Transcription
If you can drive, read, create, or poop, there's a free app on this list for you.
So, the way that we're going to structure this video is we'll have a few different categories. The studio will vote on our favorites from each category, and whoever gets the most votes wins.
Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket. It is a Pokemon trading card game collecting game. Twice a day you get to rip open Pokemon trading card game packs. When it first came out, Adam, Andrew, Rich, all these people on the team, they were really into this game. They all gave up. But not me, baby. I don't give up on this. If I do something, if I do something, I do it forever until I die.
So, if you're like me and you have moved to New York City and you really love food, Belly is a great app. Belly allows you to make a list of restaurants you want to go to. And it also has a curated list of like top 50 like restaurants that you want to go to in a specific category or like top 50 bars and you can also rank them after you have been there.
Underrated. Okay. Underrated restaurant on my list is actually in LA. In my opinion, the best tacos you can get. Sonora Town.
Oh my god. Fun and games. I cannot sing the praises of any app but the goat Angry Birds.
Alex, can we finish the video? No, there's one more level. Just give me like five minutes.
Should we put Oh, yeah. Focus Friend is Hank Green's app that's really fun. It's basically an app to keep you from using your phone. So, Focus Friend is a cool app that pretty much locks your phone from being used, but Oh, no. I don't know if that's copyright music, but it gives you a cool little bean, a little bean guy that will uh sew something or knit something while you're working. And if you need to pick up your phone to use your phone, they need to stop him or her from sewing and you lose basically. So the more you can not pick up your phone, the more socks you get, the more scarves you get if you subscribe and then you can like decorate your home and everything. It's really cool. Really clever idea for an app. Hank Green's just good at everything.
So for my fun and games app, Miles actually told me about an app called Roads that's from Porsche, like the car manufacturer. But Miles is in China right now. And so instead of him coming on to talk about it, I figure I could just do my best impression of Miles and you guys can still learn about the app. Hey, I'm Miles. So the Rose app is basically like Corner or Belly, those apps where you can share your favorite restaurants with your friends, but for roads that you can drive on. So, if I'm kicking it with all of my boys, cuz I'm a cool guy, then I could maybe drive around, or as I like to say, whip around and then send all of my cool guy boys my favorite roads.
Ridiculously goated piece of free software. It's not exactly software, but it is your local library, which just has so much good stuff. And it just so happens that my local library, the Brooklyn Public Library, actually does have an amazing piece of free software, and that's the Brooklyn Public Library app. Go to your local public library, go get a book. Um, if you don't know what to read and you want something quick and fun and easy and related to technology, I really like The Employees by Olga Raven. It's a book about a sci-fi spaceship very far away from Earth where half the people on board are humans and the other half are androids and no one knows who is who. And the story is told entirely by anonymous complaints to HR. It's very fun, very goofy, very cool.
So, this is a bit of a Dropbox or AirDrop alternative. It's called Blip. Rufus, audio guy number two, actually introduced it to all of us here at the studio, and it's kind of slowly spread like wildfire. I first switched to it to get off of Wii Transfer because a while back they updated their terms of service to technically allow them to train AIS on your data which is a big no no especially if you're working with copyrighted material especially other people's copyrighted material and I'm going to send uh Ellis a picture. Um right now I'm waiting for Ellis Roven to accept. What could this be? Ah, look at this picture of a horse.
So, unlike other free file sharing services like Dropbox or Wii Transfer where you can get a little bit of storage for free, but then you have to upgrade, there's no cloud here. You're just going peer-to-peer, which means that you can blip big files for totally free between computers. You just have to make sure that you and whoever you're collaborating with also has the software.
So, my productivity app of choice is Obsidian. It is a note-taking app, but I use it for pretty much everything. Uh, the thing that I like about it is that it's crossplatform. So, for work, we use a lot of Apple products and I personally switch between Apple devices and Android devices pretty much every year. So, having one app that goes on both platforms is super clutch. On my phone, I have it mapped to just pressing my top button and it opens up my home base in Obsidian. It's way less complicated than Notion. Notion I feel like is a little intimidating because when you open it up it's like there's so many things you could do and so many people on YouTube have so many great templates and all this stuff and it's super great. We use it for work but I think it's a little bit too much for my personal use. Most of the time I'm using it on my computer but it's super cool. Love it. Great great app.
Now I don't know if this counts as productivity but I use the Arc Search iPhone mobile browser. Um and it's a really good browser. You know Ellis is crazy. He uses Safari, which I think is like insane. But the Arc Search mobile browser is your favorite browser that will maybe possibly die soon eventually because they're not really making it anymore. However, I still find it really, really good. Um, it's very simplistic. You know, you've got your standard multitasking, all this stuff. The main reason I use it is because it syncs all your Windows to Arc on the desktop. And I still use Arc on the desktop even though they're not updating it anymore. A lot of people trying to get me to move to different browsers, but I'm going to sit on this until it's completely dead.
We at the studio do business all the time. And by do business, I mean use poopmap, which is an app that's a lot like Belly. So, let's say Belly for food in one end, poop map out the other, which is it's an app you can record where you pooped and how it was for your friends. And if you look at their website, this is kind of fun. And they've got a little blog here where they talk about, this is a recent article, the Thanksgiving aftermath, where they've analyzed data from 2025's Thanksgiving. And by far, the most poops were dropped in Texas with an average rating of 3.67. And if you want to follow the whole studio on poop, you can.
So every day, the password manager that I use is Bit Warden. Bit Warden is one that I just landed on a couple years ago because it's open source. It's on my phones. It's on my laptop. It's everywhere I need it. I have all my passwords.
Raycast is an app that I use on my computer mainly for work stuff. It is like if you've ever used Mac OS, you know that there's this thing called Spotlight, which is just to search for files or I don't even know what else it does. uh quick calculations like if you have 43 * 4 and I wrote 3 43 * 3462 cool raycast is that but for everything else so it searches your entire computer it has a crazy ecosystem of extensions that developers build for it so there's a bunch of stuff that Raycast does by default which is cool like window management and again searching your files but it's the developer ecosystem that really makes it shine there's so many extensions that I use all the time. But people have made things that do almost anything in here for completely free. So there's things like if I want to take a video file and convert it into something else, which we have to do kind of often when I work in ProTools, it's really picky about what I give it. So I can use something like convert media. And there's a few different versions of these. Like so many people have made so many different things. Raycast, you can pretty much do everything for free. I used it for free for a long time. really the only thing that they charge for is if you want to use any of their AI tools, which is I know a lot of what Rufus does with it.
So, another productivity tool that costs money if you're a business, but if you're just a normal person is totally free is cal.com. I think it's insane how much people are willing to pay for these calendar management apps just to book a call with somebody. I was able to get my cal.com account set up really quickly, quickly integrated into all my different email and calendar apps. And what's cool is you can integrate it into a bunch of different plugins, whether it be HubSpot or different calling services. So, it's actually really flexible from a tech point of view. And on their website under their free plan, they do explicitly say that this is free forever, which I like because if they ever change that, you guys don't have to yell at me. You can yell at them.
All right. There is an app that I don't think enough people know about because it was invented way back in the super early days of Android and is called Google Opinion Rewards. Google Opinion Rewards is literally what it sounds like. It is a questionnaire app where every now and then it uses your Google search data to kind of pull up a random questionnaire. So it'll be like, "Do you live in the state of Arkansas or have you thought about buying shoes lately?" And you'll just say yes or no. And it'll give you two or three questions and then it gives you 25 cents. It's easy. it. Look, it's easy. I'm not trying to sound scammy. It's easy money, people. It's easy money. You should download this.
So, my favorite app of this bunch is probably the Blackmagic camera app. I really love the controls you get for manual focus. And you get like all the other controls that you normally would want such as false color, focus peaking, all that good stuff. But for me, it's the manual focus control that I really love.
I'm an active empetamine user. If you edit videos, you will know the feeling of doing a render and then your computer shutting down or doing a file transfer and your laptop goes to sleep or you accidentally close your laptop screen and all of that upload ends. It's annoying and that's why I do empetamine. So, empetamine just sits in your toolbar up top and then it'll just give you a drop down and you can select how long you want your computer to stay completely on. That way, if you're doing a file transfer or a render, you can make sure that your laptop doesn't turn off and ruin it.
I like to make fun little videos. The piece of software I use to do this is Da Vinci Resolve. Now, I pay for this, but you really don't have to because Da Vinci Resolve is such a wellfeatured piece of free software that can do so so much. I think you're basically only limited in like resolution and a couple of noise reduction features effectively. And you might have seen a couple videos ago when we did this little video for the brain speaker that we shot on the CMF phone. I did that whole video basically in Resolve, but you can edit in Resolve, which you can see here. You can do visual effects like compositing in Resolve, which I did for a couple of our shots, not too many. You can do color in Resolve. This is the This is really the thing that it's great at. It's It's the best piece of software that you can color anything in and you don't even have to pay for that. Then you can do some rudimentary audio work in Resolve. Although Ellis did it in ProTools and he crushed it. Speaking of, look at this picture of Ellis.
What do you do in this situation? You just got hired to produce a podcast for Marquez Brownley. And inside that podcast set, you have a soundboard that plays a bunch of sound effects. And you have these two giant tube lights that you can drive with DMX information. And then he wants to do game shows that involve buzzers. And you need to make all three of these separate systems communicate. The way you can get all of these things to speak together is with one of my favorite programs ever called Touch Designer. And Touch Designer is this beautiful visual coding language that speaks to everything in existence. every single protocol, every single coding language. Not every single coding language, but pretty much every single thing speaks with Touch Designer. And uh and you've actually seen Touch Designer at work in a ton of our productions outside of Waveform. Like like in the game show that I was supposed to host, but then I couldn't. So my little doppelganger did it for me. If you watched the brain video, the brain intro that Rufus and I shot, all those projections are done with Touch Designer. I'll pull up that project right now. It's sick as hell. Here's the Here's the project. Here's what a touch designer project looks like. And this is like as messy as a touch designer project gets. But it's all these little nodes. And each one of these nodes does stuff. And some of these nodes contain code and some of the nodes contain pictures. And the really cool thing about this free version is that yes, it does limit you to 720p, but if you're not generating video with it, where you're not working in like the texture visual world, if you're just processing data or creating logic functions, you're not really capped at all by the free version and you're not technically allowed to do commercial work with it. But other than that, you can kind of go nuts.
I'm a big Affinity fan. So, this photo of the New York City skyline from Brooklyn is really cool, but I want to do some small touch-ups to it. It's really easy in Affinity. So, I choose Affinity over Stupid Adobe. Uh, so Affinity used to be a one-time payment of I want to say maybe $100, but now it's free, so everyone should get it because no one should pay Adobe any money.
Something I vibe coded is my own app called Color Snap. It's basically a daily color challenge game where every day it gives you a random color and you need to go out in the world and try to take a picture of that color to see if you passed and you can build up your streak and everything like that. Uh it was basically me and Claude for like a month straight. But I did get a lot of good feedback from real people and a lot of help from real technical people. So that was nice and it's just been a fun little side project. So definitely check it out.
What I vibe code are lots of little scripts and internal tools and things that just make my life a little bit easier. They're not that interesting to you. But what you might like is how I'm doing it because I don't really do it like everybody else because I like to use something called Quen 3.6. It's very new and it's one of many different open-source AI models that you can run on your own computer. When you use a cloud AI model, you don't really control where in the world that model is being run. They take up tons of compute power, which means that they need a lot of power and they need to be cooled using a lot of water. You don't have a say and you can't be held responsible personally for what you use. If you're local, you can't. So, I can tell you that every piece of code that was written in this project here was run on my own computer on a really efficient Mac studio. And I know where that power came from. And I know where the water usage was. Just makes me feel like I'm not really damaging the world by making my silly little apps.
If you want to know more about the apps that we use, check out this video, which is just the apps that we use, or check out this video, which is Yidd. 2027.