Micah Sargent (20:01)
Yeah, I do. I have one. It is the mail client that I use every single day and it's an app called Spark. Now I have used many mail clients over time and I used to use an app called Airmail. And Airmail was pretty great at the time. I think it was like email for nerds is how I always saw it because it had so many options that kind of got at the technology behind, behind email. The problem with it was it was never designed as an iOS first app. And given that it was not designed as an iOS first app, meaning that it was like built from the ground up for the platform, it ended up being kind of a web view into the app and that resulted in issues all the time. I would have trouble with email, not rendering, etc. Etc. I say that because, I say all of that because it took me a long time to then find one that I wanted to stick with after that and ended up going with Spark. Now, Spark is interesting and to some a little bit controversial because of the way that it works. Spark does a lot of the processing server side and then sends you email from the server. So what does that mean? Well, it means that when you, you have to create an account to use Spark in the first place, and when you do so, it kind of sets up this little instance for you where all of your email accounts are logged in. And then if you go onto another platform, if you're on Mac OS or an iPad or Wherever logging in with your account will then pull down all of those other email addresses and give you access to them. And the reason that it does this is because a lot of the snooze features and other kind of do this later or don't act on this right now. Features require some level of server smarts and syncing them between devices is a lot harder if each of those devices can kind of act independently. So I think it works well for that. The other reason is because Spark is very much about a team based mentality. If you choose to use that part of it, what that means is you can essentially bring in your team to all be able to act on an email inbox altogether. And that's where the server really comes in handy. But one of the features that I like about Spark is I can essentially create a viewable link to a page of any email that I get. And that has been helpful in the past when I do get an email as a member of the Twitch team that I need to show to other people. And yes, I could forward them that message, but then they're all seeing kind of an independent copy of it. Do they get it? Does it go in the right place, blah blah, blah, or do I just share a link in Slack? They can click on it and they're all viewing that page. Uneditable, unchangeable. Just the page that has the email on it. That's one of the features I like. But at this point I think mostly the reason why is it's muscle memory. I've figured out how to use Spark. I know how Spark works and I'm actually a classic Spark user. So Spark has two versions on the Mac, the Classic Spark and then the Spark that has a bunch of AI stuff built in. I don't use that version, I don't need it or want it. And so I have kind of classic Spark. Spark over time has added new features like smart sorting. I don't use those for the reasons that I mentioned before, but it has snooze features built in. It has spam stuff built in. It has a built in calendar, so you can do your calendar. I don't use this feature either, but it does have a built in calendar to do that there as well. I like Spark's composing options. I like the way that I can log in on any device and just count on my email being where I need it to be. And I think that more than anything else is what makes Spark my email application of choice. But it also has some great features for getting rid of messages that come in that are part of a subscription so easily being able to unsubscribe, do that kind of a thing. Ultimately, as is always the case, I think it boils down to what you're looking for and getting used to a system that you. That you go. That you. That you decide to try. I think with an email application, almost always you can do what you want in any of these email applications that are more powerful, I would say, than the default mail app. So it doesn't really matter which one you're using. Almost all of them have feature parity. And so it's just about what works for you and what you stick with. So find one and give it a real try. If you're deciding to go past the basic mail app, give it a real try, stick with it for a while, and then kind of go from there. Spark ended up being the one that I've stuck with and I use it across my devices, but I very easily could have been using any of the others. I love Fast Mail as well. I have a Fast Mail account where most of my email is done and so I also use the filtering feature that fast Mail has. I also use the filtering feature that Gmail has. And Spark is just the thing that gets my email in the end. But I like going into each of the individual mail applications and handling the filtering stuff there. And then what comes through in the end comes through to me via Spark. The only place where I don't like doing that management is my icloud account because it's just not as good. So, yeah, the rules that you can set up there I have found to be less than satisfactory in comparison to what I've been able to achieve with Fast Mail in particular and secondarily with Gmail. So, yeah, those are some applications, as always. Would love to hear the options that you're using as well. You can email us iostodaywit TV to tell us, hey, hey, this is my mail application of choice and here's why. It's better than all of yours and would beat it in a fight. We'd love to hear about it. All right, let's move on to our feedback. It's time for our feedback segment. Tony has written in with the following. I have a question about itunes. Most of the music in my library does not play at the same volume. And before you ask, yes, I have soundcheck turned on and that does not help. Is there any way to fix this? Thanks. Best regards, Tony. Tony. I understand because I too thought and hoped that Soundcheck was going to provide the actual change in audio so that all the songs were at the same volume. But here's the problem with soundcheck. So soundcheck is a normalization feature, and what it does is it bases audio levels, on average, across your music library and normalizes those audio levels across your music library. But when people hear normalization, they often think that what's going to be output is an exact. Just if you were to look at the waveform, it's just like. Like all of the audio is all at the same, like frequency, not frequency, but at the same what amplitude, I guess, and is sort of hard, limited to a certain level. So everything's just kind of going at you same volume all the way through. And that's not how normalization works. You can get normalization to get toward that scale by really ramping up and ramping down some of the features or some of the settings. But Apple is also a company that's not interested in making music sound terrible by applying such a hard compression and limiter to what the audio is outputting. And I imagine that artists, too, would be a little upset if their music sounded horrible because of that. And so if or when you're using Soundcheck, be aware that what it's trying to do is make it so that all of the loudest parts and the quietest parts of all of your music are the same. That doesn't mean that the middle parts are going to match the middle parts of other songs. And therefore, that normalization is not going to be as powerful or it's not going to be probably what you're looking for. This is where I recommend, Tony. If you. You say itunes, which already is kind of like, huh, because it's Apple Music now. But then I'm like, are you using itunes somehow? And if you are, are you using your own music? Because if you're using your own music, you could make copies of all of your music and run them through a more powerful normalization filter to then output songs that do come out at the same volume. There are also, in some cases, depending on the head unit in your vehicle or the app that you're using to listen to music, there are settings there as well that can do more powerful normalization across your audio than what Apple is comfortable doing to the music that you have in your tracks. Now, this is harder if you're using Apple music, and these are songs that are made available to you via subscription because you don't have access to those audio files in the same way. But in that case, using an output device that has its own filtering built in would be something that you could do to kind of of apply on top of soundcheck a few more settings to give you what you're looking for.
