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Welcome everybody, back to Mac Chat for May 2025, and I have Marty with me again. Hey Marty, how's it going?
Good, how are you? It's good to be here.
Yeah, that's great. It's good to have you always and I am doing well. Have a lot of great things to chat about today. Whether you've got your favorite beverage or snack, just settle in and we've got lots of good Mac Chat coming up.
Let's do it. Sounds fun. Let's jump right in.
Yeah, so I was just curious if you had any comments or responses from last month's show. When we had guest appearance Michael, I asked him which finder view he preferred. Either Columns or List view. What. What say you?
I'm listview all day long for sure. Listview is my favorite.
Awesome. Tell. Tell us what you like about that.
I like listview because when you open up a window, you can just hit the down arrow and just start going through stuff really quickly. And it's easy to find something right when you open up that particular window. So whether you're in like applications or whether you're in documents or wherever, as soon as you open up the window and hit the down button, you can either just do the up and down arrows to kind of scan up and down to look for something, or you can, if you happen to know exactly what you're going to open up. Like say, for example, you want to open up QuickTime, right? Then you just hit Q and it just takes you right to the top of all of the items with Q. So you would be say something that started with Q A. It's going to go on that, because alphabetically that would be the top of the list. And then you just go through from there with your up and down arrow. And then when you find what you need, you just hit command O and you're off and running.
That's great. Yeah, it's very handy. The only thing that maybe a less experienced Mac user might find out is that if you down arrow and you're just perusing your files, you might wander into another folder. If, you know, if you're not careful, you reach the end of the alphabetical listing for one folder and then you're down into another one maybe.
Which actually is one of the reasons why I like List because let's say you're going through the list of documents or any place that you have some kind of documents, media, whatever. You could have files like standalone, maybe jpegs or movies or music or whatever, but you could also have folders in there. And you have to be intentional about opening that folder. Example, let's say you open up documents and then you use your down arrow to get through to a couple of things. And then like, the next thing is a folder, it's going to tell you it's a folder. And you can either use the up or down arrow to go past it or behind it. Or if you want to go into that and you have it highlighted, then you just do command O and then it opens up that particular folder and then you're in that folder. So it's a lot more difficult to make a mistake, I guess would be the good. You're more. You have to be more intentional about what you're doing.
Right. And I also found out that sometimes if you don't show folders at the top, which is one of the things that you can set in, I believe it's the View menu, show folders on top, is that you end up mixing them all together. Because you can have files and folders alphabetically arranged, but maybe the folders are not first. And so I discovered that somehow my setting either got changed or I didn't realize it, that I had folders mixed in with files. So it was really cool to discover that option in one of the menus to be sure that all my folders were first.
That's great. Another kind of little pro tip is let's say you want to put something from somewhere else, whether it's another document or another folder, into that folder that you have open. You want to maybe make that a little bit of a bigger window so at the bottom there's empty space. And then that way you won't accidentally drop it into a folder in the folder you're already in. Because that could be a thing that people do on accident. I've done it. Then I'm looking in the folder going, where's this thing? I know I put it in here and it's not there. And then I end up having to, like, search. And then it turns out it is in a folder in the folder I wanted to put it in, which then you got to go get it out and move it back, you know, so you just want to. If you make the window a little bit bigger and you have blank space at the bottom, then it has nowhere to go except just in the main directory of that open folder that you're in. So kind of saves you from accidentally putting that whatever it is, document or whatever, into another folder if you have folders in the folder you have open, if that makes any sense.
Okay. Subfolders. Yep. Cool. And I also was reminded, for just my own perusing, is that command, I can give you all the information you ever wanted about that file or fold folder, and it will also tell you the path if you vo right or left arrow through that information. So that's pretty cool. In case you can't remember where you are or where did that thing get put? You know? So that's pretty cool.
Yeah, definitely. That also works from your desktop. Let's say, like, you want to find out how much space you have left on your hard drive or anything like that. You know, you can do that on. You do like a single click on Macintosh hd, which is the thing on your desktop. If you have that set up like that, you highlight it. You don't open it. You just click your voiceover cursor on it and then do command I just like you were talking about on another folder or document. And it will show you everything, all the details for that hard drive. And you can do it on really anything on your desktop, any of the hard drives, if you have your Macintosh hd, which is the internal hard drive, any external hard drives that you have maybe connected to your computer, which would be listed there, or any other files that would be listed there. So, yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a universal thing, which is really great.
That is cool. That is cool. And the other thing we talked about last time was mail categories. I couldn't turn that off fast enough. I hate it on my iPhone. I don't want it on my Mac. And so I found out how to turn that off really quickly. We talked about that, too. I imagine you did that as well.
Oh, yes. I hate. I mean, especially on the phone. I turned everything possible off that I could turn off. It took a little longer for those AI features to come to the Mac platform. But when it finally did it, I just went, oh, man. And I had to go and immediately turn all of it off because just as in my opinion, for me, right now, I don't like it. So other people may like it. I don't. You know, I'll just speak for myself. I don't want to deter anybody else if they like it, you know, so.
It'D be fun to hear from people who do like it, because everyone I talk to hates it.
Definitely, you know, that's funny, because I haven't heard anyone that says, oh, I love these new features. So, you know, we'd love to hear from you. So if you want to let us know how you have any of the AI features in Mail or beyond on your Mac computer, let us know. We're at Feedback Mute, show, and we'd love to hear from you.
Absolutely. That's great. Oh, goodness. And then Michael talked a lot about Launch Bar. I don't use it. It seems like you don't use it either.
No, I just use the stock search that's built into the operating system right now.
The Spotlight. Yeah.
Yeah.
Cool. Well, you wanted to talk about the awesome Go menu in Finder, how that can be help for us. Why don't you tell us about that?
Yeah. So the Go menu is basically where all of the main folders you want to access on your computer are located under that menu. So the way you would find it is you would want to make sure that your desktop is set to Finder, which what that means is let's say you have apps open on your computer. Let's say you've got Safari open, you got Mail open, and you want to get to the Go menu. What you would want to do is probably the easiest way to do it would be to command tab until you hear Finder. And then you can do vom, which would put your voiceover cursor up where the Apple is in the top left side of your computer screen, and then you'd right over arrow until you hit go, and then you do vo space. And then under that Go menu is going to be the list of all the most important folders on your computer. So you can access applications, documents, your icloud drive, and a bunch of other stuff all under that menu. And another little pro tip. If you kind of go slow and you listen, like, for example, let's say you land on Applications, and it'll say applications, and then it will tell you immediately after it says the name of the folder. Applications, documents, whatever, what the shortcut for that is. So then later, you know, if you remember some of those, the ones you need to use all the time, say, for example, like applications, then you can use that shortcut right from the finder, and it will just open up that folder straight away. So if you're on your Finder and you want to access Applications, for example, and you hit Command Shift A, it'll just open up your Applications folder straight away. And you don't even have to go up to any menus or Anything like that, it just opens it right up. So take a little time to explore that Go menu and listen to what some of the shortcuts are, and maybe that'll make it faster for you to be able to open up those folders without having to go through the menu.
That's great. It's because it's always good to have a reminder of those keyboard shortcuts. I appreciate that.
Oh, yeah, definitely. And if you ever forget, you can always go up to that Go menu and, you know, find the folder you're looking for and then listen for what the shortcut is and there you go. So you always have access to those folders and the shortcuts to get to those folders.
Now, are they the most recent things that you've done here in the Go menu? Are they stock? Are they just all listed? You know, everybody has those same things. Do you know?
I'm pretty sure it's just all. Everybody has the same list. The only way your list would be different is if maybe you don't use a particular thing. So, for example, like I'm an icloud or. Yeah, an iCloud user. So that's in that list. Sure, it might be there, but it might be grayed out if you don't use it or.
Right.
You know, if you possibly. I think everybody still gets like that stock five gigs maybe. Or is that only for your phone? I'm not sure.
But yeah, don't know.
I think everybody gets a stock five gigs, I'm pretty sure. And as long as you're signed into the same icloud account on your computer as you are on your other devices, then I think it shares that five gigs.
Sir. Sir.
But if you don't have certain things, it may not show up. And also one other thing I will say is there's always a little bit of difference from one operating system to another. So somebody who's on a brand new current operating system for today, for example, and somebody else may be an operating system back or a couple operating systems back. It may be a slightly different depending on how far back you are. For the most part, the Go Mini has been around a long time and everything that you need to access is there. But I just want to make sure that people understand it may be a little different from person to person and operating system to operating system.
That's great. Yeah, that's great. I don't ever visit that menu, so I'm looking forward to using that a lot.
Yeah, there was a question that came up actually, from someone they were asking, I can never find the menus, or I can never find how to access any of the folders that I need. They were looking for documents or this or that. And part of that comes in. If you've been using a Mac for a long time, there's always been Macintosh hd, which is the internal hard drive, which is an icon that is on the desktop. Well, so they used to always have that there whenever you would boot up your computer. And once you got all set up, that Macintosh HD is what it was called, was always there. And if you want to access all of those folders, then you can go that way into that, and then you can dive down through that way. So you would open up, you know, Macintosh HD and then you would look for the user, and then, you know, you would dive down and go that way. Somewhere along the way, they sort of updated the way the Finder works and they made it where it's not stock turned on anymore.
Right.
So if you're a newer Mac user, you may not know that it's possible to have Macintosh HD there. So the way that you would add it there, if that's something that you would want to do, is you would make sure that Finder is selected. So you know tab to Finder, and when it says finder, you go up to, you know, you do that vom. And that puts your voiceover cursor up at the Apple. You tap over once to the right to Finder and then you open that list and then look into preferences and then there's a few things that you can turn on there. One of them is that Macintosh hd, once you turn that on, it will then show Macintosh HD on your desktop. So if you want to explore that, you can. But since they have the Go menu and they made it so easy to access from other things, they decided not to have it on by default. So if you do want that on, that's how you would do that. There's a second feature there that's also really important, which is not turned on by default, which is external hard drives. This used to be turned on by default, but now it is not. So it used to be you would plug in an external hard drive and it would just immediately show up under Macintosh HD right on your desktop. So if you want to be able to access your external hard drives that way, the way you would do that now is the same way you do Vom. Your voiceover cursor goes up to the top on the Apple. You would then do arrow to the right. You would open up the finder window and go into references, and then you would select external drives. And so then from now on, anytime you plug in an external drive, it'll show up on your desktop right there. So under Macintosh hd. So that's how you can handle that.
Yeah. And an important thing about that too is when you take the hard drive out of your computer, you need to eject it and it will complain and put this message up that you have to get rid of. So if you find it on your desktop, and I have maybe I have a Kingston flash drive, so I find Kingston on my desktop and I press Command E and it will say eject Kingston. And so it's important to just eject it properly because it whines and complains if you don't do it.
So, yeah, absolutely. That is huge. Usually. Actually a really good point and very important. Definitely don't just yank it out, you know, definitely do that eject, because really, it could mess up your drive, it could lose data. There's all kinds of stuff that could happen. So definitely eject it before you unplug it.
Right. And you have to dismiss that notification. It will stay there until you make it go away. And a quick way to get to preferences, in any app that your focus is in, if you press command comma, then you don't have to go through the menu system. You're immediately in preferences.
Correct. And here is another, like, little pro tip. If you are low vision or have vision and you do use the mouse. If you take the mouse and you put it on any one of your external hard drives and you drag your external hard drive down to the trash can in your dock, the trash can turns into an eject button and you just drop it on the eject button and it automatically ejects the drive for you.
Oh, cool, that's great.
Yeah. There's another little pro tip on how to eject your external drives.
Awesome. Yeah, that's great. Another thing that we've been chatting about recently, you and I, is the dock. And Michael and I chatted about it last time, too. He probably uses lunch bar a bit. And I always go to my doc and I love moving things around and seeing what's up there and all that kind of thing. But you're going to talk a bit about the, the dock, and then I was going to tell you about a little experience that I had working with a student where the command I gave this person didn't work. And then we figured out why. So tell us about the dock.
Well, so first of all, for those who are maybe new to Mac and they don't know what the dock is, the dock is kind of like a long bar that will, at least by stock setup out of the box is on the bottom of the screen. And the apps that you use the most or any apps you want to put on there, are on that dock. So what you would do is go down there and launch those apps that you use all the time. Thing. You could put anything you want on the dock. But you know, usually people put the apps they use the most on the dock. So things like Safari, mail messages and you know, maybe a note taking app or, you know, whatever else they use all the time, they live on that dock. So if you were to access the dock, you would do VO and then D and that would put your voiceover cursor onto the finder at the dock, which would be farthest to the left. And then you'd use your arrows to go right or left across the dock. Now if you hold down the VO keys and use the right or left arrow, it will stop at the last item on the dock. So for example, let's say you start on finder, which is the thing that's the farthest to the left on the dock, and you hold down the VO keys and you use the right arrow and you go through all the things on the dock. The very last thing is going to be the trash. It's going to stop there and then you use the other arrow to the left to go backwards back through. Now you can do the same exact thing without holding the VO keys down. So for example, let's say you do vodka. You start on the finder on the far left side of the dock and you use your arrows right and left to navigate through the dock. If you do not hold down the VO keys when you get to the end like the trash, it'll just loop around back to find her again and start at the beginning of the dock again. Or if you want to go backwards and you're going backwards and you get to find her and you keep going, it'll loop back to the trash can and you go backwards through. So if you want to continuously be able to kind of go in a circle and loop around through it, then don't hold the VO keys down. And if you want to just go to the end and you don't want to go into that loop, then you do hold the VO keys down while you're using the arrows. If you land on something you want to open, of course, then you do VO space And then it just opens whatever item that your voiceover cursor has landed on and that app will just open straight away. So now the other thing I would say is that you can customize it a little bit in the settings. So you would go up to the apple, you would go into settings, and then you'll find dock. And in there there's things you can do like make the dock larger or make the dock smaller or another cool thing that people do is you can either leave it so it's showing all the time down there, or you can make it hide. And the difference there is you get a little more screen real estate if you hide it because it's not taking up space. It only comes up when you need it. So let's say you do have a hiding, for example, and you want to access something on it. When you do vod to go to the dock, the dock will automatically show up and your cursor will be on the finder or wherever it left off from last. So it's kind of cool to have it hiding because it only shows up when you actually access the dock. And then the other thing is, if you don't like it on the bottom, another thing you can do is you can move it either to the left side of the screen or to the right side of the screen. You don't have to have it on the bottom if you'd ra it somewhere else. So you just explore all the settings. There's a few other things you can do. And depending on whether you have any site at all or you don't, are things that may not matter to you. Things like how it looks when you open up a window or minimize a window, stuff like that. If you don't have any vision, don't even worry about all that because it won't matter to you. You won't be able to see what it's doing. The one other thing I will say, which a lot of people don't realize is, is that you can add folders to the dock also. So, for example, let's say you want to be able to access a couple folders that you access all the time. Maybe you want to access your applications and your documents folder all the time, then you can add those to the dock. It's pretty easy to do that. And also by default you have downloads already in the dock. So that's a down, that's a stock folder that's already on the dock that you can access straight away from the doc.
So you can also add a website to a Doc too, which is really cool, so that you don't even have to open Safari. You can add a website that's in the toolbar in Safari. And so that's pretty neat. Definitely. Yeah. I was going to mention too, that, like, if you're looking for an app, you can type the first letter of its name, or if you have two apps that begin with M, for instance, mail and messages, I can type M MA really fast and I get mail. If I just type M, I might get messages, depending on where I am in the dock.
Yeah.
And also you can move things around, which I thought was really cool. So if you hold down the option key and you press the left or right arrow, the item that you're currently focused on on the dock will move either left or right. So if you want to group your apps that on your dock together, like maybe say all of the. All of the mail apps together or all of the online platforms like Zoom or Teams or, you know, online access to your computer, remote incident manager, all that stuff, if you want to put things together, you can move those apps around, which is really kind of cool.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah. And the other thing I was going to mention too is I was working with a student a couple days ago and I was telling them all these cool things about the doc and we were going to move an app and option left or option right arrow did not work and couldn't figure it out. And finally they said, oh, I wonder if it could be the fact that my dock is actually vertical. And so their dock was vertical, so option up or down arrow actually moved things around for them. So that made complete sense. But if something doesn't work, you know, we got to figure out why. So.
Yeah, definitely. And one other cool little thing, and this is just a preference. Some people like it and some people don't like it. So you can either have it on or off. But it's called recent apps. So say like, the last two or three recent apps that you had open will show up on the far right side of the dock, just to the left of the, you know, trash and the downloads folder. So let's say you download were in Safari and then you quit Safari and then you do something else. You can open Safari quickly if you don't already have it on your dock by just going back on, you know, down. If you have suggestions on, you know, the last, like, I think it's two or three apps that you had open will be down there. So you can also access stuff that way. It's kind of just a Preference. Some people like it and they turn it on and some people turn it off. They don't care about that.
Yeah, cool. Well, the doc is a great place. It's really handy.
Yep. It's a good place to access things quickly. So.
Right. So kind of switching gears from another topic here. I had the need to help one of my students create another user on his Mac. So English is not his native language. And I have several students for whom that's the case. And a lot of times they'd like their computer to be in, you know, Spanish or Vietnamese or whatever it is. And so I have to. I end up learning several, several words in those languages that are important. But I follow along on my Mac as we're doing things, and so I tell them, you know, what I'm hearing, and we have enough English to. To work it out. And anyway. But the. The issue is that this person is wanting to study some documents that are in English. And what happens if the computer is in Spanish? For instance, the nice Spanish lady pronounces all of the document wording in this very heavy Spanish accent. You know, it's English with the Spanish accent. So it's really hard to understand. You know, like United States is United States or something.
I can't. I can't even imagine.
It's crazy.
So crazy.
Yeah, it's really bizarre. And so it. It makes it hard to understand the English. And if the person is trying to learn English, you know, also or become better speaking English, it really kind of messes everything up. And so they. We wanted to create another user profile. And so that was an experience in itself, just creating the user profile. But then the challenge was that, okay, so we figured out how to log into the user profile, but then we needed to change the language on the computer and the voiceover voice, because we still had this really nice Spanish lady trying to pronounce English, you know, in thick Spanish accent. So we ended up calling Apple Accessibility because it wasn't obvious to me that I had to. Well, I knew I had to go into the voiceover settings and speech and add language to rotor. That's where I had to go. And then I had to VO space a couple of times on the language I wanted. Anyway, it wasn't immediately obvious, and voiceover wasn't giving me quite the feedback that I had hoped for, but we made it. And so now the student can switch back and forth by basically logging out of the profile that he's in and then logging into the one that he wants. And so it's Pretty cool because it's an easy way to switch languages voices on your Mac. And then apparently there's a way up in the status bar, the vom that you can switch user up there. And I can't remember if I had to add something to the status bar or not, but there's a quick way to do that rather than going down to the logout, the main menu and logging out.
It's called fast user switching. And when you got it on up in that right side, for those who don't know on the right side, which is as Chris said, vom. And that puts your voiceover cursor up there, you get a whole bunch of stuff up there. Third party utilities can be up there, stock ones like Bluetooth and the time and bunch of other stuff. But in any case, if you have that turned on, you go to fast user switching and then you can just click on whichever user. Now the thing to know is when you do do that, it doesn't actually log out of the user you're in. It just switch is the user. But it's a quick way to just switch back and forth.
Right, right.
The only thing is you have to have that on in both users.
Okay. And I need to locate that setting, so I'll do that. But that's what Apple Accessibility guy told me, so.
Yep, definitely.
Yeah. So it's, it's really cool to be able to help the students who are really, really wanting to get better with their, with their English or they're really trying so hard but they're still do need to live in their native language as well. So it's kind of the two worlds, you know, like sometimes people in our community live among the low vision and the no vision world, you know. And so these folks are living in English and Spanish or English and Vietnamese or whatever they're speaking. So it's, they've got two worlds to live in. So.
Yeah.
But yeah, that was really educational for me and I really appreciated that. I think I also, I have another user account set up for testing apps, I think. And so you know, it doesn't have to be another language that you speak that you need to do this. So you might want to set up another user for yourself for a number of reasons. You could want to test apps out and then go back to your regularly scheduled programming with your settings and everything.
Yeah. And a couple things to sort of think about here, about creating a second user. First of all, when you create a second user, you don't need to make it an admin user. When you make something an admin user, that means you have full control of the computer and you can do pretty much anything. So you wouldn't really. I mean, you could have both as an admin setup, but it's better to not have the second one as an admin setup. If you're in your main user and you are having problems, like, you know, things are being glitchy, something's running funky, you're not sure if an app is working right. Or you could have software corruption. There could be a million different things. A great way to find out if it's hardware or software is to go into that other user, which you wouldn't necessarily use very much, and it wouldn't be the same setup as the main user. And you see, if you have the same problems in that other user. If you don't and the other user works totally fine, then probably you have a software issue, not a hardware issue. If you go into the other user and you're having all the same problems, then I'm not saying there is, but it could be more of a possibility that you do have a hardware issue, depending on what it is. This usually came in more when we had spinning drives, because hard drives would fail a lot more often. So that was kind of the main reason how that came up was because people needed to find out, okay, I got a bunch of software corruption, you know, and my computer's working weird. Or do I actually have a hardware issue?
Right. Yep.
But also, back then you were able to change out your own hard drives and RAM and stuff like that, which now you can't do that anymore. You can't do anything anymore.
Right. Get what you need, otherwise you can't.
Yep, exactly.
Yeah, for sure. That's great. So there's a really special event coming up this summer that I've been hearing about for the last couple years, I would say, but I really didn't know what it was. And that is the event. But I know a lot more now. That is the event called Mac Stock. And yeah, so Mac Stock, I heard about it first, probably from listening to Mac Geek Gab, because those awesome guys are at Mac Stock, and they would sometimes broadcast from Mac Stock. And it's just a cool Mac Users tech conference, I guess about a couple hundred people come there. It's in Chicago, or actually 40 miles out of Chicago in the middle of July. And I thought, you know, it'd be really fun to go there. And I sort of chatted via email with our friend Allison Sheridan, and we.
Were talking about no Silica podcast.
Yeah. No, Silica is having its 20th anniversary.
I know. That's so crazy. Wow.
This Tuesday? Yeah. And no Cilla is Alison backwards, by the way, so N O S I L L A so I was talking with Allison, I said, hey, do only developers go to this thing? I wonder if I could go. And so she kind of took the ball and ran with it, so to speak. And I ended up deciding pretty quickly that I would submit a speaking proposal. And I thought, what am I doing? So I did in February, let's see. And then in March I found out that my speaking proposal was accepted. So I was super excited about that, what I wanted to present on, because the theme this year is sharing. So it could be wide open, whatever you want to make that technologically speaking. But I thought, what about these apps that some of us use, especially Remote Incident Manager. So Remote Incident Manager is a way of you can either receive help from a person who remotes in, or you can be the controller and remote into someone else's target computer and they don't even have to have a screen reader running. It's so cool. And I love this. I use it in my teaching. I use it to help my friend out with her computer. And so it's really a great app and it levels the playing field for blind or visually impaired tech support people. For instance, because you're not out of the game, you can completely do what you need to do to help that person because they do not have to have a screen reader running. And on the Mac it's really nice because it just works on the Windows computer. You have to have NVDA running and not Jaws if the person does not have a screen reader. And there's another program that I'm going to be trying out and talking about, and that's Scribe for meetings. So that produces accessible content for meeting attendees and they can just click a link and the accessible documents that have been uploaded by the presenter are immediately sent to the person. And so thinking about accessibility and how important it is to us, I thought about sharing accessibly as the title of my talk. But I was going to tell everybody just kind of what kind of things happen at MaxDoc. So some of the topics this year include Apple health topics, efficiency with shortcuts, security focus talks, tech tools for travel, and of course my accessibility presentation. And so, you know, really cool people come to this thing. Even people we've never heard of, like Chris Cook show up. And it even says on the website familiar voices are coming, but even two voices that you haven't heard before. And so he lists our names and we have our bios up there and everything. But it's. I'm really excited about the opportunity to speak at MaxDock and really highlight accessibility because now more than ever, I think it really needs to shine. And we have so much to offer people because of that. Accessibility.
Yeah. I mean, and on the flip side of that, first of all, you know, it's great. We need more people out there doing what you're doing and talking about accessibility and making, you know, more people aware of accessibility. But on the other side of that, it's great to have companies like RIM who are paying attention to making sure that they're building an app that anybody can use, including people who need accessibility features.
Right.
I mean, it is just gotta come from both places. But it's awesome that a company like that is paying attention because like you said, you know, it makes us on a level playing field. We can do remote tech support, you know, just like a sighted person or anybody else for that matter. So, you know, we've really got to, you know, push the accessibility, let people know what's out there. And if you've never checked out rim, definitely check it out, you know, go to their website. Their software is incredible. It's just unbelievable what you can do now.
So it is, and Numa Solutions is the company. And if you want to download the software in case someone else is going to help you out, it's free. It's Getrim app and so that will get you to the landing page for the software. And it's really awesome on both platforms and it's just great. If you want more information about Mac stock, it's Mac stock. So M A C S T O C k conference and expo.com and this is here.
And I will throw in one other thing. You know our friend Allison? No. Cilla, you know, cast and pod feet. 20 years she has been doing this podcast, which is absolutely incredible. Can you imagine anybody doing anything for 20 years? I mean, that's a long time, but she's been doing it, she loves it. Both her husband, they're great people. And I have to say, for me, I personally, you know, not only is she a friend, but she's a mentor. She's, you know, just been awesome. She's definitely. We need more people like her in the community. So we are very, very lucky to have her. And with her 20 years, she's got a special edition 20 year T shirt. So hop on over to her website and check those out. I'M definitely getting myself one, I think. Chris, you said you're getting yourself one.
It's definitely on my list. Is she@podfeet.com? she is, yeah. So no silicast all one word with a capital N and a capital c. But then podfeet.com is where you want to go for that.
Definitely.
That's great. Yeah, she's really encouraging to me and I just, you know, she just introduces me to people and I, I'm just so humbled. It's crazy.
So, yeah, it's amazing. She's definitely an amazing person. So we. I'm glad just like you are, you know, to have her as a friend, as a mentor, all the things, so.
Right, right. That's great. So the. I wanted to tell you about our recent purchase, but no, it's not a kaching expensive.
I'm kind of tired about hearing your purchases. Like when is stuff going to show up on Marty's doorstep instead of Chris's doorstep? I wait every day and I look at my doorstep and there's still nothing there.
Nothing there. Oh, we just. You just gotta drag out that credit card there, Marty.
So I do, but somebody who I make the mistake of saying, hey, I just got this cool thing and I'm waiting for mine to show up. And then you go and get. Exactly it shows up an hour later at your house and you've already done a review and posted it. I'm like, I didn't even get mine yet.
Yeah, you just don't anymore about it.
Unless I told you.
He just doesn't tell me about things he's gonna buy now.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I do. I have to, you know, get around beating me.
Strategy. Yeah. I need my teaching from Farago. My little cash register sound. I'll get that next time. But I wanted to tell people about something I purchased recently and then a project that I'm going to be working on. So I am really excited about a project that I've just started. I've made the first lesson. I've recorded the first lesson of what I think will be somewhere around a 25 lesson tutorial on using the Mac. And it's going to be called basically Mac. This is the first time a big community is hearing about this. So I'm pretty excited. I'm going to walk people through with lots of demos, lots of voiceover. I've invited my voices, Alex and Jamie to come along with me and help me out and they can switch places every other lesson. That's fine. I'm Going to demo and explain how to get started with the Mac. Some of the cool tips that we've talked about here today will be in there, but even more basic things. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to be working on this big project and I'm hoping it will be ready sooner than later. I'm going to push for, I'm thinking end of summer, but we'll see. I have decided that I should probably buy a domain name. So I went to my favorite web hosting website platform that I use called hostgator. They have really awesome tech support. Last I used and also the website is really great and they will say configure my name servers for me or install WordPress for me if something's not accessible back 8 years ago when I bought my first websites, I didn't have Aira. It wasn't, it wasn't a thing yet, hardly. So but anyway, Hostgator, I went on their website and I looked up learnyourmac.com and it was taken. And so I decided that I would get learningyourmac.com and so I bought that domain name. It was very expensive at $12.95.
That broke your credit card in half.
Did it just topped it out? Not really. So I bought that and now it says, Oh, a nice WordPress site coming soon kind of thing. So I'll be sure to get that off of there soon. But I'm really very excited and I'm going to. That's going be the platform and the, the home base for my tutorial and any projects related to that. So then I got thinking, okay, so I want to edit my website. It's been a long time since I used this piece of software for the Mac called Mars Edit. It's all one word, M A, R, S E, D I, T. And it's made by this great guy, Daniel jocket from red sweater.com if you're going to go there, it's red-sweater.com and he has cool apps and it's a really great app for editing your WordPress website. You can create pages, you can update pages there. I also do navigate my website on the PC, but I would really like to use Mars Edit. So I will be exploring the changes that have occurred in the last say. I don't know, I haven't edited my website in probably five years. It's crazy. I have products on one of my websites and I just leave them up there. But anyway, that's another story. So the Mars Edit software produced by Red Sweater Software, Daniel I downloaded it last night. I bought a new license because it had been upgraded substantially. And I logged into one of my website and everything came up. So on one of my other sites, I was able to see all the pages that I had, and that was really cool.
That sounds awesome. He's really good also about making sure accessibility features work. He's another one that pays attention to that, which is fantastic. And he also has another app, which you like a lot, that works both on iOS, iPhones and iPads and stuff, as well as the Mac platform. And what is that, Chris? What is the other app you like a lot that he.
Yeah. So the other app is called Black Ink, and I did a review, review of it last year in my little recordings for digital bites on crossword puzzles that I reviewed.
Yeah, if you want to check that out, you can go to show. Go to the search and then type in Black Ink and it should come.
Up for you, Right? Exactly. Yeah, it's definitely on our feed and it's great on the phone. Also, I was just a few minutes late today to our recording session here, Marty, because I was playing a crossword puzzle on my.
Why am I not surprised that something shiny came up and all of a sudden you were lost into Chris La La Land for a while?
Yeah. 20 minutes later, I'm like, it's. Oh. Oh, no. It's the top of the hour. Oops. And black ink. Yeah, Black ink is completely accessible. It'll tell you the clue. It'll tell you that the squares are blank. It will say all blank if they're all blank. Or it will read them out to you. And then you just interact and you just type your letters. And then when you. You stop interacting, then you can view a right arrow to the next clue, or you can go to the far left and select the down clues in case you're in the across. And it's really, really awesome. You know, I am going to definitely buy it. I'm doing the trial right now because I was so excited about it. I didn't want to purchase it yet until I knew it was accessible, but I was doing a puzzle from the Wall Street Journal, so how cool is that?
That's awesome.
Yeah. It has different places where you can pull in the crossword puzzles. And so I was really excited to know that yet another piece of his software is accessible to us. So I intend on writing him and just saying, hey, I was away for a long while and I'm revisiting your software again, and I'm pleasantly surprised that you're still as accessible as you have been. So that's really great.
Yep, I agree. He makes great software.
Excellent. So Marty, is there anything else that you want to add to our topics for today before we let all these nice people go back to whatever it was they were doing before?
No, I think I talked about all the things I had on the list for today.
Great. Well, if people want to get in touch again, if you have topics that you would like us to chat about or you have comments on any of the topics that we talked about today or any other time, where do they go to write us an email? Marty?
Well, you can email us at Feedback Mute show And if you want to see all the other things we have going on, all the shows, all of everything else, you can check out our website at Unmute Show.
Great. Thanks everyone and we'll see you next time.
See you next time.