Oh oh, I heard that. Oh, I heard that.
Welcome to Comfort Zone, a podcast all about pushing your
hosts well outside of their comfort zone.
I'm Christopher Lally and each week normally I'm joined by two
incredible Co hosts but this week not sure if Riverside
caught the pop or not but apparently it's just two old men
this week 'cause we'd be creaking and popping.
Yeah, I made 108 good episodes without injuring myself while
podcasting, and I can't tell if that felt that hurt good or hurt
bad. And well, hopefully the Mac
stories health insurance plan covers it cause yeah, yeah, Oh
yeah. I, I felt that.
I, I really hope Riverside caught that and I can leave it
in the edit. But if it didn't, that was a,
that was a pop. And I felt it.
Anyways, we have a show to do. And it's not about our creaking,
aging bodies. But we got some tiny topics.
Let's do them. Yes, the first one we.
Skip them is 1. There is nothing big in here,
right? There's nothing we need to talk
about. I mean we can like whatever MBT.
Let's see what we got. Let's see what we got.
Anything interesting? Let's see here, let me, let me.
I don't have my reading glasses so I don't know if I'm going to
be able to read. This Let's see here, Neil Leon
is screaming at us right now. I I believe this first one says
parchment is live. Oh, that's me yes, my app by the
time you were listening to this parchment is live at the time of
recording the pre-orders live, but it'll be it'll be out the
day before this episode comes out.
So yes, Parchment is live. It's my app.
I spent the last two weeks talking about it.
So I won't, I won't I won't bore you guys again, but if it
sounded interesting to you, it is live.
It is a flat $5, no subscription, no in app
purchase, no tracking data, none of that stuff.
It's just there and I'm really proud of it.
It The actual shipping version should be 1.0 dot one because I
found, well, I'll get to it in my main topic, but yeah, it
it'll it, it'll be pretty cool. So yeah, parchment is life.
I'm pretty excited. Congratulations, it's very
exciting when a new one goes out.
Yeah, I know. I'm really excited.
Like I feel really proud of myself.
Like like kind of like when I first started releasing videos
on YouTube, like you put out a video and I felt very proud of
myself for just putting one out and kind of have that feeling
again with this. So I'm I'm excited.
That's great. Congratulations.
I, I hope it makes you a millionaire and so you don't
leave this podcast, but you just have to worry about this
podcast. Your whole life can be comfort
zone. I look, if I become a
millionaire, I, I will say we're, we are hiring an editor
and I will pay for. Oh yeah, that would actually be
a great way to use the $1,000,000.
Like like editor that takes care of like all the the post
production stuff. So you and I don't have anything
to do anymore. That would be cool.
That would be. Sometimes, yeah, I see these
like celebrity podcasters and they just walk into a room, they
talk for an hour or two or four, and then when they then they're
done and they just come up back a week later and do it again and
they don't worry about anything. Imagine having a team like that
behind you. Hot take, that's not real
podcasting. If you're not sweating, if
you're not dealing with CSS or the the content management
system or any of that stuff, you're not real podcasting.
If you're not logging into a Libsyn dashboard and battling
the user interface, are you a real podcaster?
And wondering if that schedule button is going to release
something too early. Breaking embargo end up getting
you sued. What are you even doing?
Anyways, yeah, so parchment is live and yeah, go check it out,
please. I would, I would, I would love
it. But also understand if it's not
for you too. Totally get it.
All right, I OK, we have something.
Else in there what? Are we doing in a podcast?
In a podcast. I I might have put something in
the tiny topics that requires some intro music the.
Browser podcast editor Chris, because the sound board isn't
set up for it at the moment. Oh.
OK, OK, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. OK, so it's playing right now
then. So a whole bunch of stuff
happened this week and I'll get into it in my main topic, but I
just wanted to say Atlas, the open AI ChatGPT browser is dead.
They killed it and with that, I think is the nail in the coffin
for a gentech browsers right. I think that's what you said.
Did you say that in a group chat?
I think you said did you say that or did Federico say that to
me? I, I had two group chats popping
off, yes, during the ChatGPT stuff.
And I, I don't remember who said, well, somebody I would
talk to yesterday said this is the nail in the coffin for
agentic browsers. And I agree because stuff like
Chrome and even Safari in the developer preview right now, but
it'll come to main Safari later on, has MCP and that just allows
any agent to control the browser, not a specific agent
that is built baked into that browser.
So yeah. Yeah, this is 1 I got wrong.
I was convinced that after all this time of Chrome being
utterly dominant every single place it's available, that the
only person or not or the only company who could come take the
crown to get people to shift browsers.
Because people used to like we had different Kings of the Hill
for a while. Like there was like the net.
I'm not going to go all the way to the beginning of time, but
there was like Netscape and then Internet Explorer was.
You're not going to believe this.
Internet Explorer was great for a while and then Firefox came
and then people went to Chrome and Chrome has been like the
browser for a long time 20. Years, something like that,
22,007, something like that. Like and like the thing that
made Chrome. This is just some fun Internet
history. I don't know if you know this or
not, but the thing that made Chrome so great was the fact
that it did updates to the browser in the background.
And now they actually built that.
The Chrome team had built that feature before.
They had actually built the browser window like because like
Firefox, you would open up Firefox and you get this pop up,
be like, oh, there's a new update you need to click.
And then you'd have to like install the update and wait for
it to install. And then you could start doing
your browsing. And with Chrome, we would just
install in the background and you'd open it and be like, hey,
it's up to date. It was also, and it must be
said, and this is probably my most controversial browser
opinion, that when Internet Explorer was, when people
started to move to Firefox, it was because Internet Explorer
started to really suck and people hated it.
And then Firefox started to suck and people hated it.
And Chrome again had this, these nice updates.
It was way faster, it was way nicer to use.
And you know, for most people, they don't hate Chrome.
So it's not driving people away, but I really thought ChatGPT or
Open AI had a chance to do something and turns out no.
Chrome still wins. Yeah, yeah.
I don't, I, I don't know what to say to that other than yeah,
like you can't kill Chrome, I guess.
Until Chrome gets really bad I guess.
Yeah, if you come for the king, you better not miss.
Anyway, so that was the Browser podcast.
I was your temporary host, Christopher Lawley, subbing in
for Neilion. Felt weird.
Yeah, it did. I don't, I don't.
I didn't like it. I didn't like it one bit.
Anyways, let's pull the RIP cord on that.
This week on Cozy Zone, which is our members only show, you get a
whole extra episode of us every single week.
Some of you may be like, whoa, that's too much of you.
No, it's not. It's really not.
In fact, you should probably even have more of us.
You should be reading our blogs and our YouTube channels, and
you should be reading Neil Leon's Mastodon feed all the
time. Anyways, this week on Cozy Zone,
Neil Leon put together a quiz and tested matinee's knowledge
on Star Wars. And it doesn't go the way you
think it does, but it also goes the way you think it does.
And it was fantastic. But I also walked away really
mad. I was enraged by this one.
It was in a different universe where the coin flipped the other
way and just the order changed. Now you, you're giving it away.
I got to believe that. I got to believe that.
You can believe that. I'm going to believe that.
I'm just saying I had a chance I had.
A chance. I don't think I don't.
No, you really didn't. You really didn't.
We can go back to the tape, but we can.
I don't know anyways. I I'm the Star Wars guy.
We all know this. Look at all the Star Wars stuff
behind me. Matt Birchler Do we need to do
another quiz? No.
I, I, I can, I, we can find somebody right now to do a quiz.
I, I can get Dan Moran on the call right now.
Well, maybe not right now, but I could get Dan Moran on here and
he could quiz us. He, he, I feel like he, he's the
equivalent of of my Star Wars nerdiness.
Oh, well, yes, that's that's fair.
You're all chasing me, which is ultimately I know all nine movie
titles. I know most of the main
characters names there's. More than 9 movies.
I know about Darth Plagueis. He was wise.
I'm just saying. All right, let's get in the main
show. You're, you're up first.
We, we, we, we, we, we got first this week.
What, what, what, what you got going on over there.
You've been doing things. You've been, you've been.
You've been shaking babies and kissing hands.
I've been shaking babies and kissing hands.
Absolutely. I wanted to talk about my app.
I got jealous of Chris talking about his app and I was like, I
need to get in on in on this, but I wanted to talk about quick
reads, which is my read later service and I'm so happy with
this app. It is, it is the read later app
I have wanted and I'm trying to make it the read later app
everybody wants. But even if it's not, it's,
it's, it's exactly what I want and it is just, I've said this
before, I'll say it again. It is so cool to be using a
thing on a daily basis and be like, I wish this worked a
little better and then you can just do it.
That is the beauty of being having like being a developer
who making your own things is like, you can, you don't have to
wish, you don't have to hope someone, you don't have to plead
your case with anybody. You can just be like, yeah, it'd
be nice if that happened and it just happens.
It's a it's very, very cool, but I wanted to talk about the
updates. I've been pushing to quick reads
because there are some notable updates.
And if you checked it out when it launched and you were like,
oh, it's missing these things that I really wanted.
Those things are there now in most cases.
So the number one thing people ask me for early days,
especially in the beta, was tags.
You gonna do tags, You're gonna do good tags.
You're gonna have a page with tags.
Can I organize my tags? Can I change my tags?
Can I bulk update tags? And my answer was no, 'cause I
hate tags. But then I realized I needed to
add that. So I've added that.
That was there on day one or day two or three.
But after that request was fulfilled, there's always,
there's always a new thing that everybody wants.
The biggest request. Yes.
Biggest request after that was newsletters.
People wanted the ability to have their newsletters delivered
a quick reads and automatically appear in their reading queue.
And now you can. It's for Pro Pro tier only.
So the basic tier doesn't get this one, but Pro does.
And yeah, you just get a quick reads e-mail address.
You can sign up for whatever you want with it.
Every e-mail is sent through the same article parser that parses
it down and you get this beautiful way to read your
newsletters. It's, and I should also say, if
you ever start to get spammed because these newsletters did
bad things with your e-mail, you have the ability to blow it away
and start a new one. So you can do that as well.
But this works really great. It's really nice.
I've set it up for a couple of my newsletters and it is it's
very nice to just have them magically appear in there.
I I haven't had a chance to do it, but this right here got me
to or is going to get me to upgrade to the pro tier or the
the what? Wait, the pro tier, right?
Did I say that? Right.
OK, all right, all right. You know, these people in their
tiers, they got to name them something else, you know, like,
and it's like this is the pro and the plus and the Max and the
and the minimum and the subtraction and the division and
the multiplication. It's all of these like things.
All of these things. But there's more.
I've also also added RSS feeds, so you can add your RSS feeds.
It is not an RSS reader. It is not meant to replace an
RSS reader. But if there's some blogs you
follow where you just know you're going to save everything
they write, maybe it's someone like a John Syracusa who writes
one to three articles a year. You can just subscribe to his
RSS feed and they'll just appear automatically in your reading
queue. So great.
Lovely. That has proven to be
surprisingly popular since I launched it.
So yeah, that's very nice. And when you add a feed, you can
auto tag them. So if you want to auto tag them
as something, I have mine tagged as RSS so that when I see things
in my queue and I'm like, how the heck did that get there?
I didn't say that I know where where it came from.
So that's cool and then this is the one.
This one is probably out by the time this episode airs.
This is a new feature. So I you want to save links,
right? You want to read them, but you
don't always want to read them. Sometimes they're just links to
things you want to get back to. I get this a lot when I come
across like developer tools or like NPM packages for things
that I may want to use in my projects.
And I don't want to read those pages.
They're GitHub links or they're like developer showcase pages.
So they're not to read, but I do want to save them.
So do I save them to reminders or like things or do I get like
a raindrop subscription as well to go along?
What do I do? And so I was like, here's what
you do. Quick reads either now or soon
has or will have A to do's section where you can save links
as to do's rather than articles. And so this saves them
structurally they are just articles because for backwards
compatibility and support for like my own app to make sure I
don't break things, they're just articles with different tags.
You can see how it works in the API, but basically they present
on a second view in the interface, whether it's the app
or the web interface. And they have nice little
circles that you can check off. There's a delightful animation
that plays and everything and it's just very fun.
So I have a new to do section for saving the things that
aren't for reading, but you do want to save for later and you
don't really know what to do with them.
And with these, you can actually give them a title as well.
So it'll automatically pull the website title, but if it's like
download this when you get home, you can title it, download this
when you get home. So I'm very excited about that
and I don't think any of the other kind of read later apps
out there have something like this.
So I think this is relatively new.
You you either have to kind of like force it and like it's kind
of janky or you have to use something like raindrop dot IO,
which then you lose the read it later.
Nice layout section that you have in quick reads.
So that's fantastic. Thank you.
This is this. This is something that I wanted,
but I didn't. I didn't bother asking you
because I didn't think you would do it.
I didn't think I would do it either.
I really wanted to focus on the reading experience.
I told you, I think you asked about this like early on, you
were like, is this going to be like a full raindrop
replacement? Or you could.
And I was like, no, I cannot do that.
I cannot do. I'm not going to like store like
archives of other of websites or anything for, for folks like
that's going to eat up so much storage and that's going to add
cost And it's a whole diversion. But I kept finding myself in the
situation where I was saving these things that weren't
articles and I didn't know what the heck to do with them.
And so I just solve my own problem I guess.
Nice nice. Is this a pro tier feature as
well or is this all the tiers? I think it's all the tiers.
All the tiers, OK, and I'll rapid fire through the rest
because the to do's are the big newsletters RSS and to Do's are
kind of the big ones. But I will not be stopped.
There are more features, so I also added after This is a
reader suggestion. So user kind of emailed me and
was like, hey, did you know that Feedbin and some of these other
like services lets you do custom share options where you can just
like they've got like you're reading Feedbin, you have an
article pulled up, they have a native send to Instapaper send.
To. Whatever.
But they also have a custom option and so if you have a URL
that you can pass in a URL to, you can add custom ones.
And so I created a save from anywhere feature which basically
just lets you in a service like Feedbin, enter a quick reads URL
with their URL variable at as a part of it.
And that will make it so that if you're in the Feedbin interface,
you can have a native save to quick reads button.
I should just reach out to them and say you should add support
for me. But in the meantime, you can
just do that and it works great. And you can use it in other
places such as IOA shortcuts, which may become relevant later
in this episode. There's been a few updates as
well. Just quality of life things.
You can upload PDFs. This was the thing I found
myself needing and was like, shoot, I should add PDFs.
And so it does OCR and those and pulls all the text.
So it's searchable. It does not do any sort of reef
flow of the, the data in the PDF.
You're just going to see the PDF, but it's searchable and all
that stuff. So that's there.
I've updated social posts. So from day one you've, if you
save a post from Mastodon Blue Sky threads or even X, it will
parse them nicely and save them lovely.
I also do some logic there where if the post has a link in it, I
kind of assume you want to save the link that's what you were
saving and so I'll actually save the link as well as a read later
thing. Nice, that's a nice touch.
Yeah, you could. There's also a way to connect to
your Mastodon and Blue Sky account, so when you bookmark a
post, it will automatically pull that in to your readlete reading
queue. And they also threads.
If there's threads with like 20 posts, it turns them into just
one article for you. And the final feature that is
for me is called preload audio because I listen to so many
articles. That's my, that's my favorite
way to read. I read them in the web app, but
I also, and then on the iOS app, but I also like to listen while
I'm walking the dog or doing a workout.
And one of the issues you can run into is that it takes a
while to generate audio. Doesn't take long to download.
It takes a while to generate it. And so I've tried to make it as
low latency as possible by chunking the text and
everything. So it's kind of doing a bunch of
jobs in order, but that's still not enough sometimes.
And So what I've added is in the web UI only so far, if you click
on an article, you can go to a preload audio option which will
generate the audio for you so that when you're ready to listen
to it, it's already there and you don't need to wait for the
text to speech provider to generate it.
So these are all little things that I did for myself and I hope
other people like. But yeah, quite a few things
have been added to the service since then.
I didn't even talk about. I redesigned the highlights
page. The tags are delightful.
Yeah, you're in. Reading has gotten more
features. Slowly fantastic.
This, this is everything I want from like a read it later
service like you like I'm going to go cancel my raindrop dot IO
and like I'm going all in on quick reads.
This is this is everything I want because I like raindrop dot
IO but it's app is not great. Like it is not a great app
experience. I think they're much more
focused on the web than they are like apps.
And I miss having like a read it later style page where like the
article is loaded in there and stuff like that.
And I actually, I know when you originally launched this, I said
I wasn't a big like text to speech blog person, but I had an
article the other day that I was wrong.
I was walking rightly. And I was like, man, I would
have loved to been able to read this article while walking
rightly. And I was like, wait a second.
I could have, yeah. There you go.
It's a, it's a, it's a thing walking the dog.
That is, that is your podcast time.
That is your text to speech time.
Yep, Yep, Yep, Yep. Yep.
Yeah, she has all of her shots now, so I can, I can finally,
like, start doing like, big walks with her and stuff.
So yeah. Except she's a golden retriever,
so she gets like it. When she gets to the point where
she's done, she just stops and lays down and I have to carry
her the rest of the way. And she's almost 40 lbs now.
That's not fun. Mine does that too in the heat
and but he's 11 lbs. Little easier.
Yeah. Well, this is fantastic.
Congratulations. This is this is some big updates
here. I'm I'm glad to see this stuff
is here and this is fantastic. Yeah, and thank you for
mentioning it when you were featured in installer a few
weeks ago. I definitely saw a bump after
that. And then the newsletters and RSS
feeds led to a second bump. So I guess if you give the
people what they want, they will come.
Yeah, I mean, I've basically implemented every feature
request in Parchment except Neon's make the orange theme the
default and out of now that's just out of spite.
I'm kidding Neon. I'm kidding.
I I do feel the people want the blue theme as the default.
No one's written in to tell me otherwise, so.
OK, let me open up my alt account and get the feedback
flow and. All right, well, I have a
classic all the small things topic for you.
I I I got like a few, like I got a bunch of little grab bag items
and I'm rapid fire through some of these and then some of these.
I think we can we'll probably have a discussion on.
But the first is there was a Final Cut Pro update.
Was it this week? No, it was by the time you're
listening to this, it would have been last week.
OK, whatever, it doesn't matter. I really get hung up on that.
Like that really breaks my brain.
You really do. I think you need to.
You need to just like eject this from your brain.
I can't. It really seems to break you.
I can't. It's just, yeah, it breaks me.
I can't do. Anyways.
Anyway, there's a couple of new features and final cut that I
think are really interesting. There's no proper live caption.
So previously they had support for like closed captions, but it
was like baked into the video. You couldn't change the font,
you couldn't change anything about it.
They were not good. Now they have proper live
captions that you see on like TikTok or Instagram or something
like that, where it's going through and giving you proper
captions. You can change the font, you can
change the size, you can change the animation style, you can
change the timing, you can change just about everything
related to it. They're really good.
They're on the Mac and the iPad, which I appreciate a Mac only
feature is there is now auto masking.
So if you're color grading and you're like, hey, you know this
I'm I'm filming a person and they're standing in front of a
car, but the person is lit correctly, but the car is not in
the car is a little too dark. You can auto mask the car now
and you can light it up and it'll create a mask around that
car for every single frame of that clip.
So if the car is moving, that mask moves with it, which is
really nice. Or if like you want to do the
person, the person moves with it or if you wanted it's, it's a
really nice feature. That's something I know.
I wish they would bring these features to the iPad as well.
It it really shows that like Apple does think of the Final
Cut Pro for the iPad as Final Cut light and not Final Cut Pro.
Yeah, it it does. It kills me a little bit.
It's like Final Cut Express back back when there was Final Cut
Pro and Final Cut Express. That's actually a really good
way of putting it, which is a bummer, but yeah.
As someone who learned on Final Cut Express.
Same. That's fine, you know, inside,
but yeah, but that's really cool.
The the auto caption thing is, is really, really nice because I
remember I don't really have A use for that myself with the
sort of stuff that I make. But like I was kind of
interested in it and then when I saw how it was initially
implemented where like you said, it was just like here it is.
Yeah, it's it was closed captions is what like classic TV
closed captions kind of thing? Yeah, but now it's like the
stylized stuff that you get in like those apps, like.
Like captions, is that what? Yeah.
Or there's something that everybody uses Cap cut.
Cap cut. OK, that too, Cap.
Cut or the Instagram Edits app or even like the TikTok app or
something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So yeah, that, that that's pretty.
There's some other stuff in there as well.
There's some logic changes. They're also baking Final or
Pixelmator Pro into the apps a little bit better.
So that way, like you can take a frame right from Final Cut and
send it to Pixelmator Pro so you can do thumbnails and stuff like
that. Kind of cool.
But interesting, OK. The other big thing that
happened this week is Open AI released GPT 5.6 and this was
kind of what I was talking about.
I was, I was in a group chat with John and Federico yesterday
and we were playing around with it and it's very impressive.
Sorry, nearly. We're going to talk about AI
stuff for a bit, but it is insane.
So there's three tiers of it now.
There is, there is Soul, Terra and Luna and I hate the names
because I always have to stop and think about them for a
second. But Soul is the sun, Terra is
earth, Luna is the moon, and so sun is the biggest most complex
like goes the hardest 1. Terra is supposed to be about
the same as GPT 5.5 but about half the cost and Luna is
supposed to be the fastest and cheapest model they've ever done
while still being pretty like pretty good.
Like it's pretty good. I have found myself just pretty
much using soul for development stuff and Luna for like everyday
task and stuff like that and like that seems to be a good
balance so it doesn't eat up my usage.
But going into it, I knew it was going to be released on Thursday
and I I've been so I've been working on parchment and I was
like, OK, I want to test this. I want to see if it actually is
that different from 5.5 S The morning 5.6 came out before it
was out, I prompted 5.5 with like this like like 2 paragraphs
of like basically TLDR find bugs, security and performance
issues. But like it was, it was a little
more detailed at that. And 5.5 came back with nothing.
It was like, Nope, you're good. I was like, wow, OK, that's
weird. Interesting.
And I, I've been kind of doing that along the way throughout
Parchment, so it's not entirely like surprising, but I was a
little surprised it didn't find anything. 5.6 came up.
I turn on Soul, I turn it up to the maximum, and it came back
with eight critical bugs and eight performance bugs.
And so I just let it go at it. I let it fix those.
And then let me tell you something, the app feels so much
snappier afterwards. You might even think it's
Safari. But yeah, it's I, I was very
impressed with 5.6. Hang on one second.
Sorry about that. I knocked the power brick out.
That is keeping my camera on. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a little important. I also took 5.6 and I pointed it
at Balance Audio. Now Balance Audio is the first
made of native Mac App that I made.
And because it was the first native Mac App that I made, I
made a lot of mistakes with it as well because there was a lot
of stuff I just didn't know. So I pointed it at it and it
basically came back and said, yeah, this sucks, let me fix
this for you. It took, it was just under 30
minutes. It was like 29 minutes and like
40 something seconds at that and it basically rebuilt it and went
through like 2400. It deleted 2400 lines of code.
No, I'm sorry I got this backwards.
It deleted 1900 lines of code and added 2400 lines of code and
like it just completely cleaned up the app and it is so much
faster and so much smoother now and is a much better native Mac
citizen. So I was very impressed with
this. I, I've been burning through
tokens like nobody's business. Luckily they keep giving me
resets. So I'm like, yeah, but anyway,
so I'm really impressed with 5.6.
I think it's a really good model.
I'm not some AI researcher or like influencer or something
like that. I don't, I, I'm not going to sit
here and tell you all the benchmarks and stuff like that,
but for my use cases, it's very impressive and I'm, I'm very
impressed by it. That being said, open AI still
not a great company and I don't like Sam Altman.
So yes, I'm very conflicted. I have very major issues with
all of this stuff and I, I don't know how to resolve that.
I, I, I really don't, I can't bury my head in the sand from
it, but I also, I, I don't know, I don't know, look, I feel bad
for using it, but I'm still using it.
So I don't know. I don't know what I don't know.
Yeah, nice. Well, I, I have not used any of
the new chat. I don't use ChatGPT almost ever.
So this is all weird to me. Although I heard they updated
their their Mac App and people hate it.
I'm sure we'll get I'm sure we'll get to that.
I think it is notable and interesting that they have
adopted the Opus Sauna Taiku naming structure that Anthropic
has had for a while. Interesting.
But I, I do think you hit on an interesting thing, which is in a
world where we lean heavily on these AI coding agents to help
us make software because we are so early in it and it change and
it is getting notably better. And I think this is a thing that
like if you use these chat bots as chat bots, then they maybe
feel like they're kind of not changing much and they're kind
of just whatever. It's been the same.
And honestly, I think like the Luna and like Haiku models and
even Apple's like basically they're on device model is good
enough for a lot of things people do with AI.
But these high end models, encoding tasks specifically with
coding harnesses like cloud code, like open code, like
Codex, their world's better, like remarkably better than they
were a year ago. And six months ago even.
And so if you are experiencing that, you may be look at other
people who are like, what's the big deal?
And be like, what are you talking about?
It's enormous what these things can do now.
And it's just, I think we live in different realities where
we're not using the same things. But I digress.
I'm going through some of this with my quick reviews app, which
was my first app I released a year and a half ago.
And that app was built with cursor and Sonnet 3.5.
So a lot of the stuff there is it was a very different
development process back then. And like it was much more like
write a function that does this, oh God, you crashed everything.
Here's how to fix it. Like it was a very different
world. And like right now we're like,
I've had the same experience where I've like said, here's the
functionality, here's what I needed to do.
And it will like look at the code base and like say, OK,
here's how it works. Here's how things should work.
Let's ask some clarifying questions.
And then it goes and works for an hour and a half and then it's
done. Like it is very, very different.
But I am going through the quick reads or quick reviews source
code and like figuring out how to make it better.
And I'm doing this with Fable 5 and it is, it is a very good
partner in figuring out how to make this stuff better.
So I'm working on a three dot O of that because like you said,
it looks at the code and it's like, whoa, buddy, what happened
here? It was functional and it worked
and it's like, it's fine. But yeah, now they can do much
more and they can be cleaner. I don't know if you ever ran
into this when you've been building in codecs.
One of the things that was a huge issue like last year was
you would like do all these coding changes and it would
stick all the changes in one file.
So Xcode would yell at you and say it can't, what is it?
What is this? I can't, you know, I can't do
this. I can't do this thing within a
reasonable amount of time. Simplify the code or something.
Yep, Yep. Yep, Yep, Yep.
I got that all the time. So that that that's what
happened with balance audio is when I cuz so balance audio, I
didn't write any code for that. Like I didn't write.
I just, I was like, we're going to let Codex do its thing.
Like it was a pretty simple app. It like I talked about, it's a
front end for FFM peg. Like it's not like it's, there's
really not much to it. It wrote everything in a single
dot swift file. It put everything.
And when I, when I put 5.6 on that, it went, why is it like
this? OK, hang on, we're going to fix
this. And that's, that's a big thing
that I did. One thing I do want to point
out. So I talked about how it found
eight critical bugs and eight performance bugs in parchment.
Those like what it came back with was really niche stuff.
Like it was very specific like workflow, like if you do this,
this, this and this, OK, the app is going to crash.
Or if you do this, this, this, like it, like one thing it found
was like if you use the Apple Pencil and you draw and you draw
over this area a certain amount of times, it's going to end up
duplicating this thing and it's going to cause all these weird
issues. It's something that I would have
never been able to figure out on my own.
I think Marco Armament just talked about how he pointed
Claude at Overcast and was like, I've had these bugs for years, I
can't find them. And Claude came back and was
like, Yep, Nope, found them. Here you go, here's the fixes,
here's how you do it. So like, I think these are
really great assistant tools like Parchment.
For me, I still feel like I am the primary developer of
Parchment, whereas Balance Audio Codex was the primary developer.
I feel like I'm the primary developer of parchment and Codex
is my assistant here. And I think that's, that's
probably the healthy tool, healthy way of doing it.
But oh, I feel like you might disagree with me.
No, I don't disagree with you. I have.
I've had a thought that I feel
stronger about, which is that all coding languages are
abstractions. Like at the end of the day, it's
ones and zeros flipping back and forth And we have there's
there's like that's like binary, there's machine code that kind
of tries to abstract it a little bit.
There's like C, there's C++, there's objective C, there's
Swift. Like all of these things are
abstracting more and more of it away so that you can write more
human readable, easy to learn and understand code.
And I kind of think that even though it's non deterministic,
like working with these coding agents is kind of an just a new
level of, of abstraction on top of it.
So I feel like if you're, if you're vibe coding where you
just like have a chat window on like one side and you just have
the web app loaded and you have no idea what's going on, maybe
that's not exactly the same thing.
But like, I feel very much like a real regular developer when
I'm working with these things. Yeah.
So for me, like I have codecs open, but I also have Xcode open
and I, I'm, I'm working in both. So I, you know, I'm not trying
to gatekeeper, tell people what they are.
They're not. That's more just like kind of my
gut feeling like, like I said, like balance audio.
I don't feel like I'm the developer of it.
I feel like I just natural language and put my way through
that thing. Yeah.
And that's fine because that wasn't, that's not an app that's
going to be sold or like, like if you join my Patreon, you get
access to it. But like, it's not something
like it was. It was really just a tool for me
because I had a problem. I think my bigger thing is if
you think this is not development, then you just don't
think development exists anymore because.
I think this is. What's going to this is it is
not, I think, a flash in the pan.
I think this is what development looks like.
It's, no, it's just like when we move from punch cards, like like
that was before our time, but like there was a time in human
history where development meant you took paper and you punched
holes in the card and that's, that's, that's how you told the
computer what to do. Yeah, it wasn't too long ago
that iOS developers had to manage their own memory and
release it on like, you know, Swift abstracts a ton as well.
Yeah, I think, I think we this, I think this is a new era of
abstraction. And I will say another thing,
one of the reasons why you are so like locked into Codex and
I'm so locked into Cloud Code is like while the LLMS are
randomizers, whatever, they are very consistent in how they
behave. So I know when I enter something
into Cloud code, I know what it's going to do.
It's very dependable. And that that was another reason
I I've talked about why I switched to codecs a while ago
because I was using cloud for a long time.
But when I started doing development, I felt like the way
I spoke to codecs, it understood me better than the way I spoke
to Claude. Does that make any sense?
It makes total sense. I I've used codecs a couple
times and I'm like, what are you doing, buddy?
That's not what I would do. So yeah, it's not that it's
worse. Like obviously 5-6 especially is
sounds like a great model, but yeah, it's, it's weird.
We live in interesting times. Yeah, it, it is.
Yeah, I do want to briefly chat about the new ChatGPT app.
So they basically they took the Codex app and the ChatGPT app,
they put them in a room, they put on some Bow Wow Wow, wow,
wow music. And then like nine months later
out came this new ChatGPT app, which is Codex and ChatGPT and
one, and people are having a field day over it.
I don't get it. I freaking love it.
I love it. It makes the IT makes.
Is the chat there? I guess the chat is so the chat
is No, the chat is there. It's just, it's, it's not the
primary focus, it's, it's like a little popover window, which I
think makes total sense. OK, let's let's big picture this
for a second. Google and Apple are going to
take the main user AI field like you're going to have built in
AI, be able to query AI stuff in your OS that you're using,
whether you're using iOS, Mac OS, Android, the Chrome OS, or
like whatever they're doing on Chromebooks or stuff over there.
There is going to be system level chat bots that you can
just chat with and ask questions and get returned.
So companies like Claude or Anthropic and Open AI and stuff
like that, they are going to lose that base right there of
like the normal people of like, hey, what are the restaurants
around me? I'm staying in this hotel.
I need stuff that's in walking distance, that kind of stuff.
They're going to lose that base right there.
What they're going to keep is all the people that are focused
on productivity and coding. So the fact that the app is
shifting more towards the productivity and coding side
thing, I think makes sense to me.
Chat is still there. There's a keyboard shortcut.
You can hit command option N and you can just type in.
You can chat right with it. It's great.
It's still there. It's great for asking those one
off questions and things like that.
But basically the way the way to think about it is your
productivity and like coding stuff is file 1st and that's the
kind of thing, whereas just asking like chat questions is
web first. So that's just kind of like off
to the side, a smaller thing. I love it.
I think people just need to get used to it.
I think the whole people don't like change and they just like,
what do you mean? Like I like, I downloaded and
I'm like, this makes sense to me immediately.
I get it. The one thing that's not there
right now is the ChatGPT projects feature, Codex projects
are there, but the ChatGPT projects, which is also like
cloud projects, those aren't there right now.
But apparently somebody from Open AI said those are coming.
So yeah. Interesting.
OK, like I said, I haven't used it, but I have not heard a
single person say they like it outside developers.
If you're a developer who used Codex already, it seems like you
like it. But I guess it's kind of, I
guess the, the feeling I've gotten from folks is that, oh,
you're making us all use the developer app now.
I see. I have.
I have a feeling that the people that are just using ChatGPT
regular ChatGPT are probably using it on the web and not
using it in the app. Well, this is the thing as well.
This is I think we overestimate how many people use Mac apps.
I have done so much user research over the years and I am
I it was this was a thing that really shocked me.
Everyone uses everything in Chrome.
That's, that's what, that's kind of what like when I'm looking at
this, I'm like, I'm like, I have a feeling a majority of the
people like they have user data, they know what accounts are
touching ChatGPT codecs touching both one or the other.
Like they know. And I have a feeling they're,
they see that like if you are just using ChatGPT, you're just
using it in the web. But anyways, we should probably
move on to the challenge. Yes.
One thing really quick. I mean, I have one more thing in
the document and I'm going to like 30 seconds on this.
There's going to be a link in the show notes to something
called Open Knowledge. This is a new text editor.
This is a text editor that basically combines terminal it
together. So think Obsidian, but also you
have Claude code or codex in the terminal at the same time, all
in the same window. So for example, if you're using
Obsidian, I pointed it at my Obsidian vault, I can sit there
and write in all of my markdown text files.
But also I can be like, hey, go through and summarize all of the
features in iOS 27 about widgets and it'll go through all of my
notes. But just that's just the stuff
in my vault and it'll pull all that stuff and it'll come back
with all of the widget features and iOS 27 kind of cool if
you're into that. And it's free, so check it out.
Interesting. Yeah, I found it yesterday.
That was kind of interesting, but yeah, we should get to the
challenge. Oh boy.
So what was your challenge, Chris?
My challenge was build a shortcut with only the feature
Describe a shortcut which is an iOS, iPad OS and Mac OS27
feature. Would you like to go first?
I feel like I just did a lot of talking, so it would you like to
go first? I can go first.
I doesn't keep a history, does it?
What? Do you mean doesn't?
Like a history of what you asked it to do it doesn't look like.
Oh, I don't think so. So I have been partially
successful and this might just be a beta issue, it probably is.
So I have created a shortcut called Save web page to stand by
quick reads and it is a simple little shortcut that uses that
new save anywhere. The URL I talked about that you
can use in apps like Feedbin and made it so made a shortcut that
takes in a safari website, it finds the URL and it sends it
over to quick reads. Now this is stupid because it is
totally unnecessary. The quick reads app has a share
extension that just shares it and it works better than this so
you should just use that. But if for whatever reason you
need, I just wanted to see if it could do it.
Like can it understand what I'm asking it to do?
And I know it can't use third party apps yet.
So I was like what can I do? That's just with the Apple
stuff. And it worked.
It did a good job. The only thing it didn't get
right and even after I asked it a couple times to fix it, it
didn't. So I just went in and fixed it
myself. It was against the challenge.
Well, here's, well, you'll, you'll hear in a moment why it
doesn't didn't matter. So the shortcut input there like
where you can select like what can like images, videos, it
would just always select all of them.
It would not specify. It would not let me specify just
like web pages. So I had to do that manually.
The ultimate problem, and this might just be an iOS 27 issue,
is that it never showed up as an option to share.
So I don't know what I did wrong, but oh, I probably need
to do something to like, say, to show it in the share sheet.
That's probably what. I you might have to add the
yeah, because I think that's an action now.
OK, so I could not for the life of me figure out how to get this
to show up in Safari itself. Yeah, I think that's.
It I'll play around and see if I can get it to do it, but that
was the one thing that bummed me out is I actually, oh show in
the share sheet. Yeah, it's just an option.
And if I do it now, now it does show and it works.
I get the annoying pop up that says would you like to allow
this? Always allow.
Which, and it doesn't remember, always allow nice.
OK, it functions so so it works. I did great.
I did cheat a little I guess. All right, so I did.
Well, OK, so I started off was like, OK, I'm just going to tell
it. So this was the thing at WWDC,
we were all trying to get it to do and we couldn't get it to do.
So I was like, I'm going to do it this time.
We're on beta three. I bet you I can do it.
I was trying to get it to make a clipboard manager, even though
on iOS and iPad OS you would still have to manually add stuff
would not do it. It would like Nope out.
It would like one of the times it was like, I will save your
clipboard history to a notes document.
And then when you would try and go and get it, it would it would
come up with little pop up. It said go into Apple notes and
look at this notes document and just copy it out of here.
I'm like, no, this is not right. So that didn't work.
So I was like, you know what, you know what other shortcut
everyone tried to make when shortcuts first came out was a
morning summary shortcut. Everyone had a morning summary
shortcut, including this guy. So I was like, you know what,
I'll I'll get it to do it. And it did a really good job
right off the first prompt of doing it.
It pulled all the reminders that we're due today, all my calendar
events and the weather. I did follow up with it because
what it did on the first go is it just put it all in like a
giant ward wall. Like it was just like one
paragraph. No line breaks, no nothing.
It's like, this is unreadable. So I told it I was like, OK, put
everything in a list form, use emojis to break up the sections
and stuff like that. Much more readable.
And then I also did follow up and told it to always include
specific weather, like the current temperature, high, low
and air quality, I believe. Yeah.
And it's been working great ever since then.
I'm not going to use this because I have something in
Codex that I use this for that's a lot more detailed and a lot
more powerful. And that's the thing that kind
of worries me about Shortcuts is I have something in Codex that
not only gives me all of this information, calendar events,
reminders, weather, things like that, it also goes through my
e-mail and finds important messages, goes through the
Messages app, finds important messages.
It goes through and finds like 5 to 10 articles that from the
last 24 hours. It does a lot more that
Shortcuts just can't do. And I'm like kind of worried
Apple is behind the game on this.
No, not not that they are. They are behind the game.
I'm not worried that they might be.
They are behind. Well, nice.
That's fun. Yeah.
Did you cheat at all? No, no, I, I didn't.
I, I literally would just do the follow up and hit run and I'd be
like, OK, yeah, that worked. And I ran it a couple of times
throughout the week. I actually am curious.
I'm going to look at it. Let's let's look at it right
now. We have a couple minutes.
So let's let's look at I haven't looked at the editor, so I've
just been using the OK, so it starts with fine calendar
events, then does fine reminder, get weather, get temperature,
get high, get low, get air quality.
Then it uses the the Apple Intelligence use cloud model
option to basically somewhere. That's interesting because it
doesn't need to do that. It could have just put all that
information in a text, deal a text action and done that.
It doesn't need to use that, but I guess that it does.
Oh OK I see what it does. So it says basically it uses the
cloud model, says summarize my day based on calendar, events,
reminders, weather, current temperature.
And then it says please format the summary as an outline with
headings. Use emojis to symbolize
different sections. So that's funny because it does
that. You could get different results
every single time that you do that.
I don't, I didn't take screenshots, so I don't know if
I was getting different results. I wasn't paying that close of
attention. I assumed it would have been
using the text action and laying all that information out, but it
doesn't. Interesting.
But then the last one is show results.
So it shows that. All right.
Interesting. All right, Well, that was that
challenge. What do you got for us to do
this week? So my challenge is use one of
your Co hosts apps and make a feature suggestion.
Love this, love this. Ideally one that'll make them
$1,000,000. Can't can we tell Neilion to put
in codex and clot? No, Tell Neilion to put in grok
and Tiny start. A more cursed combination.
Just gonna be so mad. Oh boy.
Oh. I'm kidding.
I wouldn't do that.
I.
Wouldn't do that. The coach doesn't have to follow
it. They could totally ignore it.
But you know, if I give them, we, we all like to do some dev
work. So give us give us something fun
to do. OK, I like this.
I like this a lot. OK, cool.
All right, well, that brings us to the end of the show, and I
have an end of the show question specifically for you, Matt.
Is Max Verstappen going to leave Red Bull?
There's a lot of rumors going around that he's talking to some
other teams and that like, he might be signing with McLaren,
even though everyone is publicly denying it.
There's a lot of rumors going around and you know what they
say? Where there's smoke, there's
papaya. Well, obviously on an infinite
time scale, yes, he will leave Red Bull.
I mean 40 years old. OK, before the start of next
season, will he be at Red Bull? Let's, let's put it that, let's
rephrase it before the start of the next Formula One season.
And by start, I mean obviously like testing and stuff like
that. Like by the start of the season,
will he still be at Red Bull? OK so I was going to say on an
infinite time scale, 100% heat death of the universe, he's gone
on a two to three-year time scale.
I would say like 80% chance he goes somewhere else but by next
season cause 'cause. His contract clause, so he has a
clause in his contract that he's able to leave if he isn't second
in the World Drivers Championship by a certain point
and we just passed that. He is not second.
He's not even close to 2nd. Yeah, OK, F1 using my he's #7
right now in the drivers championship.
That's tough. Yeah.
For, I mean, let's be real, the best driver on the grid at the
moment. 7th is rough. So yeah, OK, I'd I'd give it.
Oh, I mean, it's it feels like a cop out.
I feel like it's a coin flip. I would say he will still be
with Red Bull at the start of next season.
I'm saying he's gone. I I'm saying he, I'm saying next
season he is not at Red Bull. I mean, he seems pretty upset
and. Unhappy he is.
He's mad. He is like, did you see the
footage of him like after the race this last weekend?
Like just like run past Lauren Becky's?
Like he was just like, Nope, don't.
Want to talk to you? Yeah, he was like Lauren.
Becky's ran after him like it was like, yeah, he's, he's,
he's. Yeah.
All right. Well, that brings us to the
show. Thank you all so much for
listening. Thank you for Mac Stories, for
having us. We're Mac Stories podcast after
all. Go Let's go check out all the
writings and other podcasts. I can't speak anymore.
So that's a good place to wrap up.
Have a great day.