going, David? It's going great, Steven. You getting used to saying that? Welcome to MacPowerUsers? I know. I think that was maybe the first time I did the intro intro. So yeah, I was sure I got it right. Again, so much positive feedback. In fact, we kind of blew up a little bit on social media in our little nerd circle this week, didn't we? We did. So on last week's episode, we were talking about our menu bar apps and backups came into play. And I shared a little clip where you sounded like a mob boss. And you said you have a beautiful family. It'd be a shame if something happened to them. And you meant a shame if something happened to their photos. But I shared this clip everywhere. And lots of people were like, Stephen, you have to back up your stuff. And so I'm going to figure it out. But I do want to mention Cliff 538 on Mastodon actually linked this app called Parachute Backup, which is a Mac app and also on iOS, but it will back up your entire iCloud drive contents to a NAS or something else. And so I think I might try that first. I don't know if that meets your requirements. That's better than nothing. You know, it's funny because I'm getting used to the fact that we look into a camera and we do the show now. Right. And when I watched that clip, you could just see my face at the moment. You say, no backup. And it was very judgy. Well, everybody understood, you know, and I really should backup my stuff. Yeah, you should. You really should. Yeah, yeah. But speaking of video, too, we wanted to mention, so we had lots of requests saying they like seeing David's reactions to my backup failures and everything else. And so we want to give the video to more power users, members who support the show. And so what we'll do going forward is we'll make a version that's private. And if you're a More Power Users member, you'll find a link in the show notes on the More Power Users episodes to watch everything ad-free plus the More Power Users segment on video if you would like to do that. So that'll be available. Yeah, that's excellent. Very fun. Just on the question of Naz, I just have to just make a confession right now because you've raised the topic. uh this week i accepted delivery of a unify unas2 which is the uh unify you know cloud not really cloud it's the local hard drive on your network thing right i have not had a network attack storage for a long time uh you know because because the hard drives are good enough now you're good but i've got seven terabytes of data i make videos like every day so i decided i wanted to have like a local backup that i can control and the other nice thing about that is because unify so easy to use when you're on the road i can get access to all that data uh so i've got that plugged in it's going to take a week to get all my seven terabytes over there but i check every morning my carbon copy cloner is very happily sending it over to me but i'll report on that in the future but i did buy a piece of gear this week steven okay very fun i actually have two nasas both of them could be used for backup and uh i just use neither so i'm gonna set it up you're kidding me i could be running time machine right now i even have a 10 me at this point you have two nases and you have it i do have two nases i have a synology and a ugreen and i use it for video stuff i use it for plex and one has a 10 gigabit ethernet connection so it's actually pretty fast transfer speed so would be perfect for a backup okay well there you go i'm just trying to get you going now before we start but you also you have no words i have no words you You had some other announcements too. Yeah, we do. We have several announcements this week for the Mac power users. One is we have a newsletter. You may not know that, but there's a link at the website and it goes out in the show notes every week. And there's a bunch of members that are getting the newsletter. The advantage you get to that is every week it gives you a little article from me or a video and a video or an article from Steven, something we've done this week. So you get to see some of the stuff we're doing outside of Mac power users. but it also has all the notes for the week and all the links so if you listen to the show and you like to go to your inbox and just have all the links there for you you get them and so we've been doing that through a different vendor for a long time for reasons it was getting untenable and we have now moved it over to kit which is the company i use for the max barking newsletter i really like kit if you're looking at a newsletter company i really like using them they're not paying me to say that i pay them actually quite a bit of money every year but But I like the way they took care of small graders like me. One of the ways they did that is they moved all the data into KIT. So now those people that are already subscribed should get the new newsletter without any problem with an asterisk. I'm going to come back to that. But if you want to sign up for it, please do. We would love for you to do so. And then you'll get a nice little email from Stephen and I every Sunday as the show goes public with all the details of the show's outline and the show notes for that week. And we hope you enjoy that. Now, there's a few of you that for legal reasons, we weren't allowed to pull over. For one reason, I don't really understand how it all works, but they're very particular about these rules about putting people on mailing lists. And I don't want to break any rules. So we just decided for the people that were questionable whether we could move them or not, we just won't move them. And that was, I think, about 20% of the entire list. so you may not get it even though you've been subscribed this weekend if that's you please just go sign up again and keep sparky out of jail so that's the goal um so go go to the link please sign up everybody um we'd love you to uh to get those notes every week and especially if you listen in an app like apple podcasts a lot of times show notes get truncated and last week we had 50 links because i tried to link every app that we talked about and you might not have got them all so it's a nice way to see all that in one place yeah yeah um also announcing today on uh more power users we're going to be talking about the m5 question there's rumors now that an m5 studio may come out and i am having problems i'm thinking about it when i lay in bed at night and steven's going to walk me through this i don't know if he's going to push me over the edge or pull me back but we're going to find out in more power users today we will find out but you definitely pushed me to buy a bunch of apps last week on the menu bar so uh you know we'll see well hey man an m5 studio is not the same as a few apps it's a lot of menu bar apps worth of apps for sure for sure oh just one other thing i'll mention too when it comes to our iphone home screens this week which is what we're talking about i will have image links in the show notes last week i mentioned chapter art and menu bars don't work great in square chapter art as you can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. And so those were linked in the show notes. And so I'll be more specific, but this week, in addition to all the other apps and links will be there, the image links to our home screens and different focus modes. And there's a lot to see this week. So that's all in the show notes and you can get it in the newsletter as well. Yeah. So we got thinking, what's another way to get to know Steven? Let's dissect his iPhone, talk about his iPhone philosophy, what apps he's using. I've got a few updates too. And a lot of the listeners know my setup or they've heard me talk about before. So you can be the focus today, Stephen, but I'll weigh in with some things I'm doing as well. But we thought we would take on mobile today. So let's start with philosophy because yes, you can have an iPhone philosophy. How do you look at your iPhone, Stephen? Yeah. So the iPhone, it's an internet communicator. It's a phone and it's a widescreen video iPod, you know, that's right back to the original. That's it. You know, the iPhone has always been where I do most of my communication for better for worse. I mean, I still check my mail. I still do Slack and all of that, but especially in the last few years, doing more video content now being on the floor at CES this past January, it has become also a short form video device. It's not what I record long form or podcasts on, but it's definitely a video device. And I use apps, which we'll see on my home screen for editing video on it. and it's also, well, I end up watching a video on lunch, you know, just in between what I'm working. And so it does all the things and it's a key role. And there's always the question that, you know, Gruber will ask people, if you could only keep the Mac or the iPhone, which would you keep? I'm curious your answer to that, David. Oh, that would absolutely be the Mac. I mean, because I do all my work at this thing every day. And it is still the case for me that if I had to choose, I would choose the Mac also, because Final Cut and the video production and live streaming that I do, you still can't do that from the phone. I do a lot on the phone, but the Mac is still the king. Yeah, I kind of feel the same way. I think of the iPhone very much as a utility player that can get me out in a jam, take care of something. And it's remarkable the number of things I can do with it, but it doesn't equal the Mac for me. I mean, I don't have my keyboard maestro and some of my other stuff I do to make my Mac really dance for me for the real heavy lift I need it. But I find I use that phone all the time. I'm not one of those people who is a phone-only guy. We have people in the audience, like salespeople on the road a lot, and they get almost all their work done on a phone. Yeah, I use a lot of shortcuts that do allow me to get a lot of work done. And there'll be times if I have to do a podcast and all I have is my phone, like I can make it work and even edit the podcast on my phone using the app called Ferrite. So in a pinch, you know, it could be a workhorse. And when it comes to the camera and video, obviously it is one of the best. You know, I tell people if you're getting into video content or you want to record a video podcast, the iPhone is the best camera you're going to get until you're ready to invest in like a Sony mirrorless. Any webcam, the iPhone beats it. Yeah. And both of us have fancy cameras, but I believe both of us use the iPhone camera for part of the content we create. Yeah, absolutely. And just the ease of being able to share a video by recording it on the same device, it's super easy. Steven, you go on vacation with your family, and you're going to take pictures that may or may not be eventually backed up. Do you bring your fancy Sony camera, or do you bring your iPhone? What camera do you bring on vacation? I just bring my iPhone. I just bring my iPhone. And now even at the tech events, I don't bring my Sony cameras. I'll bring my DJI Osmo and my iPhone. And even when I had both at CES this year, I found myself just recording faster with the iPhone because I wanted to record some vertical and some landscape. And I would just be able to do it quickly with the iPhone. And then the footage is on the device. I don't have to transfer anything. So my use case over time has changed where I will really lean on the phone, especially on the go and when traveling. And it's powerful. It's powerful. It feels like Apple came for the point-and-shoot crowd a long time ago, but now it feels to me like they're coming for the small form factor video devices, like the pockets and things like that, as they keep adding additional features. The iPhone is so good for camera. I do think that you should think about your phone in terms of what's the job to be done, as Clayton Christensen would say. What is the job to be done by your phone? And then you can optimize for that. And that's one of the reasons I went pro again, even though the Air was tempting. And I actually have an iPhone Air just to kind of play around with as a beta device. I had to get the cameras, all the cameras. And my wife plays in an orchestra, like we talked about a couple episodes ago. And using that 4X camera lens, the telephoto in a dim concert hall, it's incredible. The video and photos you get from that. My kids have dance recitals in those kinds of theaters. And so you just, you can't beat it. It's great. So you're the second co-host of Mac Power Users to also have an iPhone Air. I mean, when do you use it? Oh, never. Just to run the betas. Okay. Just to hold it every once in a while to see how it is. You know, I did a review video on it. And the camera's very good, but I miss the telephoto and even the ultrawide sometimes, especially if I'm trying to get close to something. And I just like having the first of a device of Apple's. So, like, I still have my original Apple Watch. obviously i have the vision pro i have the original ipad i never got the original iphone and so i felt like with the iphone air i just want to have it as like a collector type thing yeah so i got it i only have eyes for orange i love this orange iphone you know i i usually get a new one every year and i was telling daisy my wife that maybe this year i will not get a new one because i love the orange color so much and she just laughed at me and walked out of the room i mean i just i didn't realize that the mac power users color you actually have the mac power users iphone color yeah steve and i both liked orange so we're like all right let's switch to the orange but yeah i always wanted like one of these you know and this is my favorite orange is what they call safety orange you know yes this is what it is this is right there they didn't like they didn't cheap out on it they went they went for orange but yeah this is a good question because as we head into this year there's a much rumored iphone fold coming i think it's probably coming based on the rumors. And I think a lot of listeners are going to be questioning, like, do you want a small and light, you know, iPhone Air? Do you want the Pro with the best cameras? Do you want the mini that, or say the Fold that opens up to a bigger screen for like the salespeople that are on the road using it as a computer? It's really going to be an interesting decision matrix later this year. So give some thought to the philosophy. Yeah. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. If you're a Mac user who creates video or podcasts, you need Ecamm. Ecamm Live is the all-in-one studio built exclusively for Mac, so it looks, feels, and performs like a native app should. So whether you're live streaming, recording a podcast, or producing training videos, Ecamm gives you a broadcast-level control with drag-and-drop simplicity. Switch cameras, share your screen, cue overlays, and control audio, all without ever leaving your Mac. If I ever need to live stream, I use Ecamm personally. I've used it for years, You can create different layouts, do overlays like lower thirds, full screen graphics. You can even bring in remote guests, live stream it, and also simultaneously record a local video file directly to your Mac. It's rock solid. You can schedule events on your YouTube channel for future live streams and then plug in and connect to those scheduled events directly in Ecamm. Super easy to use. It's a native Mac app and honestly the best way to live stream on your Mac. So don't wait any longer. go and check it out now, and you can get 15% off by going to ecamm.com slash MacPowerUsers and use code MPU15. That's 15% off at ecamm.com slash MacPowerUsers with promo code MPU15. And that link is in the show notes. You can click it there. Our thanks to Ecamm for supporting this show and all of Relay. All right, Stephen, I think we got to start talking about home screens. what's on your home screen? This is a big question because I have multiple, which we're going to get into, but I'll share here and I'll link the image in the show notes, of course. But this is my default home screen. So during the day, weekdays, I don't have a focus mode enabled. I just run it by default. And what you're seeing here is my lock home today and we'll get into control center later. but this is my home screen. I use a kind of a gradient wallpaper and I like something that's not super distracting. So I don't use like pictures of the wallpaper, even though you can do the blurred background. And so it's just kind of gradient style wallpaper. I usually get it from basic Apple guy. I'll swap this out every couple of months. And I, I guess it's utilitarian, but on my main home screen, I have a widget stack at the top that goes across the four icon with and then i have what is that 12 icons i have maps wallet photos instagram gemini home things reminders youtube the edits app which is instagram's like video editor yeah bear youtube studio and then another widget stack which we can get into and then in my dock safari threads messages and a food tracking app i've been using for the last six months which is incredible, which is food knobs. I'm a fan of it as well. Love, love food knobs. And so I use the small icons and it still has the name underneath. And I'm curious because you said your home screens as well. I know you have a special method for the dealing with that big space above the dock, but any questions about my main home screen here? Yeah. I mean, I just, it's always interesting to me. uh you have not gone like full widget some people do that like almost no no applications uh you've got a medium and a small size widget on your home screen and otherwise you've got apps there and it kind of makes sense with what i know about you like you've got a lot of shortcuts coverage actually kind of on the next page we'll get to that but you do a lot with home kit you've got home kit there uh is gemini your primary like ai helper yeah this was perplexity for a while and then in that widget stack, I actually have the ChatGPT widget that lets you jump to either the camera, voice, or text. But as far as an icon, I've been using Gemini for the last two months as my default general search, general query. I want to ask it something. I've been using Gemini for it and I've been mostly happy with it. I thought about switching it out for Claude, but I've not used Claude as like a searching type tool just yet. Yeah, and I think frankly, Gemini is probably better for that because it's from Google and they have all the ones and zeros when it comes to searching. You've got your wallet on your home screen. Do you hit it often? Well, I use my Apple card as kind of my default payment thing. And so I do jump in there, you know, semi often, and I get a lot of notifications when there's transactions and recurring things and so i i do check it i don't know if i need to have it on there but i don't know what else i would put on there so yeah see i put i put the wallet and control center but i'm often in it i could see the case for putting it on your home screen i've been doing an experiment lately i've been leaving my wallet at home because in california we've got the digital driver's license now yeah i saw i saw your email about that and i was i was curious yeah my my wife thinks i'm gonna get arrested or something but well you can't speed although it is weird when you go to a restaurant and like they bring you the bill like well do you guys take apple pay because right usually i have her with me just in case so she can pay but right yeah more and more restaurants have the tap to pay thing they like bring to the table so i feel like you're safer that's the way that's the way that's the way now i only have one home screen and this is a method that i've used for years where i don't have a second page of apps and folders i don't do that It's main home screen. I swipe to the right and it's the app library. And then you swipe the other way and it's the today view. And I believe you have it the same way. Yeah. I, uh, I don't, I feel like the app library is really good and it allows you to not have to have five screens of apps that you scroll through. And the other thing is like my philosophy. So my home screen is, is similar to yours in some ways. Um, it's, it's more boring though. Yours is more colorful. Uh, but I, I take all the fun out of my iPhone. All right. So walk me through this. So this is your home screen. Very gray. Yeah. I took all color out of my iPhone about early in the beta this year, just for giggles, because they made the icons can be more clear now. And I thought, what if the phone was less sexy and more boring? And I kind of like it that way. And everybody I know doesn't like it. They tell me that they need the colors to find the widgets and all that. But it doesn't really seem to be a problem for me. and I really like the idea because generally my working space on my Mac is also a great background as well I feel like the excitement is in the windows it doesn't need to be in the wallpaper so I did that and and for years I had colored themes for each focus mode so I could look at it and if it was blue it was max barkey or if it was orange it was personal I just felt like I I wanted to back away from that a bit so you know the overall philosophy of my phone is it's a contextual device not an app device so i like to launch everything as context so i've got this gray screen um the focus mode indicator is based on the little quote and the icon at the bottom we talked about earlier how i like to have the big apps without the names on them but it leaves a bunch of space on the bottom so what i did was there there's a search bar there by default but if you go into the settings you can turn that off because i never used it if i want to search i just pull down So I put a little funny saying there or appropriate saying the screenshot I sharing is for my personal focus mode And it something from the old NASA engineers I had the saying when they were building the spaceships that was, it will not fail because of me. And that always inspires me when I hear it. Like I want to, I want to carry that into my daily life with my family, with my kids, whatever it is I'm working in a personal mode, it will not fail because of me. So I put that there, but a little icon of the hand plane because it's personal. And then off to the races I go. And it fills that space that gets left open by having the big icons. I like the quote there. It's a wonderful quote. Are you always in a focus mode? Pretty much. Yeah. I do have like a non focus mode that sometimes I fall into, but I try to intentionally set it as I go throughout the day. Like I took the screenshot in the evening. So that's why it's the personal one right now. It will be reflecting the max parking. Actually, it's in podcast mode now. I just kind of like running the focus modes because when I finish the day at work, I change it to the personal mode and it like kind of throws a bit in my brain as well that like, okay, I don't need to be thinking about that now. I'm in personal mode. You know, there's, there's something to that. Well, I got some, I got some focus modes. We'll, we'll talk more about that in a minute, but I do have some, some things to say about your home screen here, David. Yeah, it has evolved. Like we just did a deep dive on it in the Max Sparky labs and some of the members gave me some tips that actually turned into action for me. Now I use the Fantastical widget in one of my stacks and you have it here on your home screen, just static. It seems like neither of those are stacks, right? Yeah. My question is you have the Fantastical widget there and another widget above it that tells you the date and time. Yeah. And also the time is in the top left corner. I know. You just really want to know the time and date. Honestly, I really struggle to find useful widgets for my home screen. I feel like, you know, I, the today view, when we get to that, I really load that up with widgets and it's, it's kind of my information central. If I want to know the weather, I just swipe to the right, you know, just, it's okay. But I want to have a glanceable information there and honestly i could be convinced to take both of these widgets off well i'll tell you about some of the widgets i use in a minute too but also you have safari clawed and obsidian yeah on the home screen and then a folder which is a cardinal sin for me i can't have a folder on my home yeah that is a new addition but uh it is i think the right move for me because i was really terrible about responding to people like you in my life because I don't, I hate, you know, I hate the notifications and, and I got it. I've got to explain the doc real quick and I can come back to that. Okay, please. Yeah. So the doc to me, and you'll appreciate this as a shortcut guy. This is the, these are the only things I really need on my phone. I could probably take everything off and just have those three things. Maybe that's an experiment. Maybe I should just take everything off the home screen and put a picture of my wife or my dog there. But those are contextual launchers for me. There's a bolt, which is Max Barkey. There's a little compass, which is personal. And then there's a little book, which is consumption. And each one is a choose from menu shortcut. And anytime I think of something I want to do on my phone, I write it into that shortcut. Like, you know, I'm experimenting with Cloud Cowork like everybody. And one of my tricks is I've taught it to read my drafts folders. Anything in drafts that has Cowork as a tag, it reads and processes for me every time I open it up. So I'm not going to open drafts and tag something co-work and write into it. Instead, I'm just going to make a shortcut that does everything for me except the dictation part. That is under one of those buttons. If I want to add a new task, I push the Mac Sparky button. I have one to add a new task for Mac Power users. We have a list that we share of show ideas. I've got one that opens up a shortcut that appends to that note with just one step. So what I like to do with my phone is not treat it as a thing where I go and start goofing off, you know, jumping through apps. I come to it with a specific purpose. I trigger the appropriate shortcut and it's done. And they're all under this little, at least three buttons. So that's really my whole phone system, to be honest. Okay. And then in that folder, it looks like communication apps. Exactly. So the problem was I was putting those under those buttons, under the shortcuts. But then the prior Steven would message me, and I wouldn't see it because there's no notification badge. Right. And I'm also super stingy about badges. I don't like hardly anything badge me. But I let all the communication apps badge me, Notion, all the stuff we deal with between each other, and messages and some of the family stuff, too. so those all fall in that folder i let them you know rain free with badges and if that folder has a badge on it that means i should probably go in there and figure out what's going on i see but like you steven i gotta say i hate it i hate that there's a folder on my own like if it was me i would probably make a shortcut choose from menu just so i could change the icon so i could have like a nice icon rather than the folder but then you lose the badge you do lose the badge and i need the badge i i've learned i've learned to understand that this is a constraint i need because i ideally had them all under those shortcuts and i would just go check messages like okay when i start the day check messages when i end the day check messages well you know if i miss that one day and our editor needs something and i don't i don't see that then i'm a flake and i I don't want to be like, I gotcha. And then this is your only home screen of apps, right? To the right of this is just the app library. Yeah. Okay. And that's, if you, if people don't do that, like if you have multiple home screens, I would encourage you to try it because the app library will actually start learning your habits. And there are certain apps like the mail app. I don't have it on a home screen. I don't have it in the today view, but anytime I actually want to open mail, I swipe over to the app library and my app library has learned to just put mail there where I can tap it. And even depending on the time of day, you know, there's a couple of boxes like the suggested box in the app library where it will start moving apps there that your iPhone recognizes you use certain times or a certain, you know, frequency. And so if you actually just start using the app library, almost like a quasi app launcher, it begins to learn your habits. And there is a widget called Siri Suggestions where it will swap out apps. And some people put that on their home screen, but that I can't do. I can't have different icons on my home screen every time I look at it. That's too far. Well, we talked about that and we did this labs being up on it. And some of the people in labs are very much power users. And several of them really sung the praises of that Siri Suggestion widget because, and they all said, you got to give it like a week. But after that, it just knows. And every time like I'm watching a movie and I look down and it's got the, you know, movie reference app sitting there, or if I'm waking up, it's got the way in app sitting there. They say it's shockingly good if you put it on for like a week. So I put it on for like a day and a half. And I realized I cannot handle having eight random apps every time I look at my phone. You know, it's that's, that's the thing. Yeah. Just me. With the widgets, I do want to mention, And I'm going to show these home screens later too when we talk about different focus modes. But the top widget stack on my home screen is the same stack across all my focus modes. And so in addition to the weather in that stack, I also have my Fantastical widget. But then I also have an app called Showcase, which is a nice movie and TV tracker. And I use it as like movies that I'm looking forward to in the theater. It just has a nice little image with the movie title and how many days till that movie releases. So that's just in that widget stack as I'm flipping through, I'll see that. So I like having that there. And then in this far right image, you'll see I have four family members. And that is the contacts widget, which we talked about, I think last week, where if they're in your find my network, it will actually show a label underneath each person of where they are so i you see like my wife is home one son is home but my oldest son is driving because he has his driver's license and he's driving around yeah and what's cool is that context widget will actually update if someone's in a focus mode if someone's driving and you can see on my son's icon is actually a tiny little car so i know that he's driving it says he's on i-75 south and then i can see my mom is somewhere else And so if you, you know, just want that at a glance, what's everybody doing? Where's everybody at? I keep that context widget lower in the stack, but, you know, flip down to it just to get at a glance, see what everybody's doing. So some widget ideas for you. Yeah, you told me about that, but now I see it, I get it. And so what I've done is on my TodayView, I've got a widget stack of FindMy. You don't see it in the screenshot because it's a little bit below, but I think I'm going to set it up the way you did. I prefer that. I just need to know where they are, you know, and I'm presuming if you click on them or tap on them, you can get to them and find my as well. Exactly. You can open it. It opens up in the find my app. Yeah. Now moving on to the today view, I have, I have questions here, David, cause you sent both of the, you put these in the notion and I was like, wait, which is the home screen and which is the today view? Yeah. I could see because you have the, you have two long widgets at the top of your home screen and then you have three long widgets in your today view. Yeah. And I know you were wondering what you should put on your home screen. I'm just going to throw a suggestion out there. You should do what I do, which is take that weather and the Fantastical widgets, make them a stack and put it on the home screen. But then you got to like flip through it. Yeah, you got to flip your thumb. I don't know. There's part of it. I've just got used to the idea that I swipe over and all the information is there. But you have 13 apps in your menu bar telling you your next event. Yeah, I do. I do. and that's that's why i keep the um my fantastic cow widget is underneath the weather on my main home screen because i'll flip to it but often i mean i get notifications when there's an event that i actually need to like pay attention to or go to plus i have the fantastic widget in my menu bar which to your credit i did turn on the up like the next event in the menu bar and i do like that yeah because it tells you how many minutes till the next event and if it's like a live stream or something that's that's nice on the mac but i'm saying just i think you should make a stack and put some of these on yeah you know i'm gonna try because the a point that comes out of this is you gotta scroll mine to get all the today view stuff so if i can move some of it over to the main screen then i don't have to do that anymore so and that's what i find the today view once you get past having to scroll the today view those widgets get much less useful and much less use and so in in my today view i have four shortcuts widgets yeah and these all run different shortcuts and then peeking out at the very bottom i have the food noms widget which you can interact with and actually log foods right from the widget and it will intelligently suggest some things which is pretty cool let's just take a minute to call out food noms because i have you know i'm really working on on weight loss these days so i'm really trying to be careful about what i eat and there are a bunch of these apps out there and some of them just got, I don't know, for lack of a better word, enterprise. They just felt like it turned into a whole thing. And food noms is like a low light kind of app that's not too heavy, but also does everything you need. You point it at the label of a new food and it gets the data. They've got a shared database if you subscribe and most anything you eat is already in there. And it makes tracking your food so easy. If you are thinking about this, I would not look any further than Food Noms. And I will say, I'm waiting to make this video so the title can be, I lost a hundred pounds with this iPhone app, but I've lost 70 pounds so far with Food Noms. And I have not really changed very much my activity. It's really just tracking and Food Noms. I've tried it. I tried my fitness pal. I tried lose it and they're all good apps in different ways. But Food Noms was the first one that stuck that worked super well. I can share it. So when my wife makes a dinner and, you know, it's hard to sometimes track that kind of stuff. She actually does the work because she started tracking too. She'll put all the ingredients in there, create a serving size, and then she can share that to my food noms and I can log it and it's accurate. And so I absolutely love that app. Yeah, me too. Well, we're both on a journey and the food noms is right there for us. It is. And so I want to find out what else is in your TodayView, but real quickly, the last two of mine. I have Parcel. Since you mentioned Parcel on the last episode, I installed it everywhere and I started using it again. What do you think? It's super fun. Oh, it's great. It works with everything. Syncs with my Amazon account. I have it now in my Mac menu bar, which is a change from last week. So Parcel's been great. And I have the battery widget on my iPhone as well. And underneath that, I have the Monarch Money widget, which is a sponsor on my YouTube channel, but I genuinely like it. And the transactions widget is nice because I can see recent transactions across all my accounts in a widget. And so that's helpful. Yeah. Uh, not shown. So in my today view scene is at the top is the calendar below. That's the weather. And then I've got, uh, my car has an app and this is kind of a funny story. I had it on my home screen. And then one day I was goofing off in the house, not paying attention my daughter came and said hey dad you're um the hood you know my car is electric so the hood like a frunk said your frunk's open like what why is my frunk open you know and i looked down my finger must have tapped the widget on my home screen and so i'm like okay so that does not go on my home screen anymore that goes on the today view so that one got over there but and also i've got uh food noms i've got uh is that endle do you use endle it says thunderstorm oh no that's dark noise dark noise dark yeah that's what it is among my many ailments steven i have um tinnitus so i like to have noise in the background uh so i that's probably my most used app i play that thunderstorm constantly i've got batteries there and then below that i've got the food noms and the family location stuff. But you've really got me thinking, man, I may try and move some of the stuff over to the home screen. Cause like, I'm either like going to put nothing on my home screen or I'm going to re figure out this whole system. I feel like my home screen is always in flux. I can never find it like the happy place for my home screen. Well, and that's, I've, I've not, maybe not struggled, but I haven't changed mine in a number of years because this has worked for me. I've swapped individual apps here and there. Like I had the phone app in my dock for years. I don't know why I never used it. And so I finally redid it and, you know, put it food noms and the other apps there. So, but the widget stacks, you know, I would, I would encourage you to try it. And even like for the podcast stuff, I'll use the podcast widget and that's in my smaller widget stack. I have the Apple podcast widget. I have my EV car app. I have the chat GPT widget, and also Anylist, which is a great grocery app. And I use that for groceries. My wife and I share that account so she can add stuff to the list and I go get it. But we also use Anylist for meal planning. And so if I ever want to see like what's for dinner, I actually have that in a widget, in that widget stack. And I can swipe up and see what she's planning for dinner. So many of the productivity apps for me though, always go into the context shortcuts. I just don't want to be fiddling. If I go into my task manager, I want to go to a specific list. I don't want to get lost in the weeds. Same thing with mail. I've got it rigged to go to specific folders in mail. If I want to check some element of mail, I don't want to just go to my inbox. So that actually allows me to take a lot of stuff off the home screen. But I think my widget situation definitely needs help. Well, I will say you're big with the quote and arranging your home screen around that with the no titles on the icons. It's interesting to me. And we also had someone in our forums, Brian, changed his home screen after hearing your strategy. And so he now has this. He did the big icon so you don't see the names underneath, but he arranged it in such a way where it's kind of like symmetrical. And so there's a space above his icons and under two widgets. And then I thought that was pretty cool. And your quote at the bottom, I like that. And so I might, I don't know, I might think about that. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password. Security on the internet these days is complicated, but 1Password isn't. With 1Password, you can easily create unique and strong passwords. All you have to remember is your 1Password. But today I'd like to cover Watchtower. Watchtower tells you about breaches, weak passwords, duplicate items, and other security problems in your 1Password vault. 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Thank you 1Password for all of your support of the Mac Power users. So next, let's talk about different home screens per focus. And I do have various wallpapers, lock screens, and home screens for each. And so I will say when it comes to wallpaper, what you're seeing now and what I'll link below, this is my evening and my weekend focus mode. And I do have different wallpapers for each. Both of them are space related because I do enjoy some space stuff. And so my evening one is kind of an evening scene with a star night sky. And then my weekend wallpaper is the Pillars of Creation, which is the term for this structure out in space. And I think this was an image by the James Webb telescope. And so that's actually NASA's picture. And so I enjoy those as my wallpapers. and then my home screen is actually the same between my evening and weekend focus mode. It's the same widget stacks, the same apps. It's just the wallpaper that changes. And I should mention, and I'm curious, well, yours, I don't know if yours gray all the time, but I change day mode to night mode automatically. I never do the night, whatever that yellowing of the screen is. I don't do that. And you stay light mode all the time, right? right? Yeah, largely. I mean, if I wake up at night and I decide to open a screen, I'll put it in dark mode. So my wife, you know, so it's darker for the room, but in general, I'm in light mode always. And do you use that night shift? Night shift is like the yellowing of the screen. I only use, I've got a little iPad that I'm really into not looking at screens at night. So it's very rare that I do, but I've got a iPad mini, an aging iPad mini that I keep in my bedside table. And I, sometimes I want to read in bed. I don't have a physical book. I'll read that. And I've got that thing tuned all the way up to, you know, to turn out all the blue light if possible and give myself the best chance of going to sleep. Okay. So that's, that's night shift is that feature. Yeah. And one other widget I'll mention now, these are on my weekend and evening focus mode is the Widgetsmith photo widget. And what I'll do is I'll take a recent photo of my family and just stick that as a widget That not a stack That just there all the time And I like that with the built photos widget you have to choose an album for it You can select just an individual photo to show in the built-in photos widget. And you could create an album with a single photo, but I'm like, Widgetsmith, it's way better. And you can have multiple photos that you choose from. And so I do that. And in that other widget stack, and just real quick, the apps I have on here are photos, Instagram, things, wallet, YouTube Maps Gemini Bear, then the same doc, of course. And then in that smaller widget stack, I have Apple Podcasts and then the Fantastical month view. So if, you know, usually in the evenings and weekends is when you're talking to your family and you talk about what's going on that date. And so I'll flip that widget up. I see the whole month at a glance and then you can tap it and it will jump into Fantastical and start looking at that. So those are my focus modes. Yeah. And what people don't realize about that, Fantastical is a medium sized one where it puts the calendar on the left and the events on the right. Right. That is a live widget if you're not aware. So when you're using it. You can tap the little arrows left and right to go through months. Or you can tap on an individual day. You're like, what am I doing on Tuesday? If you tap on it, the list will update for Tuesday. I really like that feature. Yeah, it's an amazing widget. And I think all their widgets are interactive in some way. The month only view, I think it's so small. I'm not sure if there's even tap targets there. And they've got a lot better over the years. Apple was cheating for the longest time where because of the number of calls, they would let a third party app make apps like fantastic. I would always be a little bit out of date. Like you updated your calendar. It wouldn't match as fast as the calendar app would. But I think they've made it. So that's updated more often or whatever, because it seems like it's more up to date than it used to be. It's pretty quick for sure. And so that's, those are my focus mode home screens. And then the only lock screen difference, I don't put anything, any widgets on my lock screens in focus modes. So my evening and weekend, there's no widgets there, but in my default, no focus mode, I do have the, once again, the Fantastical upcoming event widget right under the clock. So it shows like MPU in so many hours. I have my, once again, Food Noms lock screen widget, which shows your calories for the day. And the circle will actually fill in as you log foods throughout the day, which is amazing. And so you can have that right on your lock screen at a glance. And of course, you could tap it to open the Food Noms app. And then I have the weather conditions in a little circle. And I believe that's the carrot weather, but might be stock weather. I'm not sure. And so those are lock screen widgets I have. And above the clock, it's the date and temperature. Or I think there might be current conditions because it's a little different, but you see the same information most of the time. But what was on your lock screen, by the way, for your regular personal focus modes? I've actually put more thought into those lock screens than they have merited. Because even though I've set widgets up on them, I almost never use any of them. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just, I unlock my phone when I look at it. I don't stop to fiddle around with the stuff there, except for the Disneyland focus mode. I have, and listeners will know, I have a focus mode for Disneyland because we go there often enough. And in that one, I have programmed a lower left button to the Disneyland app. Because when you go there, you need the app to get in the front gate and to order food. There's a lot of things you need it for. So it's actually pretty convenient to have it there just on the lock screen. but in general even though i've spent all this time setting these things up i barely use them what is the magnifying glass on that disneyland uh that is uh when you get in your 50s you'll know all about that you suddenly you can't read books and so you it's a little accessibility feature if you're in a dark restaurant and you can't read the menu you hit the magnifying glass and it gives you a higher camera it's a it's an accessibility feature gotcha and yeah listeners and viewers didn't know, you can swap out the flashlight and camera icon on any lock screen to any control center action, which includes third-party apps and even shortcuts. Yeah. And that's how I'm doing the Disneyland one. I just made a simple launch this app shortcut and I put it on that button. Gotcha. Now on your personal focus mode, like I see, I see the Fantastical one, the temperature with the high and low. Is that the dark noise widget at the bottom? That is an app called Whisper Memos, which I absolutely love. It's a, Yeah. So it's a artificial intelligence based voice to text generator. And I just tap on it and I talk to it. And then when I hit done it, it converts it to text and it puts it in my drafts inbox. So I can be anywhere, think of anything, just say a few words. And then the next time I sit at my computer, it's waiting for me. And you like the lock screen widgets at the bottom. I see. Yeah. I generally like to make the clocks bigger than usual. and yeah yeah then you also get the nice depth effect like with the castle right here yeah that's kind of cool that was a good that was a nice it was a cloudy day and i took that picture with the reflection i thought it came out really nice it's the disneyland castle but there's a moat around it you know i'm holding up air quotes moat the uh but it's a really nice reflection but not so bright it looks nice you see the colors that's fun and then this one is your podcasting focus mode which as you would a microphone is the lock screen. Yeah. As little color as there is on my home phone, mainly when I actually unlock it, it does give me an image that reminds me of whatever focus mode I'm in. That's pretty funny. Now, I'll talk about my focus mode home screens, but you also have a different home screen for your focus mode. And is this your Disney one or is this? Yeah. I don't have one for all of my focus modes, but the Disneyland one is special because you have different needs when you're in a theme park. like the battery widget is on the screen and the weather for the next few hours is there and then the host of apps you need to be a theme park guest are there as well now i'm curious your apple watch do you have that changing faces for any focus mode or do you leave that alone uh some of them but i'll tell you to be honest lately i've just been really leaning into utility on the apple watch i uh I do not really like any of the faces on the Apple watch. Okay. So, you know, I kind of like the utility face. Just keep it simple. Another, you know, my reading vision is just not that good. I need reading glasses to read. So putting a bunch of, you know, complications on it are no good to me. I can't even read them. So, you know, just give me a watch. Let me see what time it is. Still does all this stuff in the background for me. But I'm increasingly going to either, you know, the utility face, which is one of the original faces, but I just think it looks nice and classy. Or with, you know, my, or some of the other faces too. I jump through them. I seem to see even be exposing myself as a fraud in here. I cannot settle on a home screen or a watch face, but I always want it to be better. well i will say one of the i wanted to mention with wallpapers specifically a lot of people do photos of like just rotating or shuffling photos on their lock screen and home screen wallpapers and i never preferred that on my iphone because like you i use my wallpaper as a signal as to like what is it right now is it evening weekend or default or filming but i i've wanted to have photos show up somewhere. And so I've actually landed on my Apple watch doing those photos. And so in the evening and weekend focus modes, I go to a photo shuffle watch face, but I was never crazy about the colors because photos are very different in color. Some of them can be very bright, some of them dark. And I didn't like that inconsistency every time I looked down at my Apple watch. And so I finally went to the black and white filter. So you can add a photo shuffling Apple watch face and make every photo black and white. And now I actually like having the photos on my watch and you can actually tap and it'll go to the next photo with the time in the upper corner. And I found the black and white actually makes it more enjoyable to me. It's more consistent. I'm not wondering what color my watch is going to be. And, you know, sometimes I'm a little particular and I like having my Apple Watch band actually match the colors on my face. But with black and white photos, it doesn't matter. And so I've actually done that on my watch. I like it. Yeah. And the other advantage is I think it's easier to read the time because if the photo is too colorful, the time element can blend in. Exactly. Exactly. And the last focus mode I'll talk about, I have a filming focus, which I strictly use for when I have my phone on camera, on screen. And it is using just a regular gradient background. I swap it out for the latest basic Apple guy one. And I have even less on this home screen because I typically just want to focus on the couple apps I'm talking about. Oftentimes it's shortcuts, maybe it's new features in iOS. and so this is like a very limited home screen i'll swap out four apps right now it's home shortcuts push cut and instagram but i'll swap that out for whatever and then i have a podcast widget apple podcast widget that will either show mac power users or primary technology this way anytime i'm doing a video there's a subliminal hey this is a podcast you should go listen to right that's great right there on the home screen i like that and and then the last one i don't travel very often but when i do i like using the world lock screen where it'll actually show your current location on like the satellite globe or whatever and i will put world clocks on the lock screen for current like whatever your current time zone is and home and so i can just on the lock screen see very quickly what time is it at home back in florida versus where i am now and i have the pocket cast widget there but usually it'll be like apple podcast or something we We have talked about basic Apple guy a few times. I'd like to call him out as well. These are the best collection of wallpapers on the internet. Just end of statement. I mean, if you've been going to like these wallpaper aggregation sites, just stop that. Go to basic Apple guy. You'll find whatever you like. I think there's some you can pay for. It gives away a ton of them. And if you want a nice wallpaper and you like Apple gear, if you listen to Mac power users, you're going to like basic Apple guy. And he's, he's hilarious too. he'll do like funny Apple watch workouts where he'll Photoshop what looks like an Apple watch workout, but it's like shoveling snow or something like that. And his, uh, currently he has a February 2026, uh, gradient wallpaper edition. That's what I've been using. And he's releasing a gradient like every other day. And so we'll put links of course, to that and show notes and food noms and all of that down below. It's so much better than anything I could ever make. And, and they're, you're like they're funny they're good if there's an apple keynote he usually put something together around that too does bingo cards for the apple just go through them you'll find a good one super fun one of the funny things i see as a disneyland patron is people because you have to get a special code when you get pictures taken they call it photo pass you know people will take a picture of the qr code and make that their wallpaper and then so when they go get their pictures taken they just open their phone the guy could scan it and uh i i it offends me to know then that you put a qr code in your wallpaper like what is wrong with you i've seen people hack their like costco or sam's club membership upc symbols on either their lock screen or even like their apple watch if it'll actually scan or whatever so maybe make a shortcut then just have the image pop up yeah don't make it your lock screen This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by SaneBox. Now I'm going to be real. I don't have a script. I don't have bullet points. I'm just going to tell you how I use SaneBox because I could not handle my email without it. SaneBox connects to any email account. It can connect to your iCloud, your Gmail, your Outlook. I use Fastmail personally, and it works seamlessly with all of those. Then once you've connected SaneBox, you can have folders created in your account for Sane later, which will take emails that are lower priority, put it in the Sane Later folder automatically, and then you can train it as easily as dragging emails from that folder back into your inbox or from your inbox to Sane Later. Same thing with the Sane News folder, which will gather all those newsletter emails into your folder, skipping your inbox. And I love it because I use the actual stock mail app on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, and Sane Box works flawlessly across all the devices just using the stock mail app, or you can use your app of choice, the Gmail, the Outlook, even Spark. And one of my favorite features is the Sane Tomorrow, Next Week, and Next Month. If you use the stock mail app like I do, you know there's not a great snooze feature. You can do the remind me later, but it doesn't remove that email from your inbox. So when I want to handle an email at a later date, all I have to do is swipe over and move it to my Sane Tomorrow or Sane Next Week folder. It will leave my inbox and then tomorrow, next week or next month, SaneBox will move that email back into my inbox for me to deal with it. Another great feature is SaneBlackHole. So if you ever get an email from a contact that you never want to get email from again, maybe it's a newsletter that just refuses to unsubscribe you, put that email into the SaneBlackHole and SaneBox will take all the emails from that sender and put it in the black hole and delete it after 30 days. You can always go back into your SaneBox dashboard and adjust those settings, but I cannot say enough good things about SaneBox because I use it all the time. It's the only way I can manage my email. So here's what you can do. Go to sanebox.com slash MPU. You could try it for free and then you get a $25 credit towards your SaneBox subscription. So sanebox.com slash MPU for that $25 credit. And of course you can try it for free, but I know you're going to love it. That link is also in the show notes. You can click it there. Our thanks to SaneBox for supporting this show and all of Relay. All right, Steven, let's talk control centers. We had fun talking about that last week on the Mac. Are you going to tell me you've had the same control center for like three years? Is this the theme today? No, the control center is pretty, this is where I'm a power user, I think. This is my iPhone control center. Okay. And I've heavily customized it. I won't go through all the things. I'll leave the image. But I've done so much as like I've removed the default connectivity widget where you have to tap twice almost to get to like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Yeah. I've broken all of that out. So I have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, rotation lock and silence in three small icons at the top. I still have volume and brightness sliders. I have my focus mode picker. I have some smart home controls, a couple scenes and a couple individual devices that I use very often, including my garage door. I have a couple focus mode type things, but then I have a lot of individual actions for third party apps. So I have add an event in Fantastical as a control center control. I have an any list, add an item to any list. I have my screen recording, low battery flashlight, as you would. I also have the call sheet search icon. So if I want to search call sheet quickly, I just click the magnifying glass. I have my set white point in control center because if I'm ever on my phone very late at night, which I know David doesn't do, but sometimes I'll do. I want to drop the brightness even further. I'll just set white point and it drops down. I have my Apple TV remote control, two shortcuts, those bottom two icons. One is a shortcut that whatever app I'm in, it will jump me to the current storage of that app. So it actually uses a URL scheme to go to the settings app, go to the specific app that's on screen and show me how much storage that app is taking up. And then the second one, which looks like kind of a circle of circles, that one brings me to the settings for that app. So if I'm in the music app and I want to adjust the EQ, I can run that shortcut while I'm in the music app. And it jumps me to the music settings deep into the settings app using the URL schemes. And then I have the share shot control, which is I can frame a screenshot if I want to share it on social media, which I do all the time. I can take a screenshot, swipe down and tap the share shot control. And then it immediately frames it with a nice gradient background. that's my first control center and then I have the smart home control center the music the connectivity and if you didn't know you can create multiple control centers on iPhone and iPad but I've created a second custom control center at the bottom which has a bunch of shortcuts and these are all shortcuts that start by hiding the control center and then taking a screenshot And so like I created a shortcut called remember this. So whether you're looking at a text message conversation, you're looking at a product on screen in Safari, you can run remember this. It takes a screenshot, hides control center, takes a screenshot. So the screenshot is of what you're actually looking at. Uses Apple intelligence to parse the information in that screenshot and then creates a reminder based on that information and attaches the screenshot image to that reminder. So there's a bunch of shortcuts in this control center that are based around screenshots and running them from the control center. I find to be the best because the first action in those shortcuts can be to hide it and then proceed with the actions. Yes. And that makes sense because the ones you have in your today view are going to be on the today view. They're not going to be in the right spot to take the screenshot. Correct. And then the action there would be take a screenshot and feed it to Apple intelligence Do you use the local model or the network model? I use the private cloud compute often, unless it has to do with a lot of text. And then I use ChatGPT, because the private cloud compute errors out if you give it too much text. Okay, so your first step, take it. I guess, do you need to add an action to hide the control center? That's the first part of every shortcut I run from here. Yeah. I hide control center, and then I wait one second, because you can add a wait command in shortcuts. because if you don't wait, sometimes you'll still get some control center in the screenshot. Gotcha. And then you take a screenshot, then you feed the screenshot with, and then you have a built-in prompt based on whichever action you've got here, right? Correct. And like one of them is called find local food spots. And this one's really cool. When you run it, let's say someone shared an Instagram story of a restaurant and they didn't share the name of the restaurant. It's just a picture of the outside, or maybe they held up a cup from a coffee place. Yeah. Well, when I run this shortcut, it hides control center, takes a screenshot, gets your current location, and then feeds a prompt into Apple intelligence, chat GPT extension that says, this is an image of a local food or coffee place. Here's my current location. Find any possible businesses that match what you see in this image to my location and, and send me that location or business name in Apple Maps. And then the final part of the shortcut actually opens it in Apple Maps. And it's surprising how well this works. And so I've done this multiple times where I'm looking at something on Instagram, I'll run the shortcut. And in a few seconds, Apple Maps will open to that business location. And it's pretty wild. And then, because you get text back from the AI, then you can kind of do anything with it, right? You can go to Maps, you can go to your task manager, Apple Notes, whatever. Yeah, and that's something like, I have a screenshot to reminder. And so you can just have it take a screenshot. It'll parse a reminder, add it to reminders. One person asked me, they had their wife refuses to use like a grocery app to add items. And so her, their wife just texts them a bunch of items. And he's like, can I parse this into a reminders list? I said, absolutely. So one of those, it'll take a screenshot, look for the items, parse it as individual reminders and add it to the grocery list reminders app. It's, you know, Apple intelligence, as much as we make fun of it, really gives wings to shortcuts. If you use it right. It is the sleeper hit of iOS 26. And especially when you want to parse things like a website. And one of my most viral Instagram reels was if you see a recipe on Instagram, you can share that to a shortcut, go to the raw HTML of that Instagram Reels page, give that HTML to Apple Intelligence and say, parse the recipe that in the caption And it will literally create an Apple note with the recipe ingredients and steps of that Instagram reel And it works surprisingly well And that is still my most viewed reel to this day Do you have, so do you have a YouTube video on how you set up these screen capture shortcut? I do. I'll have to, I'll put a link to one of my videos with a couple of these specifically. Yeah. And I'll put it in the show notes because I have so many shortcuts videos. I think I'm up to like 65. but I'll put the one that has several screenshot type shortcuts in it. Yeah, you should share that because I'm sure people listening would like to build it themselves. And it's not hard. That's the thing. Like we used to, I mean, I remember teaching this stuff and telling people to go write a regular expression. It's like such an ask. And now you just feed it to AI and it does it for you. And one of the really powerful parts is the Apple Intelligence Use Model Action can take a lot as an input without you converting it to text first. So you can just give it a screenshot, give it a photo, give it an Apple note. So you can have a choose from Apple notes action, choose from list, and then ask Apple intelligence to do something based on that note. And you don't have to convert the text to get text from input. It'll just take those notes and even multiple notes as input and do whatever you want with it. And that's actually one of the shortcuts I made a while ago. I called it Siri bot because one of the things about Apple intelligence is it doesn't have a history of your conversations. And so I made a shortcut that every time you asked Apple Intelligence something, it would log it into an Apple Note. And then anytime you would go back and ask it something else, it would pull that Apple Notes text as context into your next request. And it didn't work great. Works not as good as like ChachiPT and Claude, who just have the memory built in, but it's a way to kind of hack the system. Yeah. But I mean, that contextual window is the key to making this stuff useful. Right. that's why it's frustrating honestly that we still don't have the gemini you know brain transplant siri because just imagine the things we'll be able to do when that happens hopefully soon but tell me about your control center you send me a picture yeah okay so i've got mine is a basic control center with a bunch of modifications my modifications largely are kind of below the fold you know the top stuff i've kept the networking tools now playing that stuff um the focus mode picker right that's when i was talking earlier about how i do them manually that's where i usually throw it is there on my watch and then i've got you know the sound and the flashlight there but below that i've got like particular again contextual actions that i want to do um the one one that stands out for me that i use all the time is simple scan greg pierce's scanning app i scan all my mail as it comes in i used to you know use a document scanner and everything when you're a lawyer, you get a lot more paper. Now I don't have as much. Now I just lay it on a desk. I open simple scan. I take a picture of it and it's on my network and in seconds, uh, I've got the remote apps there, the calculator, which comes in handier than you'd think, but it's mine too. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the, uh, Shazam one, um, you know, the, uh, my melodies I talked about hearing, I have my hearing aid up there. Is that the bottom right one is next to the recording? Yeah. The, the, No, it's actually the ear, the top right corner. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. I've got a couple for OmniFocus, my task manager, where I can add and access specific places. Quick capture to an Apple Note is really useful. Got that magnifying glass one I talked about earlier. When I want to switch between dark and light mode, I've been pretty intentional about the buttons that get here, and I occasionally audit it and take a few out and put a few in. Something they've done really well over the years has made it so you can put almost anything in there. And you're just one swipe down away from it. So you start thinking about it. What's the bottom row? Can you go through that bottom row real quick? Yeah, sure. The left one is new inbox item in OmniFocus. The next one over is open a specific perspective in OmniFocus. My bench perspective to me in all my platforms is the stuff that I'm actually working on right now. And then I've got the one to record the screen. you know that's something i do all the time and then the other one is a whisper flow it's another way to whisper flow okay all right well this was part and we've mentioned it here i've mentioned i have things and reminders on my home screen i hear you have omni focus what is when you put in a task where do you put it only focus inbox that's just default to no other place yeah it's just the idea is to have as few of those as possible um but i also capture a lot to drafts and i process the drafts in box daily. And frankly, I'm doing a lot of experiments with cowork and obsidian right now, which could change that formula for me in the future. I'm not sure yet. Right. I just want to mention as you have OmniFocus as your task thing, I dual task manage it. Yeah. And I have things and reminders and I have a weird separation, but it works for me where things is like my work type items except for videos and so for mpu or if i'm trying to do a newsletter or a sponsor thing i will put that in things and then in reminders i have both my personal tasks like take out the trash change the water softener salt and i have a kanban view of all my upcoming video projects. And I had that in Notion for a long time and Notion was great for that. But Reminders feels faster, like faster to just get there and add something to a list. And so I've been liking it. I wish I could in Reminders add more text that's formatted nicely because like Reminders notes aren't very robust. You basically just have like some plain text and it doesn't collapse and you can't expand it. but it's been working for me to keep my video Kanban board in Reminders. And so I dual task it for some reason. I do that to an extent. I have some personal stuff over Reminders, partly because I just want to keep my head in the game with Reminders because a lot of the people in the Max Barkey Labs love it and I want to make sure I'm using it. I also have all our shared lists in there, all the family shared lists. We don't use grocery apps, anything. everything is reminders and we've got shared lists for any store you can think of um and we actively use that so i use reminders as well to an extent but really for me the working space is omni-focus with that asterisk of cloud co-work is really changing the way i think about a lot of things right now so interesting times you led me down the rabbit hole of cloud co-work and i did a whole video on it this past weekend because i was too excited about it yeah uh but just scratching the surface. Now, when it comes to notes, you have several notes apps because I heard you mention Apple notes and obviously we use notion for the show and Apple notes. So what, what is your notes strategy? Um, so I'm going to say obsidian primarily because historically it was my main notes database. I have a lot of things I write down. I call it Sparky OS, but I actually write down kind of my thoughts on anything that is important you know and uh i feel like by codifying it becomes real so i've written essays i also write them by hand i have all these essays i've written i think the combined total of it to me is my operating system and i've always kept that in obsidian but um then i kept a lot of stuff in notes but lately i'm leaning obsidian because of Claude Co work. So this is a little bit in transition for me, but same thing. I need Apple notes because I have a bunch of shared notes. Apple notes is really good in some ways that no other app is good, like embedding images and media and things like my woodworking projects. I'll take screenshots of inspirational pieces. That's not going in obsidian, but it goes great in Apple notes. So it's a bit of a combination notion for me is truly a status board app. I don't like web apps in general. Notion has a local app and there's a lot to like about it. I get it. People run their whole lives out of it, but that's not me. But when I work with other people, there's nothing better. This outline we're doing the show on is in Notion because there's really no better way to do it. And we can track future shows. You and I have a great way to keep track of what's going on. Same thing with my team for the Max Barkey stuff. I know exactly where a video or a blog post or a newsletter is in the process. So it's very good for that, but I work quote unquote, as little as possible in notion. Okay. I'm, I'm on a multiple system. Basically notion is for podcasts here. MPU primary tech. We have both that in notion. Bear is my personal everything. I put everything in bear and then Apple notes is for collaborative notes, which we have a few for mpu i have some with my family for different things and so i three easy and maybe i'll add obsidian because of claude co-work we'll see yeah i'll tell you we're going to do a show on that in the future gang we're already scheduling it i'm doing a bunch of research we have stuff to share here but i want to kind of get it nailed down before we bring it to you for sure and before i forget action button what does your action button do oh i'm glad you asked my action button is another contextual shortcut but okay um for me it is i call it the capture button and it's a choose from menu shortcut and if i need to make a new draft i need to add something omni focus if i want to save a personal day one entry or a max barkey day one entry all this stuff where i capture something fits under that button um i had tried turning my home screen into it like a capture screen, but I didn't find that as useful. I find that the action button is capture is perfect. Whisper memos. I can record a voice memo in the Apple voice memos app, which also transcribes pretty well for free. So I've just got a bunch of stuff in there that it launches on a choose from menu shortcut. And that is, I started playing with that about six months ago and that one is going to stick. I can tell you it has been really great. That's pretty good. And the action button is another place where you could have either shortcuts run or like you're saying, like capture type ideas, because it will be, you know, you can do whatever's on screen after you tap whatever's in the action button. For me, I have it running a shortcuts folder. And so with a shortcuts folder, you can have up to eight items. You can do a choose from menu and have way more. And so if you just want a plethora of options that you could do that. I just like how a shortcuts folder looks from the action button, uh, just cause you know, nice little round icons and stuff, but I have a, I can open my garage from there so I can open or close it using a toggle action. I can wake an Apple TV and open the Apple TV remote app on my iPhone. So it shows a choose from menu. I choose what room I'm in and it'll do that. Um, I have a couple EV car controls, and then I also have a seek action for Apple podcasts where it skips forward three minutes and if you use pocketcast or overcast you're like why do you have a special button for that with third-party podcast apps you can program the skip forward to be way longer than apple podcast i think apple podcast the most you can skip forward is 60 seconds at a time which is really unfortunate so it's basically i have a shortcut that all it does is skip forward the current media three minutes and so that runs that action and i listen to some podcasts that have some very long ads um and so that just you know gets through them a little further yeah i am the folder trick is nice because it does look more presentable another way i used to use the action button last time this came up on the show was i would have focus mode based contextual uh choose from menus so the first thing we do is check what focus mode you're in and that would give you different options based on what focus mode you're in so like if i was in max bargey focus mode it would I could turn off the studio lights or do the stuff I need to do in the studio. But I just found I wasn't using that enough to justify it and, uh, switching it to a capture button became more useful to me. And I find I'm pressing it now every day, a few times where I wasn't doing it as much before. And I've played around with three different methods. One, you can have the action button, do something different in the current app. So you can have a shortcut, check the current app on screen and then take action differently on that. You can do it per focus mode. You can even go so far and use like the toolbox pro and actions shortcuts, actions for based on orientation. So when your iPhone is upside down, your action button does one thing. If it's in landscape, it does another thing. And I found like the cognitive load of trying to think about what is it going to do right now? It was too much. Yeah. It weighs on you a bit. It's like, I know I'm in personal mode. What is going to happen if I push this button? And yeah, if you have to think about that, even a couple of times, you're like, it's not worth, it's just not as useful because then you don't want to use it. Cause you're like, I don't know what it's going to do right now. I'm not sure. So I found having the just folder or a menu and that's the best way. Cause I think the action button is meant to be able to do things quickly. You shouldn't have to think about what you're choosing to do or, you know, what trigger you're going to use. Cause you're in a different app. Yeah. I tell people that choose from menu is like the most underrated action in shortcuts. Cause you don't have to be know anything about shortcuts and you can run that and just put like launch an app or open a website. And it's so useful. Like one of the ones in my, my center, my personal choose from menu context mode, I'll get back to Disneyland is the reservation site because to make a reservation, you have to open the app, navigate to a menu. Then you push a button and then it kicks you to the web. It's just the dumbest implementation I've ever seen. So I just captured that website they kick you out to and did it as an open URL action. And it's just a button under that center button. I'm just there so fast. But, you know, just there's all kinds of little tricks you can come up with. And it all comes out of a choose from menu. It looks pretty. And you feel like you're a programmer. You just designed a personal app and it's just so easy. Absolutely. Or maybe some lightning round customization questions. Okay. Along with the action button, do you have the back tap accessibility setting program to anything? I do, and I never use it. That's exactly. Yeah, I did it for the thing where it increases the camera, like I was talking about for menus. Right. And now all I do is occasionally trigger it unexpectedly, and I'm like, what's going on? and that's this is not something i should admit i guess but sometimes i will do something on my phone in the car like i'm when i'm stopped maybe or driving very very slowly but i find that sometimes back taps get triggered inadvertently yeah uh in that scenario so i turn them all off i don't have it on and i feel like the control center now that you can customize that I'd rather have a visual cue of what I'm about to do than a back tap which I just don't know what it's programmed to right now. So now I gotta add another thing to your personal project Steven. I drive here in the backwoods. I'm out here in the country. I might hit a cow. That's the only thing. Do you do any kind of... I just got a new host. I don't need you to drive. No, no. I'm not going anywhere. Do you do any kind of battery management on your iPhone? Some people love stopping their charging at 80% or whatever. Do you do anything like that? I do none of that. Same. The only thing that in my life relates to batteries is I fret over my kids. Cause every time I pick up one of their phones, it's at 5%. I think that's like their goal is to keep it at 5% all day. Do they not charge overnight? Maybe, but not when I'm around. I don't, I don't get it. But with me, I got a charger on my desk. I got a charger next to the bed. Something weird I do is I don't actually, I usually put the phone in a drawer i drilled a hole in my nightstand and ran a cable into it so when i go to bed i just plug it in and throw it in the drawer and i don't think about it so you're not a mag safe charger at night no i i used to but i didn't like that it would light the room up every time i turned over so i and i kind of like the idea of like okay it's in a drawer it's it's done it's served its purpose i would frankly leave it in my studio except for there's enough people around me I always worry about somebody, you know, having something happen in the middle of the night, people trying to get ahold of me. Yeah. Do you, now that you mentioned the nightstand, that is a standby mode also on iPhone where you place it on a charger and landscape. Do you ever use that? All the time on my desk in a studio. Oh, you do. Okay. When, what do you have on there? Uh, I've got the date and the clock once more. You have the date in three 30 places. I need to know what day it is. If you ever need to know the date, ask Davis Parks. He has no chance he doesn't know. It's the 24th right now. Thank you. I have three independent means of verification in front of me. I don't know why it's so funny to me. It's like the date is not getting past Davis Parks. It is not escaping me. What do you put on yours? Nothing. I never use it. Yeah. I never use it. I don't have a MagSafe charger on my desk. And at night, like you said, I don't want my phone, my screen lighting up for any reason. and you can set the standby mode to like only activate on motion. Yeah. But I find even then it will light up inadvertently. And so I just, I don't use that at all. I don't like it. But then like storage, how big is your iPhone? I don't know if I know. 512. Do you ever think about storage? You do anything storage-wise? I don't think about it. It's more than I need. I think I use like half of it. Yeah. How about you though? Because you shoot a lot of video. Do you need the big boy? I get a one terabyte, which I think you can get up to two terabytes now, but I didn't do that because I feel like if you have to go two terabytes on your iPhone, like something happened, something bad. Well, if you're like doing professional video and you're shooting in, you know, raw, then you probably need it. That's true. And I, I don't, um, I don't leave those big video files on my iPhone if I ever do it. And I don't record my hour long a roll on my iPhone. That I'll still do on like my Osmo, but I have the one terabyte and I'm using three 60 right now. So I could probably get away with the five 12, but I want the headroom. I like the headroom. Do you download all your photos? Not on my iPhone. Well, wait, I thought you were joking about last week's photo backup. No, no, I'm just serious. If you've got a phone that big, I think you could probably just have it put all your photos on locally. My iCloud photo library is like over a terabyte. Oh, really? Wow. So it wouldn't do it on my iPhone. Yeah. Wow. So it's, listen, I have it saved on my Mac Studio and on a NAS. Casey List texted me after last episode. Put it in one place and pray a lot. I know. I know your theory. casey list told me he has it in eight places including a remote synology at his parents house he has it in like a fort knox bunker yeah you don't need to go the full list but you should have a couple backups that's all yeah yeah existing attached network attached storage with the high bandwidth connection the hardware is right there uh do you don't use a case do you that's a lot i know generally i don't i own a case i always buy one um but i don't generally put it in. I guess if I'm going somewhere very active, I might put it on. It's probably been two or three months since I've had it in the case. So I also go no case. I used to be case all the time, but now I'm no case with, this is the Moft MagSafe wallet and stand. And because the Pro Max just starts feeling really big, I use this as like a little grip, which is cool. And then I keep my cards in there and it also has Find My built in so you can not ping it. Because with the Moft stand, And when you open it up, you can actually, it's enclosed. You can stick your fingers in there and use it kind of as a bit of a grip. Although it's not attached very securely. So I'd imagine you still got your hands on the phone. This one is actually more secure. This is like the latest model and it's pretty sturdy. Moft makes good stuff. I really like their iPhone accessories. I've got a couple of their things. I like their stuff too. I actually met them at CES. They had a booth there. and they're a dynamic ipad folio case is super nice um that's pretty cool but that's our iphones that's a lot of iphone stuff yeah that was fun it is well well if you want to hear more on more power users remember we're going to talk about the m5 and i'm going to try and convince david to upgrade his mac studio we'll see if i'm successful coming a couple weeks from now i feel like it's not a very heavy lift to be honest you'll see the length and minutes of the more power you'll know how quickly I did it. But you can go to relay.fm slash MPU for feedback and a membership. Of course, love to see you in the forums, commenting on YouTube. Links to that are down in the show notes as well. Thank you to our sponsors, Ecamm, 1Password, and SaneBox, and we'll catch you next week.