Transcription
Hello and welcome to another episode of AppStories. I'm John Voorhees, and I have Federico Viticci with me. Hey Ticci.
Hello, John. Happy Monday.
Happy Monday. I'm doing all right, you know, recording a full week in advance is a wild thing. I'm not used to it yet, but I kind of like it. People are getting us fresh after a weekend of relaxation. I've only been up for a while. I mean, you've been up longer than I have but hey, here we are, ready to go, and we've got lots of interesting topics today, I think, because I was doing something on Saturday morning that made me think that it could be something we talk about on AppStories, which is I was studying at the kitchen table. And I realized I happened to look to see how much space I had on my iPhone because you know, my iPhone 17 Pro Max is pretty new. I have the 512 gigabyte model. And I thought, I wonder how much I have full because I know I was not too far off of full when I had my 16. And I looked and I have plenty of room but I realized I had way too many apps. So I did the, I started, I started deleting apps and that made me think about kind of organizing and maintaining and tidying up your digital life. And so I thought we would talk today about kind of like some of what our strategies are for those things and some of the apps that we use to accomplish it.
Yeah, and I think we're coming at this from 2 very different perspectives in that you've always been you have always been more of a digital hoarder than I am. Yes. You do cling to a lot of files and a lot of more things than I do. And I think I use way more web apps than you. And as a consequence of that, like most of my data these days is always backed up in a cloud somewhere, which is why I am not too precious about data loss in the sense that, well, it comes down to the service that I got to trust, right? Whether it's iCloud photos or Google Drive or notion for that matter, like I don't necessarily think about. I do back up, especially my most important stories of the year, but, I mean, it comes down to trusting that notion keeps their servers going and, you know, I have version history in notion and all that kind of stuff. I don't deal unlike you. I don't deal with a lot of like heavy files like video audio. That's more of your responsibility. I have those files, but I don't back up those files. Um, I do use Google Drive pretty, pretty um, extensively. I recently looked, this is part of this conversation to an extent in that I recently looked at backup strategies for my 2 Macs. I still have a Mac Studio online from Apple and I have my own personal MacBook Pro with the with the M4 Pro. And I was so fed up with Backblaze.
Tell me about it. I'm interested that you said that because I was going to say that exact thing. Yeah, I just couldn't stand the constant... I do find I do find the whole process of issuing a license for Backblaze on multiple computers very confusing. I wish there were just a way for me to say, I'm going to give you $200 a year and I'm just going to back up all of my machines. That doesn't exist. And so every once in a while, like especially after I I set up a Mac, the M5 for review purposes and I use Migration Assistant. My Backblaze license was automatically migrated to that MacBook Pro and I didn't want it. And so I started getting alerts on both my personal MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio for some reason, which I didn't use for the migration. And so those alerts wouldn't go away. And I tried to fix it. It's confused. I tried to fix it. I couldn't fix it. So I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna get rid of it because I'm tired of having to micromanage this thing. And so I looked at other options. I tried Arc with a Q Arc backup. I also find it confusing. I just I just wanted to have something that would back up some folders for me on Google Drive because I have like 5 terabytes of storage on Google Drive. And I just want to be able to back up some folders from my Mac where it's the only place where I keep some local stuff like scripts, backups, local backups, and I realized yesterday that I could just use the Google Drive app on the Mac to sync some folders to Google Drive. True. And I've just been using that.
Okay. I have a suggestion for you. Okay. That will be, I think you'll like for a couple reasons. I would suggest the app, Carbon Copy Cloner, which is I find very easy to use because you can. But that requires an external drive. It does, but what you do is instead of getting a big, heavy, loud, noisy external drive, you get an SSD. You get one of the Samsung T nines. It's little. You can tuck it away somewhere, and it's uh, and it's very, very fast, so you never notice it doing the backup. I literally have a 4 terabyte one of those that's connected to my, um, my Mac Studio and it does hourly backups because it's so fast. I don't even notice it doing anything. It just sits in a little tray under the edge of my desk, doing its thing over and over and over again 24 hours a day. And yeah, it'll run out. It'll wear out eventually, but I'll get a new one then. That's, that's, that's my main backup. I, I find that SSDs. I mean, the thing about it, a 4 terabyte SSD is it's not a cheap SSD, that's going to run you at least $250 probably. Unless you get a good, a good deal for MacStories deal. I was about to say, I know I know this account called Mac Storage Deals, that every once in a while posts a good deal for an SSD. And when I see a good T90, I drop it right in there because those are my favorite drives for this kind of thing their USB 3.2. Gen two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, so backups have been on my mind because we wanted to do this topic about digital digital cleanup and decluttering your devices. And so I realized, well, I maybe got to reconsider my backup strategy on the Mac. And so I am I am syncing some stuff to Google Drive now. And it's basically like Dropbox. You just select a folder and it creates a two-way sync between that folder and Google Drive. Um, but I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna wait for Black Friday, get a good deal on SSD, plug it into the back of my Mac Studio while I'll still have it and and use it as a destination for Carbon Copy Cloner. And I've been thinking about like, what's going to happen when the Mac Studio loan is up? Yeah. Because I got spoiled, right? By this M3 Ultra Mac Studio with half a terabyte of RAM. Now, obviously, I'm not gonna spend the money to buy one of those myself. I have I have gotten used to having a Mac desktop. I think I am gonna get a Mac mini. Yeah, I would get I would get a like a high-end mini, you know, like with all really speced up. I would get that T9 backup drive. And when you're ready to switch and send your Mac Studio back too, back to Apple instead of doing, you know, Time Machine backups or Carbon Copy Cloner backups on it, I would just do an image of that drive on the Mac Studio onto the SSD because then your migration will be really quick to the new computer. That's that's kind of how I would do it. That's been my strategy when I have loaners from Apple is to keep a keep an SSD around so that I can do them. Or you can just do them, you can know, you can buy the new computer before you send back the other old one and just do a regular migration. That's probably the easier thing anyway. Do we know do we know if Apple is doing an M5? Probably next year. Yeah, I wouldn't expect we see that until summer or fall next year. Yeah, because they probably they probably want to do the M5 Pro on it as well. I think so. I think so. So yeah, I think that we're going to see kind of a rash of computers over the summer and early fall next year with the M5, you know, I think we'll get the Mac Studio. I think we'll get the MacBook Pro and I think we'll get the the mini too, probably all 3 of those. And they'll probably space them out. Some of the Pro models probably come out near WWDC, whereas the mini probably will be more like a back to school type of thing, you know, like in August. September.
Interesting that you mentioned Google Drive, because I've been a, you know, we I moved to Google Drive primarily because the complete package of Google Drive plus Google Gemini was a better deal just price wise than maintaining Dropbox, and there's certain things about Google Drive the way it works, which are a little different than Dropbox, that have still been kind of bothering me, a little bit of friction points, although I have moved to an alternative to the Finder that I for the last few weeks called Bloom, which is really, really, uh, Bloom. It's a really great app. It's Bloom. I think the website is bloomapp.club, I want to say. Odd URL. But in any event, it works better with Google Drive than other apps that I've used before. Finder sometimes is a little wonky with Google Drive, and so is Forklift, which is another alternative to the Finder that I've used from time to time. There's a lot of other reasons I like Bloom too. I'll probably write about it at some point, but I feel like with Finder replacements, the kind of things you have to live with for quite a while before you're really sure that it's like worth doing because the Finder is so deeply integrated in the system. It's not the kind of app that's easily replaceable on a Mac.
Yeah, Bloom, Finder, but refined. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. So anyway, backups are part of decluttering because obviously that, you know, the stuff that you have is also the stuff that's gonna be backed up. Um, I wanted to start very simple about this this idea of how do we keep our computers organized and our devices organized with not too much junk on it? Um, a very simple thing for me is to, on the iPhone iPad, uh, to use the App Library a lot. I am not a heavy user of the App Library as an app launcher. I am a heavy user of the App Library as a way to clean up after myself. I go into the Apple Library because it's a very neat way to see all of your apps by category and it's especially handy for deleting a whole bunch of those TestFlight that I inevitably accumulate over time. They get a special TestFlight folder in the App Library, and it's a very handy way. First of all, to see, okay, which apps do I still have on TestFlight? Am I still using it? Should I get the App Store version now if it's launched? So it's a good way to migrate to see the apps and migrate the App Store version but also to just delete some of those betas that I don't need anymore. And it's also a nice way to browse my category and see like, oh, what's in my productivity folder? I probably don't need to have 5 different email clients. Now that I've made a decision, same for task managers. I, uh, you can also do this in Settings but in Settings you get a, you get just an alphabetical list of apps, right? I got some notification on Saturday from Spark, and that's what that's what caused me to go through and clean them. I'm like, what am I doing with Spark on my phone? I haven't used it in probably a year and a half.
Yeah, have you ever offloaded apps? I have never done it. No, no. I feel like if I've got the space, I don't know why I would do that. I don't really have I feel like I have a reason to do that. I go about it a little differently. I don't go through the folders so much. I went through the list. I tap the search field and just went through the list alphabetically and just scan through. And, you know, good rule of thumb. If you look at an icon and the name of an app and you have no idea what it does, you should probably delete it. Yeah. That's what I did. Yes.
I, um, I also wanted to mention that I do the a version of this with Shortcuts. Um, because those are that's another area of the operating system that I tend to overgrow over time. And every once in a while and it's a little trimming. So I have set up. This is new. I have set up on macOS Tahoe, an automation. I made years ago, a shortcut called Shortcut Exporter, and that creates, uh that creates a copy of every single shortcut in my library as .shortcut files in Files or Finder. And I set it up as an automation on my Mac so that every day it creates a copy of that backup in a folder on my Mac. That folder, I set up as a synced directory in Google Drive. So I have a sort of an off-site backup of my shortcuts, in case I accidentally delete one of them, because I do go in there and every once in a while and I just, I create a lot of test shortcuts that tend to end up at the top level of the Shortcuts app, and then every once in a while I go in there, okay, what was this? I don't need anymore. I'm just gonna delete it. I have so many that are just called New Shortcut. Because, you know, I mean, it's gotten better at managing those. Like if there's literally no action in a shortcut, It goes away now, which is, I really appreciate because before that, I used to have tons of New Shortcut 1, New Shortcut 2, New Shortcut 3, all those things. Yeah, yeah. And so that's that's what I do. And on the Mac, there's the, is there an App Library on the Mac, I don't think there is. No, there isn't. There is the new overlay in Tahoe for your apps, but I just do it the old fashioned way. I go into the Applications folder and Finder because I don't, I'm not fancy like you. I don't use a Finder replacement. And I select all the apps that I don't need anymore. And I just hit delete and my tip is that I use Hazel. I use Hazel on the Mac and I enabled this option called App Sweep. Yep. It's a good option that when you when it detects, that you're deleting an app on macOS, it also offers to delete, like, the cache files, the data files, in applications. Yeah, there's sometimes like logs and other things that are scattered around your system. Yeah, yeah. And so whenever I delete an app. There's also Hazel kicking in and offers to delete the sort of those hidden files. Yeah, they're little files usually, but at the same time, it's nice to just get rid of them because you never know if they might cause a conflict with something in the future.
One tip I have for Shortcuts is what I try to do to avoid that top-level shortcut problem is I have a folder called Experiments and I start every new every new shortcut in Experiments, and that's the folder that grows out of control. And at some point, if I haven't revisited it and turned it into something that's useful that goes into some other dedicated folder, then I just wipe out everything in the Experiments folder and start over with that. Yeah. What else do you do on your device? Like, what's your situation like?
All right. All right, so on the Mac, the Mac is where I do most of the the maintenance because as you noted, I do a lot of, I deal with a lot of big files. So for instance, like for this show. We will have 2 audio tracks that are pretty large chunky wave files. They're not like video chunky, and I have a lot of space on my Mac. I have got 4 terabytes, but they're probably going to be like 200 to 250 megabytes. And as I process the audio, I take the wave file and I run it through 3 different apps, each time copying that file. So at the end of that process, I'll have the original and I'll have 6 copies. And then we have video too. And so I will copy the video files for our video editor. Basically, the process is, don't make any changes on the originals ever, always duplicate at each stage of the process so that you can roll back easily if there's a mistake. And you need to do it. It saves a lot of time in that sense. Um, But that also means that the, at the end of the day, once this show comes out I've got just tons of wave files. I've got a couple of MP3s, you know, there are 2 versions of this show. So I actually have 2 Logic projects for the plus and the regular version of AppStories. I'll have transcripts for the video thumbnails for the video, all kinds of little files. And so what I do is I've set up a pretty careful system for tracking both the audio side and the video side of the production work. And then on Tuesdays, because Tuesday after NPC is released, I don't have another podcast that's coming out until Friday. So there's like a little gap there. That's kind of nice because I don't have to rush to get everything cleaned up. But I never want to get rid of files until I know something's published and there are no problems. So like sometime on Tuesday afternoon after NPC's been out for a while and nobody's said, oh, hey, John, you screwed up this thing. I will go through and I'll just delete all that stuff except for the final product. I keep the MP3s of the podcast audio, and I keep the final MP4, not upscaled at 1080 because I can always re-upscale it. And I take those, and about once a month those files get moved to an external drive that I also mirror onto a 2nd drive. And so I've got an archive of every podcast we've ever recorded, both audio and video for all the shows, and I keep them that way. And I also, I haven't been religious about this, but I usually keep the Logic projects too, because the Logic projects it's only happened a handful of times, but once in a while, it can be handy to go back in there, and those contain, like the original wave files embedded in them and you can kind of go in and do a, you know, grab a little bit of something. And I know that you like to give me a hard time about being a digital hoarder Federico, but it does come in handy once in a while when you will say, John do you know, do you have this? And I'll be like, yeah, of course I have that, right? I mean, it wasn't that long ago, you asked me about, I forget what it was. It was either a video or audio from some. Oh, you know what it was? It was our Club Town Halls. You asked me if I had the original audio because we changed how we're dealing with those on the Lipstone. And yeah, I had a full catalog of all of those episodes all ready to go. MP3s. all just sitting there on a drive.
That is true. That is true. You do you do keep that stuff around and it comes in handy. Every once in a while. Every once in a while. Not all the time. I mean, I don't know. I like I think like having originals of the stuff that we do is useful. I don't do it so much with text because text's so easy to get back off of the web since we control, you know, the database that MacStories lives on. It's a little different when you're dealing with uploading audio and video to a 3rd party service, which may or may not lose your data at some point. So I like to have the originals of that stuff. Um, I also wanted to mention a couple of other features of Hazel on the Mac. I also enable the option to automatically delete the files sitting in the trash for longer than a month. If something's been in, if I haven't emptied my trash in more than a month and something's still there, I probably don't need it. And so it just takes care of its own and it keeps the trash size under one gigabyte for me. That is something that you can configure in Hazel's settings. And so that's what I do. And I also have some, you know, you can set up rules for your downloads folder to automatically delete stuff that's been sitting in the downloads folder for like a month. I've done that in the past. I just like to review manually. What's in my downloads and just delete that stuff myself. But you can do that automatically if you want to. And I wanted to give a quick shout out to 2 options on iOS that I've been using that I like. There's a ton of apps for deleting photos on iOS, right? Obviously, you can do most of this function, you can have most of this functionality yourself with the standard Photos app. For example, if you accumulate a lot of screenshots or a lot of screen recordings you can just go into those sections in the Photos app and you can, you know browse by collection, essentially, go in there, select all, and get rid of all your screenshots. But there's a couple of options that I want to, that I want to mention. One is Clean My Phone, which is by the folks at MacPaw. The makers of the popular Clean My Mac. Now, obviously, uh, you cannot offer the kind of experience uh, on iOS, the Clean My Mac provides on macOS because it's iOS is not open like that. You cannot have that kind of utility with deep hooks into the file system on iOS and iOS. So instead, Clean My Phone is mostly based on the idea of scanning your follow your photo library, and giving you more filters than you have in the Photos app. And it takes a while to run, like I, you know, I have 45,000 items in my, I got for a library, and it took like about an hour to run on device. But it basically breaks down into multiple categories for you, like duplicates. Uh, this is, this is one of the nice things that the Clean My Phone can do large videos. So it gives you a way to see, okay, sure videos, but what about the big ones? So you can go in there, you can see which video, and I have, turns out, 60 gigabytes of large videos. And what I like is that you can choose to clean it all, or you can just review the individual items, going there and choose which ones you want to keep, which ones you don't want to keep around. The other options is called Shutter Declutter. This is a new app that came out a few months ago, I think. And it's got that sort of like, um, um intuitive UI where you can just swipe left and right and choose which photos you want to keep. There's a bunch of apps like this, and it can send you daily reminders to go in there and clean up your photos. Personally, I prefer the every once in a while nuclear, nuclear approach of Clean My Phone, where it does a whole, does a whole scan, and then you can decide. And you can do this twice a year, for example, and keep an eye on the size of a photo library. Also, I usually, I was going to say, I usually do it during the holidays, just what I'm sitting around, you know, it's a good time to do it. There's another category and Clean My Phone that I like, which is blurry photos especially like so that one, like, I don't know, you're carrying around your phone, you have the camera app open and you just accidentally take a picture of the ground, you know, that kind of thing. It'll find all those. Yeah. And the other app for macOS that I wanted to mention that I've been using for years. And it's a great way to find to discover huge folders or files that you forgot about is Daisy Disk. Yeah, it's very good. There's been around for more than a decade, I think. It gives you that, it gives you that sort of like, there's a name for it. I call it like a like a like a flower UI. It's not the proper name. It's got this radial thing going on. Yeah, it's like a radial area graph or something. It gives you like visualization. Colored visualization with colored blocks for which parts of your file system are wasting storage and you can hover over it. See how much storage it is. Click on it, and it digs into that folder and then you can keep expanding or going back. It's a good way to discover that your Spotify cache is now 10 gigabytes or you have that huge project that you cloned from GitHub and it's 5 gigabytes for no reason. You know, those kinds of things that you do with the terminal. They download some huge assets and then you forget about it. And you realize, oh, why am I wasting 20 gigabytes on this thing? Daisy Disk is a nice way to declutter. And again, you can do it not every single week, but you can do it a few times a year and keep your storage in check like that. So, you know, when I use Daisy Disk, is alongside just kind of keeping my files organized the way I explained, is I keep I stat menu in my menu bar with nothing except for how full my SSD is. And that way, I know, you know, it's really weird with APFS, I have no idea how to explain how much space I'm actually using because there's all this kind of, I don't even know. It's like...
No, no, no. We should get John Syracuse on. We should. I mean, look, I don't understand it. All I know is that it fills up and not all of it is real. So what I do is if it gets to the point where I'm concerned that it's going to affect the performance of my Mac, like you know, maybe it gets over 80 or 90 right now, it's only at 67, I will go in I'll take Daisy Disk, and I'll look for those random big files that I have that undoubtedly escaped my system of being organized, that I can delete, and then I'll do Clean My Mac, and I'll allow it to kind of reset all those, systems with APFS. And usually what I have sitting at 67 right now, because I've got a full production of AppStories unwind and NPC undeleted, will drop back down to, I don't know, 50 to 55. So there's probably 10% on my drive at any one point that can be deleted. And so that, that's a big change for me now that I'm, we're doing video is that I'm constantly dealing with a lot of files that I have to delete on a pretty regular basis or else my driver will fill up. Yeah, yeah.
Is there anything else you want to mention? for the things that you do?
Yeah, I don't think so. I think that those are the big things that I do. I don't, you know, one of the things I don't do is I don't I don't sweat. being hyper-organized with my files that way. Well, obviously, obviously, you don't. Well, I do with the video and the audio but like my downloads folder, for instance, is my junk drawer, I put everything in downloads, and I don't see any reason to get rid of it. Every now and then I'll go through and I'll delete the DMGs, and I'll delete maybe the zip files, and I'll delete all kinds of big stuff in there, but...
We used to be able to query the contents of the downloads folder using Sky. But since that's been acquired by OpenAI and stopped working for me.
I sent you a couple of days ago, this alternative to Sky that I saw on Reddit called Fluent. Fluent version one. 4. I mean, it looks pretty similar to Sky with the tapped UI. Yeah, Sky wasn't the only, they weren't first to that idea. I'd seen it before Sky even. But, yeah, well, there are alternatives out there to Sky, if you want to look for them. It's a shame. I mean, we haven't really talked about it on the show. On the one hand, it's kind of a shame that Sky, which you you kind of previewed in May, will never see the light of day in it, the form that we used it for readers. On the other hand, I kind of feel like it was inevitable, and you said as much in your in your preview was that this is just begging to be acquired by one of the big AI companies and it has been. Yeah, in hindsight, I kind of wonder, and this is just my personal opinion. I absolutely don't know any of the details because obviously all the people involved are keeping those things private because of this. I mean, it's an important deal between OpenAI and this team, just my personal speculation. I kind of wonder if maybe in hindsight that article, I've been thinking about it like, why, why, why, why was I given this opportunity to write about it? And I wonder if maybe it was, I don't want to say that my article was a fancy pitch deck, but I'm saying that... It didn't hurt. You and David Pierce had a big profile on them too over at The Verge, I remember. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's a shame that it'll never see the light of day. will see what OpenAI will do with it. But yeah, I think roughly speaking, if there's a takeaway from this episode is that from what I've seen so far, the process of cleaning up, you and I, we all we do it manually. There's no AI involved because we don't trust it with our files.
Oh, no, I would not. Yeah, I mean, Hazel's about as far as I would go in terms of automation. Yeah. Yeah. And even that, it's I'm like you. okay, if it's over 30 days old, I'm pretty comfortable that I'm not going to need it but anything that's newer than that, I'd want to delete myself manually after looking at what it is. Yeah.
Well, uh, in the post-show, for AppStories Plus members, we are going to talk about our latest experiments with vibe coding. Because John and I, we have independently been using Claude Code. John for whatever John has been up to. I have continued my experiments with Type in Mind, which I mentioned last week, and I am so far up to 12 million tokens used on Grok. 12 million. So for a grand total of $9.
John. I was going to say, does that cost a lot of money? Nine dollars. Nine dollars. So we're gonna be talking about what we've been up to on that front.
All right, sounds good, Federico. Thanks for everybody to for joining us today. We will be back in another week. In the meantime, you can find us on MacStories.net and on social media where Federico is @viticci. That's VITICCI, and I'm @JohnVoorhees. J-O-H-N, V-O-R, H-W-S. Talk to you next week, Federico.
Ciao, John.