Favorite Apps of the Year, Mac Pro Went Missing, and Looking to 2023

The Art of Staying Focused: A Conversation with William RI

As I sat down to discuss the latest trends and technologies with William RI, I couldn't help but notice his enthusiasm for staying focused on tasks. "I've realized that I'm a happy prisoner of Omnifocus," he confessed, highlighting the popular task management app's ability to streamline his workflow. For those unfamiliar, Omnifocus is a powerful tool designed to help users prioritize and manage their tasks, making it easier to stay organized and focused.

William's experience with email is another area where he finds himself torn between different options. He has tried various email services, including Apple Mail, but often feels drawn to other alternatives that promise innovative features. "I've tried all of the rest," he lamented, suggesting that he may have been too hasty in his assessment of their merits. Despite this, William remains loyal to Apple Mail, appreciating its reliability and stability.

One intriguing aspect of William's email setup is his use of Gmail as an archive service. In a clever hack, he created a separate Gmail account specifically for archiving articles and scripts from various projects. However, when Google decided to modify the address format, this system was compromised, forcing William to reassess his approach. "I'm getting emails from people who are saying why do you never respond to emails?" he chuckled wistfully, highlighting the unintended consequences of relying on Gmail for communication.

As we delved deeper into our conversation, William touched upon the topic of custom domains and email services. He had attempted to set up a custom domain with iCloud Mail in the past but was disappointed by the limitations it imposed. Despite his desire for flexibility, William is currently using Google Workspace, which has become an indispensable tool for his work. However, he remains open to exploring alternative options, including FastMail, a service that promises greater control over email addresses.

Another fascinating topic of discussion was Apple's foray into virtual reality (VR). With the upcoming release of Apple VR, William is cautiously optimistic about its potential impact on productivity. While he acknowledges the impressive capabilities of existing VR technology, he remains skeptical about integrating it into his daily routine. "I think it kind of has to be something like that if we're going to spend thousands of pounds or dollars on this kind of thing," he mused, implying that Apple's latest venture must offer a compelling reason for adoption.

As our conversation drew to a close, William expressed gratitude for the opportunity to share his thoughts and experiences with our audience. He concluded by stating that 2022 has been an eventful year, but he is eager to see what 2023 holds. "I will see you again in 20123," he quipped wryly, hinting at a playful approach to looking forward to the future.

As we conclude this article, we invite our readers to share their own thoughts and experiences with email services, task management tools, and virtual reality technology. Whether you're a seasoned user or just starting to explore these areas, we encourage you to engage with us on social media using the hashtags #WilliamRI or #Tuskus. Don't forget to follow us on Mastodon for the latest updates and behind-the-scenes insights into our show. If you'd like to support our content and access ad-free versions, please consider leaving a five-star review or subscribing to our service. Thank you for tuning in, and we look forward to catching you next time!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven robbles and today we're going to talk about the Mac Pro seemingly absent at the End of This Year look forward to 2023 some of our favorite apps from this past year and maybe a little Mastadon talk as well this episode is brought to you by I amazing and joining me for the final time in 2022 my friend across the pond William Gallagher how's it going oh it seems so final when you say it like that I thought it was going okay no just this year just this year no no no no you'll be back in in like what two weeks about 5 hours something like that yes yes yeah it does it does feel like that for sure well we're going to talk about uh looking forward to 2023 in this episode and special guest Jason a0 will join us next week for a year in review looking at everything Apple released this past year but we're going to be futurist today William you can finally give your official Apple car prediction in this episode it'll be blue it'll be January I'm done oh there you go now I know the people have been asking for this so let me let me play this here real quick roasting on an open fire I'll let you know when it's your Q uhhuh Jack Frost nipping at your nose this is the micro BL Blade Apple music sing you TI carols being some by a choir and folks dressed up like Eskimos all right William you go thinking about it I think the Apple car probably be silver space gray or silver not blue yeah I just want our listeners to know I tried you I tried doing the Apple music sing I mean you forget the fact that I've just had a disastrous holiday and I came back to be in your company and have a good time and then you do this to me and it's fine no no it's all right now wait a minute now wait a minute what what happened you did go on holiday and you said it was it was not so good what happened don't even go there oh actually that was the problem we didn't even go you know that bit at the airport you didn't go you you've got you've done the online checkin you're in the queue to go to security and uh flighty on your Apple watch pops up to say your flight's been cancelled that's what happened what but it Airways decided to cancel a flight yeah and we were going on a six- day river cruise from Budapest and British Airways said yeah if we were very nice if we were very good they would swap us to another flight that would get us 3 days into our six day course and of course of course cruise but of course you know the boat would have been 3 days gone by then so uh the whole holiday was scrapped and we drove no William what but on the upside the flighty app is is really well it's mostly really good uh even after the flight was canceled kept telling us that the inbound version of the flight it's nearly here I'm thinking you know I don't care very much anymore I really don't care it's gone but other than that it was far better than heo Airport's own app for example but now there was no other like things that you could know other flights that were available uh it looked to me going through uh flighty and um what's say kayak and things like this all this information you can have I could track down flights that would get us there a day late uh which is better than 3 days late and maybe we could have done something but it was not allowed imagine if we decided to spend several hundred pounds and just buy an extra flight for somewhere else maybe we could have got there but it's wasn't really an option so instead I came home and sulked that's what I did oh my goodness were you able to get like a move your river cruise ticket to another time or get some kind of re refund yes uh we will actually do it about this time next year although mly amusingly it was canceled last year because of covid and at one point during this it looked like the next December one was full so it would be 2024 and I don't know what happened to fix that but it would have been a four years late uh Cruise my mom keeps saying that Angela and I are always going on a cruise and we're trying but you know it's my first ever won oh my goodness was this armor waterways or Viking Cruise it was Viking you know them that's yeah I do I do I've had the privilege of going on one river cruise down the Rind oh and it was it was beautiful uh yeah not helping but good good I'm sorry I'm sorry okay all right we let's talk about app what your I'm so sorry better so hopefully next year you'll get to go my goodness but seriously flighty app I subscribed for a month uh for the INB atban really impressed uh with that app so that's a good thing to come out of this and I will subscribe for a month again the next time I'm going flying so next year it really it really is a great app and like live activity wise it's one of the few that it just works really well and is reliable yeah I was so looking forward to that but because the flight was also delayed live activities on flighty starts only 3 hours before the flight departs I learned and uh the flight was sufficiently delayed that we didn't quite get to that point before it was cancelled I was really looking forward to my first actual use of live activities but oh it was not to be next year William next year we're going to hear a wonderful story about you on a river cruise uh but flighty will be the highlight of your trip that's we'll hear about the next year although you know by next year who cares there'll be all this great Apple stuff out that's what we'll be thinking about forget holidays well we're going to get to that because well maybe we'll make some predictions for 2023 uh real quick one five star review shout out Kier me from Estonia all right Estonia International review this year this this episode very cool all right so real quick before we get to our predictions and looking forward to 2023 a couple news bits seemingly absent this entire year has been the Mac Pro we got that mention earlier this year from Jeff Williams saying it's the last Mac to go to an Apple silicon transition but we're now in the final week of 2022 we have literally just one week left no mention of the Mac Pro from Apple uh doubtful I think that we'll hear anything about it now but according to Mark German in his power on newsletter from Bloomberg supposedly Apple's pulling back from offering a Mac Pro with an M something extreme chip inside due to production problems so this might be what has caused the delays and might even be canceled now apparently the complexity worries over cost things like that General recession time it's like who's going to buy a super expensive Apple silic Mac Pro so we might not see it till next year or probably not see it till next year and even then it might not have the extreme chip it might just have some kind of double M2 Ultra variation with a bunch of GPU cores and bunch of unified memory so we'll see I I I'm surprised I really thought we'd at least hear about it sometime by the end of this year well on the positive side you know whatever it is whenever it comes it'll still be faster and cheaper than the current macpro it'll be very impressive whatever it is oh yeah I mean that's a pretty low bar from the the Intel from 2019 that's actually three years old um the thing is Apple totally failed here really Apple silicon 2 years from WWDC uh two and a half years ago whole range failed to do it Apple blew it completely what do you mean they did fantastic machines otherwise uh they failed on that literal promise but you know I mean you got to let them off everything else is so great I yeah and I mean the Mac Studio was something that was not expected no at least you know right until right before it was released and so while it might not have made the transition for the Mac Pro we did get the Mac Studio and that's actually been one of my favorite products from this year because it Powers everything I do here at this disc so but we'll talk about what we can look forward to he Mark Gman did say in 2023 we should see an M2 Pro Mac Mini M2 Ultra in some kind of device maybe an updated Mac Studio and M2 Pro and M2 Max in the MacBook Pro Line which that seems pretty reasonable probably maybe fall time or maybe summer but we'll see we'll get to that couple other pieces of news the self-repair program has now added the M1 iMac M1 Mac Mini and the Mac Studio and so if you want to try and repair your own M1 Max you can now do that and even the studio display has been added to the self-repair program I don't know about you William but I have no desire to take apart any of these devices I would not do it what it's just not going to happen no not at all and I feel Apple knows this but uh you know if anybody's brave enough good on them and everybody has enough money to rent the tools or buy whichever bits and yeah and risk a machine going wrong well then it's great for them and why shouldn't it be but no I looking down at this MacBook Pro thinking no and then M1 iMac that is a very very thin computer and the whole computer part is in like that area I don't want to mess with that I I have you ever repaired like an iMac where you have to like pizza cutter the screen off have you ever done that I've been involved in incidents that were related to this that's as far as I'm going to go I did not myself get my hands dirty but I held dirty hands while it happened and it was uh not a success shall we say so the first time you do it it is one of the scariest things and I literally broke an iMac display the first time I Pizza cuted it off I rep reped the hard drive with an SSD everything was looking good and when I plugged the display back in and turned on the computer there was a nasty green line down the middle of the monitor like an inch wide and I was like well I guess I must have bent it a little too far because that's broke yeah but after that actually I've actually replaced maybe maybe 10 or so IMAX because I've I've the where I used to work we had a bunch of older IMAX the kind that were like the unibody and replacing the super slow hard drive that was like 5200 RPMs or whatever if you replace that with an SSD it is an incredible upgrade to those older iMacs and they feel much faster and so part of my gig was just like changing out a bunch of those and I got pretty comfortable with it and so I never messed up again and I did about you know you order the iix it kit you get the little adhesive strips I did probably about 10 or so of those and I did mess them up again so but just to be absolutely clear here none of these Macs were actually yours so your money wasn't on the line at any point right no no none of them were mine and I would not mess with my studio display or my Mac Studio right now and also the company that you worked for doing this job they let you do the second one even after the first one had gone AR well the first one was for like a like a client not necessarily my actual work and then the rest of them were for my work so okay I guess I kind of practiced on a different client at first on the clients uh there you go that's yeah listen I I bought a new display on eBay or whatever and I replaced it all good oh I see that's all right which those man those were expensive buying just a display only I basically made no money on that repair cuz it was like $250 I think just for a display on eBay not cheap that cheap but pretty good price for what you get isn't it an iMac display is amazing yeah I mean it was a retina one so I mean it's not you know it's pretty pretty good display I won't be taking apart any of my computers I I get Apple Care on pretty much everything I even got it on my studio display even though it's just sitting here on a desk because because it's a studio display I I don't want to ever have to worry about trying to fix something myself so you are you I forget are you an Apple Care guy do you get Apple Care no I should be for certain things but I just am not it over the years the budget has been such that Apple Care made the difference being able to get something or not and uh although you go around smashing your Apple watch into walls and things um I have none of those issues I've I have shattered the screen on my iPhone uh once since 2007 and that was a horrible time but I don't even have a case on it so yeah I'm just seemingly naturally more careful than you this is now wait a minute when you were thinking you were traveling on a river cruise did you put a case on your iPhone then uh no no I didn't you're going to go no case yes wow I'd be curious for our listeners what the split is on no case vers case I don't do no case also because the camera bump is so big now I feel like without a case it's always like rocking back and forth on a table you ever experienced that yes but I'm very careful I keep it in Pockets I keep it in bags occasionally I very rarely have it slapped down on on a hard surface anyway I have a kind of a leather um I was going to say mouse map but it's B than that a desk mat on my main office desk and so it rests quite comfortably on there but otherwise wise no I don't put it down what about when you're walking down the street there over in the UK do you ever use your iPhone while you're walking down the street and were you going to drop it uh yes and yes but no okay but but you've never dropped it uh once when I was putting it into mycket uh it it kind of flew out of my hand and did this amazing um Arc through the air away from me and I watched it shatter on the ground uh but I have no idea how it sort of reverse slipped out of my hand that time no otherwise no wow okay well that kudos to you I I don't uh I always like it when I take it out of the case just to like kind of feel the raw iPhone and it's always like that's a really nice Hardware device but goes right back in the case I don't I don't keep it out I don't like doing that oh see I just put my mag safe case back on I don't know if you heard that anyway also I thought this was interesting Wes actually pointed this out on Twitter but there's a new there's a new Apple music show for classical works and it's hosted with Alexis French he's a classical pianist and he has I love his music actually I listened to his stuff even before this show came out but it's basically kind of an interview style show where they also play some music and I thought this was I thought this was interesting because I went to listen to it and it's very much like a podcast style show where he's talking he interviews people and then there's you know some music that's played with it and I was like I would love this as a podcast and so I thought let me check I went to Apple podcast but it is not there as a podcast it is only in the Apple music app and you could be halfway through listening to this show with Alexis French and if you go to like play another piece of music it totally loses your place and so if you're like 20 minutes into this hour show and you go play another music track it loses your place so the next time you go back to it it just starts from the beginning again and I thought this was very strange like that's definitely something you'd want to save your place in if they wanted to do something like Spotify where you have these talk type shows in addition to the music which I know there's also like apple music radio but do you ever listen to that do you ever listen to like the interviews with Zan low or whatever no uh cuz I'm in the UK I was used to Zan low from BBC Radio and it's like I've had enough there thank you um this when she was saying that that suddenly made me wonder whether we're going to get an apple uh classical radio station as well and that this is a production well and this this was the thing because that was one another promise that was another promise that Apple said Apple music classical Standalone app will launch in 2022 looks like at this stage in the game we're not going to get it I mean we're like one week left of the year I doubt Apple's going to launch something between Christmas and New Year's so I don't think we're getting it but this does seem like an ideal piece of content for a standalone classical app that also has talk shows that will save your place and uh I'm I've been waiting for the Standalone classical app for a while so I don't know I think this is interesting I wish it was a podcast format and one of the things I'm looking forward to in 2023 is I hope they launch this classical app I want to I want to see it I want to use it and um me too but the shows you've heard from this were was there anything in them that was um topical that meant they had to go when you heard them they couldn't have been saved up for the app no I mean it wasn't super like of the moment you know it's just commentary on different music works and pieces so you know it could have launched with the Apple musical classic apple music that's going to be interesting to say the Apple music classical app but I really just want it as a podcast and I mean Apple does so many original podcasts and they're in the podcast app I don't know I feel like it would have been better served there so we'll see we'll see when that music classical launches if this will be uh a talk show radio style thing there I never tapped that radio tab in the uh in the music I did listen to the country when it first came out and I was writing about it I left the country music uh channel on for quite a while and I liked it but um I I like American country music from about September to October 1996 uh and it wasn't a lot of that on the show William did you just say you listen to American country music yes um but only music issued or played on heavy rotation between September and October 1996 yeah and also actually only by women because men look so silly with those hats I just can't take it you know wait a minute are you real with me right now I can't tell if you're pulling my leg Yeah I am actually no there's a there's a channel you still have in the St it's called CMT country music television and for quite a while it was here in the UK and when I discovered it uh it was desperate for rating so anything it could possibly call even in 44 time was included so there was Bruce Springstein was on there Dar Williams who doesn't really sit into a genre but you could if you really wanted to call some of her songs a bit like country and actually that's how I discovered Dar Williams D R Williams I absolutely love her writing for it and I used to listen to it while I was doing the washing up um I would actually have it on the TV set on Sky Television and reflect Ed in the glass window of our kitchen while I was washing up and then CMT pulled out of the UK just as I got into it about 5 to six weeks later but to this day there are certain songs uh by Gretchen Peters uh for example that I really like and I I the other day I looked it up and it is a very specific period in time I like yeah wow well you learn something new every day I had no idea that you listen to American country music this episode is brought to you by imazing imazing is the Swiss army knife of iOS device management for mac and windows that delivers unparalleled access to features and capabilities that Apple doesn't provide things like a powerful local backup solution for iPhone and iPad including support for time machine like snapshots and automatic backups over Wi-Fi you can easily transfer music between your iOS device and any computer without limitation now with a built-in music player so you can listen to your music directly without Apple music or iTunes and amazing is the best way to move files from your computer to your iPad or iPhone with quick transfer a free feature of IM amazing oneclick drag and drop is all it takes to get any file into any iOS supported app on your device you can also browse and Export iPhone messages or WhatsApp and you can export those to PDF Excel or plain text for safekeeping or compliance purposes plus they have advanced tools for geeks and developers like extracting log files view the devices real-time console brows and open system files and a ton more amazing is constantly updated with new features it's handcrafted in Switzerland by Apple Fans who enjoy supporting the latest iOS iPad OS and Mac OS features you could try it today and learn more at IM amazing.com that link is also in the show notes go to IM amazing.com and try it for free today our thanks to I amazing for sponsoring this episode so real quick wanted to talk about weather apps because dark sky if you remember years I think it's like 2 years now at WWDC Apple acquired dark sky was incorporating the features like precipitation forecast and all that into the stock weather app and now dark sky is going to be sunsetted at the end of this year which is like in a week so if you still use the dark sky app you will not be able to once we enter 2023 now there are lots of options out there for weather apps and we have an article I'll put the link in the show notes that talks about the several apps The Weather Channel app which I find kind of obnoxious do you have you do you use the weather channel app no I'm a I was a do eer then um I'm stock weather app when the last revision of it was done and it had and it visibly absorbed all of Dark Skies ethos that's when I did it so a Weather Channel I've seen online and it looks quite ugly even online so I can't imagine using in an app yeah yeah it is it is quite ugly but anyway you have the weather channel app there's a few others in the article but carrot weather is also the very popular app especially for widgets and the Apple Watch app cared weather's very popular I just I use the stock weather app too I just find that it's been really good the precipitation forecasts have been pretty spoton at least here in the states for me even in Florida where it could rain for 5 minutes and then not for 3 hours then rain for 5 minutes again so stock weather app has been really good I should say actually stock weather app is not good here in the UK for rain starting in 7 minutes ending in 11 it tries and it tells you that stuff but it's generally wrong uh but in exactly the same way the dark sky was I think there are fewer weather stations here it's more of a micro climate it's a gorgeous feature where it works but it doesn't happen to work here and actually speaking of gorgeous I think the design of Apple's new thing even the subtlety of the animation and stuff there's a developer who calls herself nval Swift I'm presuming Swift is a reference to the language not her real name but she's on Twitter as Naval Swift and she talked about at some point whenever this first came out of the effort that went into the redesign of it and I I think Apple did a marvelous job yeah I agree I I really like it although it's also been buggy for me since 16.2 which I'm not going to complain about it again here but my entire homekit home has now lost 21 devices again 21 devices are showing no response after I factory reset them all and repaired them I just it's ridiculous I don't even know what's happening yeah I'm a bit fed up of homekit at the moment I moved Wi-Fi networks up put in an hero thing and I've got everything back by one light uh and I just tried to I I like being able to walk into a living room at this time of year and say hey Iris or something very similar it's Christmas and have all the Christmas lights come on and I I got it to work for an hour and then it stopped it's like just fed up of devices not responding or not connecting yeah it's just what is wrong with our porch why can't homekit find our porch light why why it's bad I don't 16.2 has been buggy I think in multiple areas is the Home app especially for me but also the weather widget a lot of times I have a weather widget on my home screen and when I unlock my phone it just doesn't show anything it'll just say no weather data really I have to tap it kind of yeah it's weird 16.2 kind of a thumbs down for me it was not not great but indeed what are you going to do you know what I mean I'm not going on the beta not doing it are you doing that are you on the 16.3 uh not not deliberately no right it's never on purpose you just find yourself on it somehow yes it has happened yes yeah so interesting yeah just how you how that happens now I've had several requests from our listeners and followers on social media they're asking if you're going to join Mastadon are you going to join Mastadon Oh you mean me specifically they're asking oh that's very yeah no you're you're the only William I'm talking to right now I mean yeah you are you going to join masteron I did just look over my shoulder to see who you meant but you mean me uh yep I've been on Mastadon for three weeks four weeks now or so oh you have yeah um I like the people I meet on there we chat a little bit uh it seems have coincided with my doing less social media which is unfortunate I don't feel like I've really explored it very much like I I don't think I've even found you on there yet I take it you're on I I am on there but now I'm I'm searching for you let's see I'm W Gallagher home.so and I chose that uh home. social very carefully I copied a poet here in the UK Jonathan Davidson the poet mentioned it gone on I thought well if he knows that one I'll do that one so lots of research went into that wait so it's at at whatw gallager home.so okay do you not have a profile picture on here uh I just see an elephant you know can't even remember that sounds quite likely okay well I'm now following you so all of our listeners uh oh here's a way to check um have I just blocked you oh that might be it that might be it yeah I haven't no I I think I just followed you I think I found you so all for all of our listeners William is on there and it's at w Gallagher home.so I don't want to get into Twitter William I'm not going I'm not going to get into it but no that's not there's been a a mass Exodus uh not not even an exodus but just people saying not going to Tweet on here anymore not going to be active I'm going to Mastadon lots of people like Marco armant Casey Liz a lot of journalists because there was that news I think late last week or early this week where Elon Musk was like Banning journalists who were badmouthing Twitter which is hilarious from a free speech standpoint but anyway not I'm not getting into it William why are you trying to bait me into getting into this I'm not going to get into I wasn't even listening I was add back on masteron finding that you followed me and following you back so um okay okay oh very good okay Mastadon is not as userfriendly as most other social networks but it's getting better and I find that there's more and more people on there yeah not as many as Twitter obviously just yet I also find Mastadon is not great for real-time communication there was a tapbots post I don't know what what do we call a Mastadon message what what is that that is a well some people keep calling them tootes but that doesn't need to be catching on so I don't know I I mean toots is what people called tweets is it I thought oh okay well maybe people are calling it toots maybe I'm let's call them TUS okay oh I see why you did that yeah okay that's I my mind went to Fleetwood Mac there you see so I was just slightly confused yeah maybe we can get tusks to catch on that's kind of hard to say tusks anyway uh tap Bots the makers of tweetbot and pastebot they're making an app for Mastadon which is very similar to tweetbot it's called Ivory see with the Tusk you know what I mean and there's they've been releasing like beta access through test flight periodically and whenever they announce it it fills up almost immediately because everyone wants to use a good app cuz right now Mastadon doesn't have a first-party app there are some other thirdparty apps that are pretty good like Mammoth you know tapbots is well known makes great applications but I was following them and they said all right we're going to to we're going to Tusk out no that's not going to work it's not going to work we're going to post in an hour the link to our test flight and like Market down and then you'll you can get access if you're quick enough and I said all right I'm going to set a reminder for an hour from now and I'm going to like get in there get in on the beta I set the reminder went for an hour I went back to Mastadon I went on the website so I wasn't even trusting any kind of third party API or whatever and it it just would not show up the post from tap Bots wasn't showing up and it wasn't until 15 minutes later that have finally showed up in my feed or whatever for Mastadon and I was like for real time this is not great but I have now since got into the ivory beta or I guess it's even an alpha right now just today just earlier today they they opened up some more uh test flight spots and so I got in there right away I actually just kept clicking the test flight link directly not even waiting for the Mastadon post and I finally got in and I will say Ivory is great and it is a wonderful client for using Mastadon like a social network but Mastadon still has a long way to go things like G and media kind of weird and take a while to load a lot of times pictures are blurred out at first and you have to tap it to load so again not not great in a lot of areas but it's an alternative like it is a viable option and I've been on there a little more and I will put William and my Mastadon Handles in the show notes in addition to Twitter but you know going to try and uh goingon to try and keep using it you know like I say I like the people I meet on it yeah so let's do it yeah and they're doing good and you know it is interesting because you can make like your own server like the Mac stories. net guys they actually have their own Mastadon server and they're all like vtii at Mac stories. net on Mastadon and what's nice is like because it's an independent server like even if Mastadon shuts down some of their main servers like they'll still be able to be there and people like us could still follow them so it's a I don't know if decentralized is the right word but it's Federated is that another word no decentral it reminds me of the way the whole internet was supposed to be self- reparing if a center goes out back when the uh what was a precursor to darpet was that no aranet um that was the whole design of the internet you can lose a center and it all continues it's the same well it's uh it's it's not not bad so I'll put our maedon links in there I've been on there trying to be more active on it okay so let's let's do a little retrospective here on 2022 next week uh with Jason I'm going to be talking about more like the hardware the events and some of the feature set or whatever but I thought it' be interesting to talk about kind of our third-party app use cases you know for this last year where have we landed on maybe our most used apps or still of our favorite apps or ones that have had big updates significant Updates this year and I feel like there's some excellent ones out there and we've talked about these probably in the past but I do have to mention pixel Mater is just killing it killing it they added the video editing on the Mac side they also added some kind of like machine learning something or other the debanding uh thing debanding yeah I've never heard the term and I'm looking at their press release thinking I don't know what this is but then they show you an example and it's a a reasonably low res jpeg where this the blue sky is actually quite stripy and suddenly when you see it you oh yeah I've seen that a lot for it and this just fixes it for it yes it's very impressive it is it is amazing pixel Mater both on the iPad and the Mac you can even get on the iPhone but well different versions for Pixel mat Pro is still Mac only isn't it but there's pixel mat photo and there's kind of just pixel mater that I think is still around for the iPad that has so many uh great features on it as well it's an amazing company I think and they keep pumping out really strong updates it's great it is it is amazing and you know they integrate with shortcuts especially for things like removing background which is built into the OS now but I still find pixel maters is really excellent pixel Mater all the way they have just killed it this year a big shout out to pixel Mater I also want to give a shout out to farite because they had a big update just at the end of this year they released fite 3 can is the developer he was on the show several years ago now but this farite 3 update is amazing you can edit at up to 2x speed there's an entire visual overhaul of the library and the like navigating your projects and templates it is just amazing and faite is what I use to edit the podcast every week this homid Insider and two other shows literally that's all I use to edit is farite 3 and I love it it's amazing I love using it with universal control because as I do chapters for this show I will literally have apple Insider pulled up on my Mac and I'll have all the articles that we talked about and I literally just drag an image from the Apple Insider article on my Mac drag it to the edge of the screen drag it onto the iPad using universal control and drop the image on the chapter art area in farite and it just loads the image and right there that the chapter art is right there so I could do it across those devices universal control works amazingly so huge shout out to fary 3 you got to try it actually the moment I heard there was a new version of far you were the first person I thought of uh so you've obviously got it but you used it have you used this um faster editing two times normal speed thing how does that go for you it's amazing I actually had access to the beta before it went public and I've been editing for months with it and editing at 2x speed is amazing like I now edit the Apple Insider and homid Insider shows at 2x speed and I'm still able to edit I actually posted a video on Twitter I think I'm not sure if I did it on Mastadon but I posted a video on Twitter of me actually editing live and using the 2x speed and it I mean it's great I mean I can edit the show in almost half the time that I was before so it's almost in real time like for an hour show I can now edit it in about an hour cutting out all the ums and breaks and anything else like all the swearing obviously that that comes out very early tell me about it you never hear it but fortunately they're all very British swear words so some of them you don't even know are actually swear words no okay I don't even know things like poppers and Q those are swears right right I don't know what I thought those are okay yeah yeah don't you guys say that don't you guys say poppers for buttons well I've heard that word used in different context anyway um I I edit audio in logic pro which I it's only had sort of steady Updates this year doesn't me anything big I but it's been one of my apps of the year I absolutely love it have you edited audio in logic pro and how does that compare with Ferro for you I edit in logic pro as well I've edited I used to edit podcast there like years ago and I've edited music stuff too I mean logic pro is amazing it's an extremely powerful application but when it comes to just making those Quick Cuts and snapping the timeline so like it eliminates the space it's just several steps in logic where it's not in farite like I can literally drag with the apple pencil in farite select all the tracks delete a section and then there's a ripple delete option which will literally move all the tracks in time to take up that space And so there's no more blank space and like that's literally a one apple pencil move in farite where in logic I mean it's a couple clicks I forget exactly how many it would be but that that's the kind of stuff that makes farite much faster for me so that that sounds like the magnetic timeline in Final Cut Pro you edit something and everything shuffs up I love that but key word there you said apple pencil there uh I take it do would you say an apple pencil is essential for ferite on the iPad definit I would say like I've edited with just a magic keyboard and fite just trying to do that and it is it is not as fast it is not as useful like I really find the apple pencil makes editing podcast and farite super fast if I was just using the the trackpad and the mouse like it would not be the same so definitely apple pencil I've done it with my finger editing in Far there was an emergency some emergency how how can you have an audio emergency but I needed to do some audio work very quickly and fair available and I used my fingers to do it and I and I liked it and it worked but it didn't feel as brilliant as you've made it sound and now I realized actually this is another reason why I should consider an apple pencil again you really should wa do you have one for your iPad Pro I bought uh one of the original Apple pencils first generation one so it doesn't work with my iPad Pro from last year but I gave it to my wife Angela who uh how hardly ever uses it either so yeah I mean my handwriting is so po I'm never going to use it for anything other than control so it's an expensive control when I have a cheap finger to product things I mean I literally only use it for farite that's the only thing I do or if I have like a document like a PDF that I need to sign and fill out for some kind of like medical thing or whatever then I'll bring it into good notes and I'll use the apple pencil for that but really it's only faite for me also have to give a huge shout out to Fantastical which obviously talked about it before it's an amazing calendar app but this year they adopted Focus filters with Iowa 16 they were like right on the launch they had Focus filters available and they are amazing I use Fantastical for lots of reasons it's really just excellent but the focus filters integration and that update was amazing and also like I don't think you can do this in the stock calendar app but like just the ability to hide an event do you use fantastic C I forget I actually stopped this year um when it came up to renewal of subscription it just hit at a moment when I had subscription fatigue and also um I've been using setup which includes busy Cal which is another another another excellent uh calendar app I why am I paying for two I will try to just use byy Cal and no offense to busy Cal but I find even with it there I'm calling up Fantastical little um popup menu drop ones so often and I'm I'm only occasionally hitting features that I'm I'm missing but it's enough that I'm going to go back onto fantastic and you you said Focus filters and things uh that came in since I stopped I'll be looking forward to trying those out what what do you use them for this hiding of events that you don't want to face up to yeah absolutely I mean I use Focus filters every day so I have a focus mode that enables at 6:00 p.m. during the week and I call it my evening Focus mode and all of my work emails work calendars all of that gets hidden away and so if if it's Fantastical if it's my mail app all of those inboxes and calendars just hide so I don't see any work stuff after 6 p.m. then I also have a weekend Focus filter where again all of my work accounts email accounts and mail calendars like it all gets hidden but I still can see my personal events so events that I share with my spouse or with my kids things that are scheduled for the weekend that I still want to see I still see those and I don't see all of the work stuff and if you get a work like invite like a meeting invite you won't have to see it or deal with it so it's a it's clutch I love it so if I ever have I need to have a meeting for you about something awful and terrible bad news I should make sure I email at 559 on the Friday yeah to just get in your head before okay all right yeah that would be that would be wonderful yeah yeah that's that's uh that would be the you'd get right in under the wire if you did that that's right appreciate it appreciate it uh also I have been using reader a ton this year oh yes it is wonderful I use it on all my devices iPhone iPad on the Mac I have all my RSS feeds filing into reader I even have YouTube channels yeah and you can get like the RSS feeds for YouTube channels feed those into reader it's really wonderful and especially like with all that's going on with Twitter it's where I just get the news I get all the news from reader and it's wonderful uh I've been using rer religiously for years many many times a day business personal stuff utterly adore it but just in the last few days I heard an interview with Tim Stringer a guy does learn omn Focus he was interviewed on Mac power users and he mentioned things he does and one of them was just what you said there about YouTube videos in reader and I had no idea that this app I use so much did even more than I thought and from that instant I've been adding uh YouTube channels and so reader yes yeah I yes it's wonderful wonderful love reader pocketcast is still my podcast player of choice I tried Apple podcast for a while this year like for several months it's good and I know it's obviously the most used podcast app but pocketcast still has a pocketcast still has it for me I still love it which do you use now U Apple's own podcast one uh I think nobody's perfect William it's okay pocketcast has this button of playing things back at faster than normal speed uh and apple podcast also has that as well except on Apple podcast it's called unsubscribe you know uh if you're listening to something and it you think it sounds better at faster than normal speed find a better podcast so you know I don't need other features uh like this uhhuh uhhuh yeah I get it anyway pocketcast still Great Bear is still my note taking app of choice I love bear I do every article that I write every meeting Note Everything like scripts for videos I do it all in bear I love bear where where do you do your notes and writings and stuff like that all over the place notes go into Apple notes uh every article is written in drafts five scripts if it's you know um if it's for a podcast or a video and my I have a YouTube channel scripts for that I tend to write in on the outliner because it starts off as notes and built up uh but actual scripts you know TV or radio and stuff go to final draft like this so and occasionally Pages for for just you know when I'm in a crazy mood I do like Pages now don't now don't you find that it would be more convenient if you were able to search everything that you've written in one place and see all the results from that search query at once uh about 30 years ago I worked with a man who made sure he saved a plain text copy of every single thing he wrote into one document and I thought then that was a superb idea and I should really do something like it but three decades on I still haven't got around to it so you know I guess if you if you ever system where this kind of writing goes there and this kind goes here like I guess you'd be able to find it but I just do everything in bear so I can search and all the notes with that search term gets pulled up you know if I start a new uh episode you plan for a new episode on YouTube I run a shortcut it asks me what it is it figures out the number in the series and it creates all of the folders including the barebone script using Omni outliner they're just all done and there for me uh so just it's become automatic now Omni Omni outliner for so many things you're talking about things we like this year I don't think Omni outliners had a significant update this year but they probably hasn't been a day there definitely hasn't been an event I've done that I haven't been planning an omni outliner so uh as ever a favorite of this year and all years forever okay yes all right now I know you're an omn Focus guy as well well which is your tasks for everything I'm still a things guy I still really enjoy things everywhere just the design and the Design's amazing and I also things is such a good name for it oh yeah it's great name great icon love it yeah it's just not quite powerful enough uh for me it's like um it follows the the getting things done methodology but it doesn't quite follow it um so there's just a thing that you have to I think this still true you with only focus so every week or so it'll remind you you haven't looked at these projects and it will kind of encourage you to look through and just check things out so you're always on top of everything with things you can do that but it doesn't guide you through it it doesn't remind you or prompt you it's like the review process doesn't really exist in things is that still the case that is still the case there is a log book and things where you can see like what previous tasks you've accomplished for each day so you can kind of review that but yeah it doesn't have all those kinds of features and honestly I actually use a combination of reminders and things because one thing I wish things would do is not show me a task if it's something that I can't do until a certain time of the day yeah omn Focus does that but I took it for granted that things did right I know omn Focus does that which all right wow I'm really surprised at that any task that has a due date for today will be in the things window from the beginning of the day you can add a reminder for a certain time and that's when it will notify you but it's visible in the interface and I when when I have a task that I can't do until like 300 p.m. on a certain day I don't want to see it until 3 p.m. and so I actually use reminders for that kind of stuff it'll be recurring reminders repeating or whatever and then it will show up at 300 p.m. and I'll see the reminder pop up on my Mac and other devices and that's how I deal with those I did wish I can kind of do all that in one and uh that's a feature request if things is listening oh I realized when you said that I do use another app called je uh due for really time sensitive yeah uh things because it prods you on your watch and the phone and things and it does not give up until you go in and say yes I've done it stop it um and omn focus years ago promis that sort of feature was coming it doesn't seem to have so notifications don't prod me as much as due does so for the odd thing can't think of an example but a phone call I've got to make at a certain time that happened today that was in June I don't like being sped over multiple systems I know what I just said about writing but for reminders and things I like to know if I look here and everything is done then everything is done I don't have to go find some other system to check there as well but I do do for that yeah I see that I can see that and the last app third party app that I'll mention pastel I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but pastel is an incredible little app where it can keep color paletes for you and it has this really cool feature where if you want to pull the color from a certain image let's say a logo this way you can use those colors elsewhere you can actually just drag an image into the pastel window and it will literally pull the exact colors in the image that you dragged into there and then you can have different libraries uh where like different color palettes are saved and if you work with like Brands especially if you're like a web designer or graphic designer and you work with the same Brands over and over again pastel is a great way to keep those brand colors in one place and then what what you can do is you can go into that color group for a certain brand and when you rightclick one of the colors you can copy the hex value the RGB value float hsl and this way if you work at HTML you can just use the hex value or if you're doing something like in pixel Mater or whatever you can copy the RGB or the hex and I just love it like it's a really convenient way to keep brand colors in one place and quickly access them and copy things that are useful like X codes one so how often do you find yourself ripping off Branden colors from other sides then well not not from other sites but like so for my my movies podcast I dragged the podcast artwork into pastel and it pulled the dominant colors from the artwork and then whenever I'm going to make something for that podcast whether it's a social media graphic or whatever I'll go into pastel and I can choose any of the four dominant colors copy the hex value and I know it's the exact color from the brand and you're good to go and there's like three or four Brands I use regularly when I was doing more website building I use it a lot more often because you know if you're making a website hopefully there'll be some kind of color palette or logo to use and I would import it and and use those you know pretty often so it's it's a really cool app pastel we'll put links to all of these in the show notes and now you have a couple listed here I've recognized one I think so tell me about your third party apps of choice wow I think the quickest one is Ma's edit has just had a really nice update it's a Mac only uh I suppose word processor for blogs it just it connects really easily to whatever your blog is WordPress in my case and it just is a nice editor um it went in grabbed all my blog posts 700 out of them uh in my self-d distract blog put them all there for me to just scoot through do anything I want and I I I suppose there's no logical benefit to using locally instead of going online to Wordpress and going through the WordPress archive but it feels as if there is it feels like it's yours it's there you can take your time over something uh even with a bad internet connection I actually I got into it partly because it came out just before I didn't go away but I also figured when I went away I was going to have very limited internet access so I was always going to prepare the blog offline and kind of Squirt it in and this just did it so well I find I'm doing more because of it so Mars edit yay love it okay yeah Mars edit has been around for a long time yeah it is a good app and then your other one I think you've mentioned it before but what is hook Mark hook Mark I love hook Mark it's transformed my writing this year I mean I used it last year it was known as hook and it was very good but I found it oddly hard to get into this year it's got new features it's been rebranded as hook Mark which I think is a great name and it's also their part of setup and think things so I looked at it again and you know I there's the way I used to work before hook Mark and there's the way I work now it's it gathers together everything you're working on so for example I just uh two or three times a year I do a magazine for a company and when that magazine comes around well there's a briefing from the client that's in a couple of different emails uh it's a collection of articles by Young Writers so they're all the submissions I have a folder of ones I've rejected I have emails about the rejections I have spreadsheets with the schedule for it an affinity design uh sorry Affinity publisher document for a pdf version and all of this stuff you yeah when I'm in the magazine and I'm in Affinity publisher and I think I can't remember what the publish what the client wanted me to do about this particular thing I press a key and I'm in that email from them it's not that I've been taken over to mail and gone to search for it I'm in that very email and when I'm in that email I can leap to the rejected folder I can leap from a rejected folder to the spreadsheet with the schedule on it all other things you choose what you want linked to what and it's straight there I mean maybe a clear example is um uh I use spreadsheets quite a lot and stuff so I have a spreadsheet for my bank accounts when I'm in that specific spreadsheet no other then the same keystroke will call up all of my bank accounts for it all of my tax records and things and you just keep adding the stuff to it and once you've got it together I mean I suppose that example of with the publisher on it uh and the client I would have to come out of affinity publisher go to mail search for the client's name maybe i' put that email in a folder and it's it's not hard but it breaks the moment the concentration whereas now it's oh I need to know this I know it it's done and we carry on it is uh revolutionary I think is not too strong a word for hook Mark wow all right hook Mark then finally very quickly let's look to 2023 William I want to know what you're excited about for 2023 if and what Apple launches or third parties that's cool too but I think this might be the year for Apple VR yes I think so too yes I think that is a likely release I'm very curious what the story will be behind that maybe we'll see it at WWDC so developers get early access to a VR type device but you know iPhone 15 with USBC likely this year finally saying goodbye to lightning an M2 iMac or Mac Mini you know some of those Hardware chip updates but you know I don't I'm not sure what I'm what I'm most excited about I really do find like a lot of my Apple devices they're just so good right now like my M2 iPad Pro my Mac Studio Studio display they're all great and even as like iterative updates happen in this next year or two you know I don't know how much I'll be updating iPhone I update every year but you know that's how we do but the um yeah I don't know what are you most excited about weirdly none of Apple's launches I I I know I will buy the iPhone 15 Pro I skipped the 14 um I know I'll buy the 15 Pro uh but other than that I just unless Apple comes up with another Mac Studio type of surprise that makes me think well you know what apple is like when they bring anything out you want it they're very good and making you want it for at least a few hours there until you sober up a little bit for it uh I really like all of the gear I've got I have a lot of Apple gear now I'm I'm using it all to death and I really like that um but the iPhone is the one that will be replaced I wonder what's going to happen with the Apple watch Ultra 2 uh what's going to happen with there or whether it's going to the line's going to blur together again for it I'm not sure I have an Apple Watch series 7 and I had there was nothing to compel me to go to an eight but would that be to the nine I don't know it might be the the next major design overhaul because it's been pretty similar since the four maybe maybe but I'm I'm so happy with my Series 7 that it's going to take some doing to make me regret that I can guarantee as well also there is a thing I know is coming in 2023 because I've been using the beta for such a long time uh omn Focus 4 for the Mac the iPhone and the iPad uh you me we mentioned it a moment ago it's my to-do app of choice well now it's my very to-do app of choice the beta stuff I mean go to the omig group's website and see if they can still let you on the beta test uh because it is so so good uh it's hard to explain why it just seems to fit my work even better than it did before and there's so much automation that I don't tend to understand but I copy other people's Automation and they add things in and so it's like I get extra features every few weeks on this thing which actually also locks me in Tom F because I've suddenly realized I said it to you but I'm quite happy to be locked in to that you're you're a happy prisoner of of om focused yeah yes yes I am I think it's called Stockholm syndrome but yeah sure right okay it suddenly turned very negative but yes I mean every time I see omn focus and I hear you talk about it I'm always like do I upend my entire to-do process and go to this again I also feel that way about email regularly like I always wonder well which well I'm curious William what do you use for your personal email as a service like what where is it hosted Apple M iCloud an apple mail I have tried uh all of the rest it feels like I've tried all of the rest and there's always a great feature that tempts you away from Apple mail but then the feature isn't quite as good as you thought or it's just something isn't solid or stable and you end up coming back to Apple Mail thing there are things I wish Apple Mail did that it doesn't but I'm sorry but do you use iCloud mail or do you use like Gmail personally like what oh iCloud mail um I joined when it was uh was it it tools first of all and then it became MAAC um I've been using all of those Services since then don't you have a Gmail account too though yes but um I actually I created a Gmail account as an archive I did this thing where at the end of every day I would email myself uh an article or whatever I was writing the book The chapter the script and I would email it from that account to that account and any email from anyone else was instantly killed so that was this pure unfettered list except Google decided no and it started spreading that around as my email address and so suddenly I'm getting emails from people and then I'm getting meeting people who were saying why do you never respond to emails and B the whole AR I think was destroyed by Google's Gmail systems I use Gmail where I have to with certain clients and I find it's it's powerful but it's not like it's powerful for me it's like it's powerful for Google isn't it there's this weird thing that if somebody gets your address almost right it still works well I get a lot of spam that's almost my email address for it and it's just what is the point of Gmail you know so fed up at that have you used the custom domain thing for iCloud Mail uh I remember looking into it when it started uh actually and I totally forgotten it didn't work when it first came out like in a beta test something was stopping me doing it and I kept meaning to go back to do it and i' had entirely forgotten until you said that have you been using it is it great no I tried to set it up for a while and it was okay but you can only set up a limited amount of domains and I have a problem with domains William I have like many many domains that are like active for my email so I need something like either Google like I I use Google Google I use Google workplace right now but I've always been tempted to go to fast mail just cut it with Google entirely so I don't know I don't know what I'll do there so you're going to get apple VR if it out this year if they can convince me that it's useful for something it's the killer app that's what I can't imagine and I'm sure if anybody's going to imagine it it it will be apple but you know I've used VR and it's very impressive really not sort of I'm not going to I don't yet imagine putting a helmet helmet a headset on first thing in the morning and being in it all day doing my work um I think it kind of has to be something like that if we're going to spend thousands of pounds uh or thousands of doll rather on this kind of thing we'll see hopefully this year but thank you William it's been a great year 2022 and I will see you again in 20123 that is not some kind of finality I'm glad you said that thank you nice talking to Youk and listeners let us know what you're looking forward to in 2023 you can tweet at William RI or a Tusk us on Mastadon we will put those links in the show notes as well if you'd like to follow us there and of course you can leave the show at five star rating review support us for ad free version and all of that thanks so much for tuning in we'll catch you next timewelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven robbles and today we're going to talk about the Mac Pro seemingly absent at the End of This Year look forward to 2023 some of our favorite apps from this past year and maybe a little Mastadon talk as well this episode is brought to you by I amazing and joining me for the final time in 2022 my friend across the pond William Gallagher how's it going oh it seems so final when you say it like that I thought it was going okay no just this year just this year no no no no you'll be back in in like what two weeks about 5 hours something like that yes yes yeah it does it does feel like that for sure well we're going to talk about uh looking forward to 2023 in this episode and special guest Jason a0 will join us next week for a year in review looking at everything Apple released this past year but we're going to be futurist today William you can finally give your official Apple car prediction in this episode it'll be blue it'll be January I'm done oh there you go now I know the people have been asking for this so let me let me play this here real quick roasting on an open fire I'll let you know when it's your Q uhhuh Jack Frost nipping at your nose this is the micro BL Blade Apple music sing you TI carols being some by a choir and folks dressed up like Eskimos all right William you go thinking about it I think the Apple car probably be silver space gray or silver not blue yeah I just want our listeners to know I tried you I tried doing the Apple music sing I mean you forget the fact that I've just had a disastrous holiday and I came back to be in your company and have a good time and then you do this to me and it's fine no no it's all right now wait a minute now wait a minute what what happened you did go on holiday and you said it was it was not so good what happened don't even go there oh actually that was the problem we didn't even go you know that bit at the airport you didn't go you you've got you've done the online checkin you're in the queue to go to security and uh flighty on your Apple watch pops up to say your flight's been cancelled that's what happened what but it Airways decided to cancel a flight yeah and we were going on a six- day river cruise from Budapest and British Airways said yeah if we were very nice if we were very good they would swap us to another flight that would get us 3 days into our six day course and of course of course cruise but of course you know the boat would have been 3 days gone by then so uh the whole holiday was scrapped and we drove no William what but on the upside the flighty app is is really well it's mostly really good uh even after the flight was canceled kept telling us that the inbound version of the flight it's nearly here I'm thinking you know I don't care very much anymore I really don't care it's gone but other than that it was far better than heo Airport's own app for example but now there was no other like things that you could know other flights that were available uh it looked to me going through uh flighty and um what's say kayak and things like this all this information you can have I could track down flights that would get us there a day late uh which is better than 3 days late and maybe we could have done something but it was not allowed imagine if we decided to spend several hundred pounds and just buy an extra flight for somewhere else maybe we could have got there but it's wasn't really an option so instead I came home and sulked that's what I did oh my goodness were you able to get like a move your river cruise ticket to another time or get some kind of re refund yes uh we will actually do it about this time next year although mly amusingly it was canceled last year because of covid and at one point during this it looked like the next December one was full so it would be 2024 and I don't know what happened to fix that but it would have been a four years late uh Cruise my mom keeps saying that Angela and I are always going on a cruise and we're trying but you know it's my first ever won oh my goodness was this armor waterways or Viking Cruise it was Viking you know them that's yeah I do I do I've had the privilege of going on one river cruise down the Rind oh and it was it was beautiful uh yeah not helping but good good I'm sorry I'm sorry okay all right we let's talk about app what your I'm so sorry better so hopefully next year you'll get to go my goodness but seriously flighty app I subscribed for a month uh for the INB atban really impressed uh with that app so that's a good thing to come out of this and I will subscribe for a month again the next time I'm going flying so next year it really it really is a great app and like live activity wise it's one of the few that it just works really well and is reliable yeah I was so looking forward to that but because the flight was also delayed live activities on flighty starts only 3 hours before the flight departs I learned and uh the flight was sufficiently delayed that we didn't quite get to that point before it was cancelled I was really looking forward to my first actual use of live activities but oh it was not to be next year William next year we're going to hear a wonderful story about you on a river cruise uh but flighty will be the highlight of your trip that's we'll hear about the next year although you know by next year who cares there'll be all this great Apple stuff out that's what we'll be thinking about forget holidays well we're going to get to that because well maybe we'll make some predictions for 2023 uh real quick one five star review shout out Kier me from Estonia all right Estonia International review this year this this episode very cool all right so real quick before we get to our predictions and looking forward to 2023 a couple news bits seemingly absent this entire year has been the Mac Pro we got that mention earlier this year from Jeff Williams saying it's the last Mac to go to an Apple silicon transition but we're now in the final week of 2022 we have literally just one week left no mention of the Mac Pro from Apple uh doubtful I think that we'll hear anything about it now but according to Mark German in his power on newsletter from Bloomberg supposedly Apple's pulling back from offering a Mac Pro with an M something extreme chip inside due to production problems so this might be what has caused the delays and might even be canceled now apparently the complexity worries over cost things like that General recession time it's like who's going to buy a super expensive Apple silic Mac Pro so we might not see it till next year or probably not see it till next year and even then it might not have the extreme chip it might just have some kind of double M2 Ultra variation with a bunch of GPU cores and bunch of unified memory so we'll see I I I'm surprised I really thought we'd at least hear about it sometime by the end of this year well on the positive side you know whatever it is whenever it comes it'll still be faster and cheaper than the current macpro it'll be very impressive whatever it is oh yeah I mean that's a pretty low bar from the the Intel from 2019 that's actually three years old um the thing is Apple totally failed here really Apple silicon 2 years from WWDC uh two and a half years ago whole range failed to do it Apple blew it completely what do you mean they did fantastic machines otherwise uh they failed on that literal promise but you know I mean you got to let them off everything else is so great I yeah and I mean the Mac Studio was something that was not expected no at least you know right until right before it was released and so while it might not have made the transition for the Mac Pro we did get the Mac Studio and that's actually been one of my favorite products from this year because it Powers everything I do here at this disc so but we'll talk about what we can look forward to he Mark Gman did say in 2023 we should see an M2 Pro Mac Mini M2 Ultra in some kind of device maybe an updated Mac Studio and M2 Pro and M2 Max in the MacBook Pro Line which that seems pretty reasonable probably maybe fall time or maybe summer but we'll see we'll get to that couple other pieces of news the self-repair program has now added the M1 iMac M1 Mac Mini and the Mac Studio and so if you want to try and repair your own M1 Max you can now do that and even the studio display has been added to the self-repair program I don't know about you William but I have no desire to take apart any of these devices I would not do it what it's just not going to happen no not at all and I feel Apple knows this but uh you know if anybody's brave enough good on them and everybody has enough money to rent the tools or buy whichever bits and yeah and risk a machine going wrong well then it's great for them and why shouldn't it be but no I looking down at this MacBook Pro thinking no and then M1 iMac that is a very very thin computer and the whole computer part is in like that area I don't want to mess with that I I have you ever repaired like an iMac where you have to like pizza cutter the screen off have you ever done that I've been involved in incidents that were related to this that's as far as I'm going to go I did not myself get my hands dirty but I held dirty hands while it happened and it was uh not a success shall we say so the first time you do it it is one of the scariest things and I literally broke an iMac display the first time I Pizza cuted it off I rep reped the hard drive with an SSD everything was looking good and when I plugged the display back in and turned on the computer there was a nasty green line down the middle of the monitor like an inch wide and I was like well I guess I must have bent it a little too far because that's broke yeah but after that actually I've actually replaced maybe maybe 10 or so IMAX because I've I've the where I used to work we had a bunch of older IMAX the kind that were like the unibody and replacing the super slow hard drive that was like 5200 RPMs or whatever if you replace that with an SSD it is an incredible upgrade to those older iMacs and they feel much faster and so part of my gig was just like changing out a bunch of those and I got pretty comfortable with it and so I never messed up again and I did about you know you order the iix it kit you get the little adhesive strips I did probably about 10 or so of those and I did mess them up again so but just to be absolutely clear here none of these Macs were actually yours so your money wasn't on the line at any point right no no none of them were mine and I would not mess with my studio display or my Mac Studio right now and also the company that you worked for doing this job they let you do the second one even after the first one had gone AR well the first one was for like a like a client not necessarily my actual work and then the rest of them were for my work so okay I guess I kind of practiced on a different client at first on the clients uh there you go that's yeah listen I I bought a new display on eBay or whatever and I replaced it all good oh I see that's all right which those man those were expensive buying just a display only I basically made no money on that repair cuz it was like $250 I think just for a display on eBay not cheap that cheap but pretty good price for what you get isn't it an iMac display is amazing yeah I mean it was a retina one so I mean it's not you know it's pretty pretty good display I won't be taking apart any of my computers I I get Apple Care on pretty much everything I even got it on my studio display even though it's just sitting here on a desk because because it's a studio display I I don't want to ever have to worry about trying to fix something myself so you are you I forget are you an Apple Care guy do you get Apple Care no I should be for certain things but I just am not it over the years the budget has been such that Apple Care made the difference being able to get something or not and uh although you go around smashing your Apple watch into walls and things um I have none of those issues I've I have shattered the screen on my iPhone uh once since 2007 and that was a horrible time but I don't even have a case on it so yeah I'm just seemingly naturally more careful than you this is now wait a minute when you were thinking you were traveling on a river cruise did you put a case on your iPhone then uh no no I didn't you're going to go no case yes wow I'd be curious for our listeners what the split is on no case vers case I don't do no case also because the camera bump is so big now I feel like without a case it's always like rocking back and forth on a table you ever experienced that yes but I'm very careful I keep it in Pockets I keep it in bags occasionally I very rarely have it slapped down on on a hard surface anyway I have a kind of a leather um I was going to say mouse map but it's B than that a desk mat on my main office desk and so it rests quite comfortably on there but otherwise wise no I don't put it down what about when you're walking down the street there over in the UK do you ever use your iPhone while you're walking down the street and were you going to drop it uh yes and yes but no okay but but you've never dropped it uh once when I was putting it into mycket uh it it kind of flew out of my hand and did this amazing um Arc through the air away from me and I watched it shatter on the ground uh but I have no idea how it sort of reverse slipped out of my hand that time no otherwise no wow okay well that kudos to you I I don't uh I always like it when I take it out of the case just to like kind of feel the raw iPhone and it's always like that's a really nice Hardware device but goes right back in the case I don't I don't keep it out I don't like doing that oh see I just put my mag safe case back on I don't know if you heard that anyway also I thought this was interesting Wes actually pointed this out on Twitter but there's a new there's a new Apple music show for classical works and it's hosted with Alexis French he's a classical pianist and he has I love his music actually I listened to his stuff even before this show came out but it's basically kind of an interview style show where they also play some music and I thought this was I thought this was interesting because I went to listen to it and it's very much like a podcast style show where he's talking he interviews people and then there's you know some music that's played with it and I was like I would love this as a podcast and so I thought let me check I went to Apple podcast but it is not there as a podcast it is only in the Apple music app and you could be halfway through listening to this show with Alexis French and if you go to like play another piece of music it totally loses your place and so if you're like 20 minutes into this hour show and you go play another music track it loses your place so the next time you go back to it it just starts from the beginning again and I thought this was very strange like that's definitely something you'd want to save your place in if they wanted to do something like Spotify where you have these talk type shows in addition to the music which I know there's also like apple music radio but do you ever listen to that do you ever listen to like the interviews with Zan low or whatever no uh cuz I'm in the UK I was used to Zan low from BBC Radio and it's like I've had enough there thank you um this when she was saying that that suddenly made me wonder whether we're going to get an apple uh classical radio station as well and that this is a production well and this this was the thing because that was one another promise that was another promise that Apple said Apple music classical Standalone app will launch in 2022 looks like at this stage in the game we're not going to get it I mean we're like one week left of the year I doubt Apple's going to launch something between Christmas and New Year's so I don't think we're getting it but this does seem like an ideal piece of content for a standalone classical app that also has talk shows that will save your place and uh I'm I've been waiting for the Standalone classical app for a while so I don't know I think this is interesting I wish it was a podcast format and one of the things I'm looking forward to in 2023 is I hope they launch this classical app I want to I want to see it I want to use it and um me too but the shows you've heard from this were was there anything in them that was um topical that meant they had to go when you heard them they couldn't have been saved up for the app no I mean it wasn't super like of the moment you know it's just commentary on different music works and pieces so you know it could have launched with the Apple musical classic apple music that's going to be interesting to say the Apple music classical app but I really just want it as a podcast and I mean Apple does so many original podcasts and they're in the podcast app I don't know I feel like it would have been better served there so we'll see we'll see when that music classical launches if this will be uh a talk show radio style thing there I never tapped that radio tab in the uh in the music I did listen to the country when it first came out and I was writing about it I left the country music uh channel on for quite a while and I liked it but um I I like American country music from about September to October 1996 uh and it wasn't a lot of that on the show William did you just say you listen to American country music yes um but only music issued or played on heavy rotation between September and October 1996 yeah and also actually only by women because men look so silly with those hats I just can't take it you know wait a minute are you real with me right now I can't tell if you're pulling my leg Yeah I am actually no there's a there's a channel you still have in the St it's called CMT country music television and for quite a while it was here in the UK and when I discovered it uh it was desperate for rating so anything it could possibly call even in 44 time was included so there was Bruce Springstein was on there Dar Williams who doesn't really sit into a genre but you could if you really wanted to call some of her songs a bit like country and actually that's how I discovered Dar Williams D R Williams I absolutely love her writing for it and I used to listen to it while I was doing the washing up um I would actually have it on the TV set on Sky Television and reflect Ed in the glass window of our kitchen while I was washing up and then CMT pulled out of the UK just as I got into it about 5 to six weeks later but to this day there are certain songs uh by Gretchen Peters uh for example that I really like and I I the other day I looked it up and it is a very specific period in time I like yeah wow well you learn something new every day I had no idea that you listen to American country music this episode is brought to you by imazing imazing is the Swiss army knife of iOS device management for mac and windows that delivers unparalleled access to features and capabilities that Apple doesn't provide things like a powerful local backup 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features you could try it today and learn more at IM amazing.com that link is also in the show notes go to IM amazing.com and try it for free today our thanks to I amazing for sponsoring this episode so real quick wanted to talk about weather apps because dark sky if you remember years I think it's like 2 years now at WWDC Apple acquired dark sky was incorporating the features like precipitation forecast and all that into the stock weather app and now dark sky is going to be sunsetted at the end of this year which is like in a week so if you still use the dark sky app you will not be able to once we enter 2023 now there are lots of options out there for weather apps and we have an article I'll put the link in the show notes that talks about the several apps The Weather Channel app which I find kind of obnoxious do you have you do you use the weather channel app no I'm a I was a do eer then um I'm stock weather app when the last revision of it was done and it had and it visibly absorbed all of Dark Skies ethos that's when I did it so a Weather Channel I've seen online and it looks quite ugly even online so I can't imagine using in an app yeah yeah it is it is quite ugly but anyway you have the weather channel app there's a few others in the article but carrot weather is also the very popular app especially for widgets and the Apple Watch app cared weather's very popular I just I use the stock weather app too I just find that it's been really good the precipitation forecasts have been pretty spoton at least here in the states for me even in Florida where it could rain for 5 minutes and then not for 3 hours then rain for 5 minutes again so stock weather app has been really good I should say actually stock weather app is not good here in the UK for rain starting in 7 minutes ending in 11 it tries and it tells you that stuff but it's generally wrong uh but in exactly the same way the dark sky was I think there are fewer weather stations here it's more of a micro climate it's a gorgeous feature where it works but it doesn't happen to work here and actually speaking of gorgeous I think the design of Apple's new thing even the subtlety of the animation and stuff there's a developer who calls herself nval Swift I'm presuming Swift is a reference to the language not her real name but she's on Twitter as Naval Swift and she talked about at some point whenever this first came out of the effort that went into the redesign of it and I I think Apple did a marvelous job yeah I agree I I really like it although it's also been buggy for me since 16.2 which I'm not going to complain about it again here but my entire homekit home has now lost 21 devices again 21 devices are showing no response after I factory reset them all and repaired them I just it's ridiculous I don't even know what's happening yeah I'm a bit fed up of homekit at the moment I moved Wi-Fi networks up put in an hero thing and I've got everything back by one light uh and I just tried to I I like being able to walk into a living room at this time of year and say hey Iris or something very similar it's Christmas and have all the Christmas lights come on and I I got it to work for an hour and then it stopped it's like just fed up of devices not responding or not connecting yeah it's just what is wrong with our porch why can't homekit find our porch light why why it's bad I don't 16.2 has been buggy I think in multiple areas is the Home app especially for me but also the weather widget a lot of times I have a weather widget on my home screen and when I unlock my phone it just doesn't show anything it'll just say no weather data really I have to tap it kind of yeah it's weird 16.2 kind of a thumbs down for me it was not not great but indeed what are you going to do you know what I mean I'm not going on the beta not doing it are you doing that are you on the 16.3 uh not not deliberately no right it's never on purpose you just find yourself on it somehow yes it has happened yes yeah so interesting yeah just how you how that happens now I've had several requests from our listeners and followers on social media they're asking if you're going to join Mastadon are you going to join Mastadon Oh you mean me specifically they're asking oh that's very yeah no you're you're the only William I'm talking to right now I mean yeah you are you going to join masteron I did just look over my shoulder to see who you meant but you mean me uh yep I've been on Mastadon for three weeks four weeks now or so oh you have yeah um I like the people I meet on there we chat a little bit uh it seems have coincided with my doing less social media which is unfortunate I don't feel like I've really explored it very much like I I don't think I've even found you on there yet I take it you're on I I am on there but now I'm I'm searching for you let's see I'm W Gallagher home.so and I chose that uh home. social very carefully I copied a poet here in the UK Jonathan Davidson the poet mentioned it gone on I thought well if he knows that one I'll do that one so lots of research went into that wait so it's at at whatw gallager home.so okay do you not have a profile picture on here uh I just see an elephant you know can't even remember that sounds quite likely okay well I'm now following you so all of our listeners uh oh here's a way to check um have I just blocked you oh that might be it that might be it yeah I haven't no I I think I just followed you I think I found you so all for all of our listeners William is on there and it's at w Gallagher home.so I don't want to get into Twitter William I'm not going I'm not going to get into it but no that's not there's been a a mass Exodus uh not not even an exodus but just people saying not going to Tweet on here anymore not going to be active I'm going to Mastadon lots of people like Marco armant Casey Liz a lot of journalists because there was that news I think late last week or early this week where Elon Musk was like Banning journalists who were badmouthing Twitter which is hilarious from a free speech standpoint but anyway not I'm not getting into it William why are you trying to bait me into getting into this I'm not going to get into I wasn't even listening I was add back on masteron finding that you followed me and following you back so um okay okay oh very good okay Mastadon is not as userfriendly as most other social networks but it's getting better and I find that there's more and more people on there yeah not as many as Twitter obviously just yet I also find Mastadon is not great for real-time communication there was a tapbots post I don't know what what do we call a Mastadon message what what is that that is a well some people keep calling them tootes but that doesn't need to be catching on so I don't know I I mean toots is what people called tweets is it I thought oh okay well maybe people are calling it toots maybe I'm let's call them TUS okay oh I see why you did that yeah okay that's I my mind went to Fleetwood Mac there you see so I was just slightly confused yeah maybe we can get tusks to catch on that's kind of hard to say tusks anyway uh tap Bots the makers of tweetbot and pastebot they're making an app for Mastadon which is very similar to tweetbot it's called Ivory see with the Tusk you know what I mean and there's they've been releasing like beta access through test flight periodically and whenever they announce it it fills up almost immediately because everyone wants to use a good app cuz right now Mastadon doesn't have a first-party app there are some other thirdparty apps that are pretty good like Mammoth you know tapbots is well known makes great applications but I was following them and they said all right we're going to to we're going to Tusk out no that's not going to work it's not going to work we're going to post in an hour the link to our test flight and like Market down and then you'll you can get access if you're quick enough and I said all right I'm going to set a reminder for an hour from now and I'm going to like get in there get in on the beta I set the reminder went for an hour I went back to Mastadon I went on the website so I wasn't even trusting any kind of third party API or whatever and it it just would not show up the post from tap Bots wasn't showing up and it wasn't until 15 minutes later that have finally showed up in my feed or whatever for Mastadon and I was like for real time this is not great but I have now since got into the ivory beta or I guess it's even an alpha right now just today just earlier today they they opened up some more uh test flight spots and so I got in there right away I actually just kept clicking the test flight link directly not even waiting for the Mastadon post and I finally got in and I will say Ivory is great and it is a wonderful client for using Mastadon like a social network but Mastadon still has a long way to go things like G and media kind of weird and take a while to load a lot of times pictures are blurred out at first and you have to tap it to load so again not not great in a lot of areas but it's an alternative like it is a viable option and I've been on there a little more and I will put William and my Mastadon Handles in the show notes in addition to Twitter but you know going to try and uh goingon to try and keep using it you know like I say I like the people I meet on it yeah so let's do it yeah and they're doing good and you know it is interesting because you can make like your own server like the Mac stories. net guys they actually have their own Mastadon server and they're all like vtii at Mac stories. net on Mastadon and what's nice is like because it's an independent server like even if Mastadon shuts down some of their main servers like they'll still be able to be there and people like us could still follow them so it's a I don't know if decentralized is the right word but it's Federated is that another word no decentral it reminds me of the way the whole internet was supposed to be self- reparing if a center goes out back when the uh what was a precursor to darpet was that no aranet um that was the whole design of the internet you can lose a center and it all continues it's the same well it's uh it's it's not not bad so I'll put our maedon links in there I've been on there trying to be more active on it okay so let's let's do a little retrospective here on 2022 next week uh with Jason I'm going to be talking about more like the hardware the events and some of the feature set or whatever but I thought it' be interesting to talk about kind of our third-party app use cases you know for this last year where have we landed on maybe our most used apps or still of our favorite apps or ones that have had big updates significant Updates this year and I feel like there's some excellent ones out there and we've talked about these probably in the past but I do have to mention pixel Mater is just killing it killing it they added the video editing on the Mac side they also added some kind of like machine learning something or other the debanding uh thing debanding yeah I've never heard the term and I'm looking at their press release thinking I don't know what this is but then they show you an example and it's a a reasonably low res jpeg where this the blue sky is actually quite stripy and suddenly when you see it you oh yeah I've seen that a lot for it and this just fixes it for it yes it's very impressive it is it is amazing pixel Mater both on the iPad and the Mac you can even get on the iPhone but well different versions for Pixel mat Pro is still Mac only isn't it but there's pixel mat photo and there's kind of just pixel mater that I think is still around for the iPad that has so many uh great features on it as well it's an amazing company I think and they keep pumping out really strong updates it's great it is it is amazing and you know they integrate with shortcuts especially for things like removing background which is built into the OS now but I still find pixel maters is really excellent pixel Mater all the way they have just killed it this year a big shout out to pixel Mater I also want to give a shout out to farite because they had a big update just at the end of this year they released fite 3 can is the developer he was on the show several years ago now but this farite 3 update is amazing you can edit at up to 2x speed there's an entire visual overhaul of the library and the like navigating your projects and templates it is just amazing and faite is what I use to edit the podcast every week this homid Insider and two other shows literally that's all I use to edit is farite 3 and I love it it's amazing I love using it with universal control because as I do chapters for this show I will literally have apple Insider pulled up on my Mac and I'll have all the articles that we talked about and I literally just drag an image from the Apple Insider article on my Mac drag it to the edge of the screen drag it onto the iPad using universal control and drop the image on the chapter art area in farite and it just loads the image and right there that the chapter art is right there so I could do it across those devices universal control works amazingly so huge shout out to fary 3 you got to try it actually the moment I heard there was a new version of far you were the first person I thought of uh so you've obviously got it but you used it have you used this um faster editing two times normal speed thing how does that go for you it's amazing I actually had access to the beta before it went public and I've been editing for months with it and editing at 2x speed is amazing like I now edit the Apple Insider and homid Insider shows at 2x speed and I'm still able to edit I actually posted a video on Twitter I think I'm not sure if I did it on Mastadon but I posted a video on Twitter of me actually editing live and using the 2x speed and it I mean it's great I mean I can edit the show in almost half the time that I was before so it's almost in real time like for an hour show I can now edit it in about an hour cutting out all the ums and breaks and anything else like all the swearing obviously that that comes out very early tell me about it you never hear it but fortunately they're all very British swear words so some of them you don't even know are actually swear words no okay I don't even know things like poppers and Q those are swears right right I don't know what I thought those are okay yeah yeah don't you guys say that don't you guys say poppers for buttons well I've heard that word used in different context anyway um I I edit audio in logic pro which I it's only had sort of steady Updates this year doesn't me anything big I but it's been one of my apps of the year I absolutely love it have you edited audio in logic pro and how does that compare with Ferro for you I edit in logic pro as well I've edited I used to edit podcast there like years ago and I've edited music stuff too I mean logic pro is amazing it's an extremely powerful application but when it comes to just making those Quick Cuts and snapping the timeline so like it eliminates the space it's just several steps in logic where it's not in farite like I can literally drag with the apple pencil in farite select all the tracks delete a section and then there's a ripple delete option which will literally move all the tracks in time to take up that space And so there's no more blank space and like that's literally a one apple pencil move in farite where in logic I mean it's a couple clicks I forget exactly how many it would be but that that's the kind of stuff that makes farite much faster for me so that that sounds like the magnetic timeline in Final Cut Pro you edit something and everything shuffs up I love that but key word there you said apple pencil there uh I take it do would you say an apple pencil is essential for ferite on the iPad definit I would say like I've edited with just a magic keyboard and fite just trying to do that and it is it is not as fast it is not as useful like I really find the apple pencil makes editing podcast and farite super fast if I was just using the the trackpad and the mouse like it would not be the same so definitely apple pencil I've done it with my finger editing in Far there was an emergency some emergency how how can you have an audio emergency but I needed to do some audio work very quickly and fair available and I used my fingers to do it and I and I liked it and it worked but it didn't feel as brilliant as you've made it sound and now I realized actually this is another reason why I should consider an apple pencil again you really should wa do you have one for your iPad Pro I bought uh one of the original Apple pencils first generation one so it doesn't work with my iPad Pro from last year but I gave it to my wife Angela who uh how hardly ever uses it either so yeah I mean my handwriting is so po I'm never going to use it for anything other than control so it's an expensive control when I have a cheap finger to product things I mean I literally only use it for farite that's the only thing I do or if I have like a document like a PDF that I need to sign and fill out for some kind of like medical thing or whatever then I'll bring it into good notes and I'll use the apple pencil for that but really it's only faite for me also have to give a huge shout out to Fantastical which obviously talked about it before it's an amazing calendar app but this year they adopted Focus filters with Iowa 16 they were like right on the launch they had Focus filters available and they are amazing I use Fantastical for lots of reasons it's really just excellent but the focus filters integration and that update was amazing and also like I don't think you can do this in the stock calendar app but like just the ability to hide an event do you use fantastic C I forget I actually stopped this year um when it came up to renewal of subscription it just hit at a moment when I had subscription fatigue and also um I've been using setup which includes busy Cal which is another another another excellent uh calendar app I why am I paying for two I will try to just use byy Cal and no offense to busy Cal but I find even with it there I'm calling up Fantastical little um popup menu drop ones so often and I'm I'm only occasionally hitting features that I'm I'm missing but it's enough that I'm going to go back onto fantastic and you you said Focus filters and things uh that came in since I stopped I'll be looking forward to trying those out what what do you use them for this hiding of events that you don't want to face up to yeah absolutely I mean I use Focus filters every day so I have a focus mode that enables at 6:00 p.m. during the week and I call it my evening Focus mode and all of my work emails work calendars all of that gets hidden away and so if if it's Fantastical if it's my mail app all of those inboxes and calendars just hide so I don't see any work stuff after 6 p.m. then I also have a weekend Focus filter where again all of my work accounts email accounts and mail calendars like it all gets hidden but I still can see my personal events so events that I share with my spouse or with my kids things that are scheduled for the weekend that I still want to see I still see those and I don't see all of the work stuff and if you get a work like invite like a meeting invite you won't have to see it or deal with it so it's a it's clutch I love it so if I ever have I need to have a meeting for you about something awful and terrible bad news I should make sure I email at 559 on the Friday yeah to just get in your head before okay all right yeah that would be that would be wonderful yeah yeah that's that's uh that would be the you'd get right in under the wire if you did that that's right appreciate it appreciate it uh also I have been using reader a ton this year oh yes it is wonderful I use it on all my devices iPhone iPad on the Mac I have all my RSS feeds filing into reader I even have YouTube channels yeah and you can get like the RSS feeds for YouTube channels feed those into reader it's really wonderful and especially like with all that's going on with Twitter it's where I just get the news I get all the news from reader and it's wonderful uh I've been using rer religiously for years many many times a day business personal stuff utterly adore it but just in the last few days I heard an interview with Tim Stringer a guy does learn omn Focus he was interviewed on Mac power users and he mentioned things he does and one of them was just what you said there about YouTube videos in reader and I had no idea that this app I use so much did even more than I thought and from that instant I've been adding uh YouTube channels and so reader yes yeah I yes it's wonderful wonderful love reader pocketcast is still my podcast player of choice I tried Apple podcast for a while this year like for several months it's good and I know it's obviously the most used podcast app but pocketcast still has a pocketcast still has it for me I still love it which do you use now U Apple's own podcast one uh I think nobody's perfect William it's okay pocketcast has this button of playing things back at faster than normal speed uh and apple podcast also has that as well except on Apple podcast it's called unsubscribe you know uh if you're listening to something and it you think it sounds better at faster than normal speed find a better podcast so you know I don't need other features uh like this uhhuh uhhuh yeah I get it anyway pocketcast still Great Bear is still my note taking app of choice I love bear I do every article that I write every meeting Note Everything like scripts for videos I do it all in bear I love bear where where do you do your notes and writings and stuff like that all over the place notes go into Apple notes uh every article is written in drafts five scripts if it's you know um if it's for a podcast or a video and my I have a YouTube channel scripts for that I tend to write in on the outliner because it starts off as notes and built up uh but actual scripts you know TV or radio and stuff go to final draft like this so and occasionally Pages for for just you know when I'm in a crazy mood I do like Pages now don't now don't you find that it would be more convenient if you were able to search everything that you've written in one place and see all the results from that search query at once uh about 30 years ago I worked with a man who made sure he saved a plain text copy of every single thing he wrote into one document and I thought then that was a superb idea and I should really do something like it but three decades on I still haven't got around to it so you know I guess if you if you ever system where this kind of writing goes there and this kind goes here like I guess you'd be able to find it but I just do everything in bear so I can search and all the notes with that search term gets pulled up you know if I start a new uh episode you plan for a new episode on YouTube I run a shortcut it asks me what it is it figures out the number in the series and it creates all of the folders including the barebone script using Omni outliner they're just all done and there for me uh so just it's become automatic now Omni Omni outliner for so many things you're talking about things we like this year I don't think Omni outliners had a significant update this year but they probably hasn't been a day there definitely hasn't been an event I've done that I haven't been planning an omni outliner so uh as ever a favorite of this year and all years forever okay yes all right now I know you're an omn Focus guy as well well which is your tasks for everything I'm still a things guy I still really enjoy things everywhere just the design and the Design's amazing and I also things is such a good name for it oh yeah it's great name great icon love it yeah it's just not quite powerful enough uh for me it's like um it follows the the getting things done methodology but it doesn't quite follow it um so there's just a thing that you have to I think this still true you with only focus so every week or so it'll remind you you haven't looked at these projects and it will kind of encourage you to look through and just check things out so you're always on top of everything with things you can do that but it doesn't guide you through it it doesn't remind you or prompt you it's like the review process doesn't really exist in things is that still the case that is still the case there is a log book and things where you can see like what previous tasks you've accomplished for each day so you can kind of review that but yeah it doesn't have all those kinds of features and honestly I actually use a combination of reminders and things because one thing I wish things would do is not show me a task if it's something that I can't do until a certain time of the day yeah omn Focus does that but I took it for granted that things did right I know omn Focus does that which all right wow I'm really surprised at that any task that has a due date for today will be in the things window from the beginning of the day you can add a reminder for a certain time and that's when it will notify you but it's visible in the interface and I when when I have a task that I can't do until like 300 p.m. on a certain day I don't want to see it until 3 p.m. and so I actually use reminders for that kind of stuff it'll be recurring reminders repeating or whatever and then it will show up at 300 p.m. and I'll see the reminder pop up on my Mac and other devices and that's how I deal with those I did wish I can kind of do all that in one and uh that's a feature request if things is listening oh I realized when you said that I do use another app called je uh due for really time sensitive yeah uh things because it prods you on your watch and the phone and things and it does not give up until you go in and say yes I've done it stop it um and omn focus years ago promis that sort of feature was coming it doesn't seem to have so notifications don't prod me as much as due does so for the odd thing can't think of an example but a phone call I've got to make at a certain time that happened today that was in June I don't like being sped over multiple systems I know what I just said about writing but for reminders and things I like to know if I look here and everything is done then everything is done I don't have to go find some other system to check there as well but I do do for that yeah I see that I can see that and the last app third party app that I'll mention pastel I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but pastel is an incredible little app where it can keep color paletes for you and it has this really cool feature where if you want to pull the color from a certain image let's say a logo this way you can use those colors elsewhere you can actually just drag an image into the pastel window and it will literally pull the exact colors in the image that you dragged into there and then you can have different libraries uh where like different color palettes are saved and if you work with like Brands especially if you're like a web designer or graphic designer and you work with the same Brands over and over again pastel is a great way to keep those brand colors in one place and then what what you can do is you can go into that color group for a certain brand and when you rightclick one of the colors you can copy the hex value the RGB value float hsl and this way if you work at HTML you can just use the hex value or if you're doing something like in pixel Mater or whatever you can copy the RGB or the hex and I just love it like it's a really convenient way to keep brand colors in one place and quickly access them and copy things that are useful like X codes one so how often do you find yourself ripping off Branden colors from other sides then well not not from other sites but like so for my my movies podcast I dragged the podcast artwork into pastel and it pulled the dominant colors from the artwork and then whenever I'm going to make something for that podcast whether it's a social media graphic or whatever I'll go into pastel and I can choose any of the four dominant colors copy the hex value and I know it's the exact color from the brand and you're good to go and there's like three or four Brands I use regularly when I was doing more website building I use it a lot more often because you know if you're making a website hopefully there'll be some kind of color palette or logo to use and I would import it and and use those you know pretty often so it's it's a really cool app pastel we'll put links to all of these in the show notes and now you have a couple listed here I've recognized one I think so tell me about your third party apps of choice wow I think the quickest one is Ma's edit has just had a really nice update it's a Mac only uh I suppose word processor for blogs it just it connects really easily to whatever your blog is WordPress in my case and it just is a nice editor um it went in grabbed all my blog posts 700 out of them uh in my self-d distract blog put them all there for me to just scoot through do anything I want and I I I suppose there's no logical benefit to using locally instead of going online to Wordpress and going through the WordPress archive but it feels as if there is it feels like it's yours it's there you can take your time over something uh even with a bad internet connection I actually I got into it partly because it came out just before I didn't go away but I also figured when I went away I was going to have very limited internet access so I was always going to prepare the blog offline and kind of Squirt it in and this just did it so well I find I'm doing more because of it so Mars edit yay love it okay yeah Mars edit has been around for a long time yeah it is a good app and then your other one I think you've mentioned it before but what is hook Mark hook Mark I love hook Mark it's transformed my writing this year I mean I used it last year it was known as hook and it was very good but I found it oddly hard to get into this year it's got new features it's been rebranded as hook Mark which I think is a great name and it's also their part of setup and think things so I looked at it again and you know I there's the way I used to work before hook Mark and there's the way I work now it's it gathers together everything you're working on so for example I just uh two or three times a year I do a magazine for a company and when that magazine comes around well there's a briefing from the client that's in a couple of different emails uh it's a collection of articles by Young Writers so they're all the submissions I have a folder of ones I've rejected I have emails about the rejections I have spreadsheets with the schedule for it an affinity design uh sorry Affinity publisher document for a pdf version and all of this stuff you yeah when I'm in the magazine and I'm in Affinity publisher and I think I can't remember what the publish what the client wanted me to do about this particular thing I press a key and I'm in that email from them it's not that I've been taken over to mail and gone to search for it I'm in that very email and when I'm in that email I can leap to the rejected folder I can leap from a rejected folder to the spreadsheet with the schedule on it all other things you choose what you want linked to what and it's straight there I mean maybe a clear example is um uh I use spreadsheets quite a lot and stuff so I have a spreadsheet for my bank accounts when I'm in that specific spreadsheet no other then the same keystroke will call up all of my bank accounts for it all of my tax records and things and you just keep adding the stuff to it and once you've got it together I mean I suppose that example of with the publisher on it uh and the client I would have to come out of affinity publisher go to mail search for the client's name maybe i' put that email in a folder and it's it's not hard but it breaks the moment the concentration whereas now it's oh I need to know this I know it it's done and we carry on it is uh revolutionary I think is not too strong a word for hook Mark wow all right hook Mark then finally very quickly let's look to 2023 William I want to know what you're excited about for 2023 if and what Apple launches or third parties that's cool too but I think this might be the year for Apple VR yes I think so too yes I think that is a likely release I'm very curious what the story will be behind that maybe we'll see it at WWDC so developers get early access to a VR type device but you know iPhone 15 with USBC likely this year finally saying goodbye to lightning an M2 iMac or Mac Mini you know some of those Hardware chip updates but you know I don't I'm not sure what I'm what I'm most excited about I really do find like a lot of my Apple devices they're just so good right now like my M2 iPad Pro my Mac Studio Studio display they're all great and even as like iterative updates happen in this next year or two you know I don't know how much I'll be updating iPhone I update every year but you know that's how we do but the um yeah I don't know what are you most excited about weirdly none of Apple's launches I I I know I will buy the iPhone 15 Pro I skipped the 14 um I know I'll buy the 15 Pro uh but other than that I just unless Apple comes up with another Mac Studio type of surprise that makes me think well you know what apple is like when they bring anything out you want it they're very good and making you want it for at least a few hours there until you sober up a little bit for it uh I really like all of the gear I've got I have a lot of Apple gear now I'm I'm using it all to death and I really like that um but the iPhone is the one that will be replaced I wonder what's going to happen with the Apple watch Ultra 2 uh what's going to happen with there or whether it's going to the line's going to blur together again for it I'm not sure I have an Apple Watch series 7 and I had there was nothing to compel me to go to an eight but would that be to the nine I don't know it might be the the next major design overhaul because it's been pretty similar since the four maybe maybe but I'm I'm so happy with my Series 7 that it's going to take some doing to make me regret that I can guarantee as well also there is a thing I know is coming in 2023 because I've been using the beta for such a long time uh omn Focus 4 for the Mac the iPhone and the iPad uh you me we mentioned it a moment ago it's my to-do app of choice well now it's my very to-do app of choice the beta stuff I mean go to the omig group's website and see if they can still let you on the beta test uh because it is so so good uh it's hard to explain why it just seems to fit my work even better than it did before and there's so much automation that I don't tend to understand but I copy other people's Automation and they add things in and so it's like I get extra features every few weeks on this thing which actually also locks me in Tom F because I've suddenly realized I said it to you but I'm quite happy to be locked in to that you're you're a happy prisoner of of om focused yeah yes yes I am I think it's called Stockholm syndrome but yeah sure right okay it suddenly turned very negative but yes I mean every time I see omn focus and I hear you talk about it I'm always like do I upend my entire to-do process and go to this again I also feel that way about email regularly like I always wonder well which well I'm curious William what do you use for your personal email as a service like what where is it hosted Apple M iCloud an apple mail I have tried uh all of the rest it feels like I've tried all of the rest and there's always a great feature that tempts you away from Apple mail but then the feature isn't quite as good as you thought or it's just something isn't solid or stable and you end up coming back to Apple Mail thing there are things I wish Apple Mail did that it doesn't but I'm sorry but do you use iCloud mail or do you use like Gmail personally like what oh iCloud mail um I joined when it was uh was it it tools first of all and then it became MAAC um I've been using all of those Services since then don't you have a Gmail account too though yes but um I actually I created a Gmail account as an archive I did this thing where at the end of every day I would email myself uh an article or whatever I was writing the book The chapter the script and I would email it from that account to that account and any email from anyone else was instantly killed so that was this pure unfettered list except Google decided no and it started spreading that around as my email address and so suddenly I'm getting emails from people and then I'm getting meeting people who were saying why do you never respond to emails and B the whole AR I think was destroyed by Google's Gmail systems I use Gmail where I have to with certain clients and I find it's it's powerful but it's not like it's powerful for me it's like it's powerful for Google isn't it there's this weird thing that if somebody gets your address almost right it still works well I get a lot of spam that's almost my email address for it and it's just what is the point of Gmail you know so fed up at that have you used the custom domain thing for iCloud Mail uh I remember looking into it when it started uh actually and I totally forgotten it didn't work when it first came out like in a beta test something was stopping me doing it and I kept meaning to go back to do it and i' had entirely forgotten until you said that have you been using it is it great no I tried to set it up for a while and it was okay but you can only set up a limited amount of domains and I have a problem with domains William I have like many many domains that are like active for my email so I need something like either Google like I I use Google Google I use Google workplace right now but I've always been tempted to go to fast mail just cut it with Google entirely so I don't know I don't know what I'll do there so you're going to get apple VR if it out this year if they can convince me that it's useful for something it's the killer app that's what I can't imagine and I'm sure if anybody's going to imagine it it it will be apple but you know I've used VR and it's very impressive really not sort of I'm not going to I don't yet imagine putting a helmet helmet a headset on first thing in the morning and being in it all day doing my work um I think it kind of has to be something like that if we're going to spend thousands of pounds uh or thousands of doll rather on this kind of thing we'll see hopefully this year but thank you William it's been a great year 2022 and I will see you again in 20123 that is not some kind of finality I'm glad you said that thank you nice talking to Youk and listeners let us know what you're looking forward to in 2023 you can tweet at William RI or a Tusk us on Mastadon we will put those links in the show notes as well if you'd like to follow us there and of course you can leave the show at five star rating review support us for ad free version and all of that thanks so much for tuning in we'll catch you next time\n"