
Our app launchers of choice, the software makers we love and those we've lost faith in, our browser preferences, and forgotten automations causing inexplicable behaviors.
Loading summary
A
It's Time for episode 653 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, April 22, 2026. Clockwise. Four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes.
B
Welcome back to Clockwise, a podcast that I wound in 2013, and somehow it's still ticking. I am your host emeritus, Jason Snell, back because Dan Moran is out of the country, and that means legally I am bound to co host Clockwise. Across the Internet from me is one of your regular usual hosts, Micah Sargent. Hi, Micah.
A
Hello, Jason. Thank you for being here.
B
Of course. I love it. I love it. I love being able to host Clockwise without having to do it every week. It's great. It's like being a great grandparent, I would imagine, right? Like, play with the baby all you like, and then you go home and then there's no more baby. It's kind of brilliant. I'm looking forward to that part of my life. It's. Anyway, so I guess what I'm saying is Clockwise is my grandchild, and I love it.
A
And you give it lots of cookies and popsicles and other things.
B
Yeah, I don't care. What do I care? Right? Like, I mess this show up when I'm here, and then you and Dan have to clean it up next week.
C
It's fine.
B
This is the podcast where we talk about vortex topics very quickly. And to my left on this virtual table we have, it is VFX super advisor at Sandwich, Dan Sturm. Dan, welcome back to Clockwise.
C
Thank you. I'm glad to be here and be your substitute Dan for the week.
B
We gotta have one.
A
And to my left, Chief podcaster@podfeet.com, the wonderful Allison Sheridan. Hello, Allison.
D
Two dance a lot of people. Oh, there you go. I got a Dan. I highly recommend that whole grandparent thing, Jason. It rocks. It's just as fun as it looks.
B
I'm not going to rush to get there, but I'm sure I'll get there. All right, well, let's get started. I will kick us off with the first topic since I'm in the lead position today, because Micah made me do that, which Stan, like, never makes me do, but Micah's like, nope, you gotta go, Jason. So here I go. I was reading There's a lot of discourse. I defended Spotlight in macOS Tahoe. I switched to it from Launch Bar for a while, although I recently switched back. Wrote about that Dr. Drang, the Internet's friendly snowman, wrote about how he tried it and it was just too slow, and he went back to Launch Bar as well. I was Just curious, thinking of app launchers and stuff. If all of you use an app launcher of some kind to make it faster to get stuff open on your computer and if so, which one? How do you use it and if you don't, what are you doing and why not?
C
Dan, just like you and our friend Dr. Drang, I am a Launch Bar user. I had intended to give Spotlight in Tahoe a test run, but I have yet to Tahoe ize my computer. So I. I think the both of you sort of killed that test for me whenever that time comes. Launch Bar has its issues. I think my favorite feature of Launch Bar is how after every update or reboot it moves itself on the screen instead of remembering where it was supposed to be. But the customization is great. I am a deeply broken person. So to launch Safari I type Ch as my shortcut from back when I used to use Chrome as my browser.
B
Oh wow. Oh yeah, you're not letting yourself make the mistake of launching Chrome. I love it.
C
No, yeah, I have to type go for Google, which, yeah, I don't want to do that. And then other than that, like you know the instant send feature of just hitting command space and holding it will grab whatever was in finder and then you can hit tab and send that to a specific app I find very handy. And I don't know if any of the other launchers have that, but I use that a lot. And then other than that, not, not a ton of stuff. I mean I don't. My needs for a launcher are very specific but not a great many of them. But I. I'm still stuck on Launch Bar.
A
Well, I have been and probably will continue to be, although maybe not after today, a Spotlight user. I have used Spotlight from the get go and it's second nature to me and I think because of that I have given it a lot of grace and understanding and so even though now when I type in, I don't know, like audio hijack for example, this morning and, and instead the Audible app from my iPhone via iPhone mirroring somehow launched, I still say, you know what, I'm going to keep using you because it's what I know and what I love. But now I'm eyeballing Launch Bar. I've tried Alfred and I've tried. There was some other thing that I tried. It's that Raycast. Yes, yes, thank you. And he did Raycast personally and didn't much care for Alfred. But maybe Launch Bar would be something because I am sick of Spotlight always indexing and never having Anything that I actually want.
B
Ready to go.
A
Allison, what about you?
D
Well, I'm not going to apologize for being a Spotlight person. I think it's fine. I fooled around with a lot of the other options and all the ones that you just listed. I've tried all of them, and I like automation and doing all this cool stuff, but for some reason in my launcher, I just want to be able to hit Command, spacebar, type a couple characters, hit enter, boom, I'm in. I don't do even any of the fancy features that came with Tahoe in Spotlight. I just use it. It's fine. But what I do find interesting is I don't know how this happened, but in the last couple of years, I realized I've started using the dock, too. I was never a dock person. I kept it hidden. Why would I ever do that? I can use my keys and it's much faster, but now I just, like, every once in a while, like, oh, I'm gonna press that button down there.
B
So my piece is up on six colors. But basically, I used Spotlight on Tahoe from the first beta until, like, this week, basically. And it was because Dr. Drang wrote about how he thought it was slow. And I thought to myself, yeah, you know, actually, it is. It didn't used to be. So I'm keeping an open mind about Spotlight. I use Spotlight happily instead of launch bar after 20 years of using Launch Bar, basically because it was fast and it did mostly the right thing. But there are. I have some notes for Apple, right? Like, my notes are, you need to be smarter. Launch Bar is really smart. Like, if I launch one app a thousand times and then I accidentally launch a different app with the same first couple of characters once. Launch Bar is like, yeah, you probably normally are going to want that other app. Spotlight's like, oh, this is the new app now. I'm going to use this one now. And it's just not smart enough. It just needs to get smarter, and it needs to get optimized because it is too slow. And then my big frustration is Dan talked about mapping weird letters to Safari, right? You can map things called quick keys in Spotlight on Tahoe, but only to actions which are, like shortcuts, not to everything else. And I don't understand why, because that's what I want is I want to be able to say, look, guys, when I type home, I only ever want the home app ever. And Spotlight won't let you do it, but Launch Bar will. So I'm back on Launch Bar, but I'm going to keep an open mind because I think Spotlight has gotten so much better. But I worry that in these latter releases of, of Tahoe, it's backslid and it's gotten worse and that's no good. So thank you all. And if you don't use an app launcher, even Spotlight, give it a try because you can save a lot of time. Oh, my question was supposed to also include what I use it for, not just launching apps. I save a lot of like web pages, like the, let's say the clockwise sheet we use or my upgrade show notes. Those are all favorites in Safari and those get indexed and I can launch those with a couple of letters too. And that's the best because it's very easy to just, you know, go type, type, type, boom. And Google Google Doc opens in my web browser. That's awesome too. So thank you all. Dan, what is your topic for us?
C
My topic is so I read this really good article on Petapixel the other day about basically how Adobe has slowly abandoned their core user group over the past decade.
A
Ish.
C
And sort of moving to creative cloud and pivoting to enterprise services and how they used to have a very die hard group of creative people that would stand up for them and talk about how much they loved their products, etc. But it really got me thinking about how we're kind of in an odd place with software. I mean, I typically think of creative software, but I think in general where we've got these horrible enterprise apps that nobody enjoys using, we've got these other more consumer facing apps that kind of don't do what we need. And I was wondering, I was reconsidering my own relationship with software and I was wondering which software companies of any size, you know, indie, medium large companies, are making software that you really like these days and who have you maybe lost some faith in, whether that Adobe or other people. This does not have to be about Apple, I swear.
A
Yeah, I mean I would say one of the options, and it's one that I use regularly, is Rogue Amoeba's stuff. You know, we, we joke on the show and also joke with Rogue Amoeba folks about different bugs and things that pop up. But ultimately we've in some cases, in my case in particular, find out that it was our fault all along and Jason Snell comes through with a fix and everything is better. And so in that I have no ill will and only love for the company as far as those I have lost faith in, I have seen Slack, you know, go super, super Corporate and lose some of its original fun, really. That is sort of the, the way of things. We've got that term that we can't use on the show in, you know, whatification and goodness. Do we not see that play out again and again and again? And I think that that's, you know, part of what we've seen with Adobe doing. So, yeah, kind of a lot of a lot of stuff, frankly. Alison, what about you?
D
Well, I don't want to get Paul Cafas's head too swole up, but my opening line was going to be that I'm a huge fan of indie developers rather than the big companies. And Rogue Amoeba is the best example. I mean, the support team there when, when they know me by name, you know, I'm talking to them a lot and they always come through. But another really good example of a small indie developer is a guy named Cindra Sorhas. He's one guy and he's pumping out small utilities that are just crazy useful. So many, so many of them. If you can figure out how to spell his name. Cindersorhas.com everything he does is fantastic. On the flip side, on Losing Faith, I hate to say this, but One Password is really on my nerves. There's this bug that they know about and they've been known. They've known about it for months and months and months. And it's where you log in using 1Password and it comes up and goes, hey, do you Want to use 1Password next time to log in like I just did? So I have to dismiss that button every single time and I can't get any traction with them. And they go, yeah, we know about it. Yeah, we're going to do that someday. So finally I started talking on Mastodon about it, and a gentleman from 1Password suggested we chat directly about this. And he says he's going to do something about it. But I mean, it's. It's literally been like five or six months and it's constant. The other one that I'm disenchanted with right now, I don't know if you guys know about the big kerfuffle at Backblaze. They, without telling their users, decided to. They're not backing up Dropbox and Google Drive files, even if those files are resident on your computer. If you. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of misinformation going on. If you go to the Reddit for Backblaze, Backblaze has been posting there. They've got some pin posts that have sort of Clarified. It least explains why they're doing this. It's still unclear to me whether icloud drive is in there. Pieces of icloud drive aren't. I don't know. Come on, you had one job. I have stuff on my computer and you're supposed to back it up. So I'm pretty annoyed right now with them. And I'm not the kind of person who ever loses faith. I'm always like, no, I'm still there for you, but I'm. Disenchanted is the right word.
B
Yeah. I think a lot of what we feel and just channeling everybody so far is there are a lot of software developers where once they get big or they get their funding or whatever it is, they realize they need to turn to an enterprise market or a particular kind of money bag that is full of money and they want it. And I, like, I. On one hand, I understand it. On the other hand, it is frustrating when they're pivoting to serve a customer who isn't you. And so Adobe kind of started this. And that's definitely true. One password. It's absolutely true. Slack. I was gonna say Slack, Micah. Which is like, we all loved Slack, but, like, Slack is not interested in us. And what we do with Slack is not what they want because we're not gonna give them money. In fact, I can't give Slack money because they don't make a paid plan that makes sense unless you're a big business. They like, don't even want your business if you're just a smaller community. And so I'm using Discord a lot more. And I can't believe I'm using Discord because I always liked Slack better. Another company that I'm gonna mention is two Corporate is Microsoft. Well, okay, I know it's. But I had those feelings too, where I dropped 365 and it's just like, you know, I still pay for Adobe Photoshop only. But it is funny, I am teetering on the brink where I think if they raised the price too much, I would just give up. Even though I've been using Photoshop my entire adult life, at some point I feel like they're going to mess that one up too. And I'm kind of amazed they haven't yet. The flip side is I end up embracing what we've been talking about, which is indie developers, people who are like us in that they care a lot and they care about serving people who care about software, not in finding the next giant money bag of enterprise. And you know large business or not receiving big venture capital investments or things like that. So yes, rogue amoeba. Fantastical. I'm using Mindstream. I've been using BBEdit forever, which is like a couple of people basically. And lately I've been using this app that's still in beta by two people, a person I know and a person I kind of know called Indigo, which is like a Mastodon and Blue sky client. And it's like I find it delightful or something like Ivory, which is a Mastodon client because it's written by a person or two who have a very specific idea of what the software should be and it's to serve an individual human being. And that's the problem with a lot of this other software is just it starts out maybe that way, but at some point that, you know, you let go of the balloon and it just flies away into the stratosphere and you just watch it go. And I mean, when my kid let go of their balloon, it was very upsetting and I feel like that sometimes it's like my balloon. But I loved it. Where is it going? And it's like you're never getting it back. Dan.
C
I do feel exactly what you're saying, Jason. Where like the shifting priorities. And I know this is a very like me centric way to think, but of course that's. I'm trying to get my job done over here. But like, I use the Adobe Creative Suite. I don't love any of their apps. I mean, they're like the best bad option, I guess would be a way to describe it. Which is a rude thing to say because they put in a lot of work on those products and it's. I appreciate all the developers that I know that work there, but like, there are things about the app that are so fundamentally broken and they're like, look, we added a new AI transcript. I'm like, can you fix the thing where if I import an image sequence it just uses the wrong timecode? And they're like, oh, that's broken. I'm like, yes, it's been broken for decades now. You know, another part of this is that Apple used to be in that slot with Final Cut Studio where they kind of undercut everyone and said, look, all of the amazing stuff you can do here. And when they shifted to final cut Pro10, it's just not usable for what we do for work anymore. I'm sorry, Apple professional people. It's just I can't use it. So I'm just kind of stuck in the Adobe world. And there's not really. Maybe it's because video editing is such an odd little category that you're not going to have like a one or two person indie dev usually pop up and like displace Adobe. But you know, to that article's point, you know, blackmagic Design released Resolve for free, which is an insane app. It's huge. It has like 10 different apps inside of it all at once. You can edit, you can do color, you can do visual effects and sound. And it's an unpleasant app to work in, but it's very powerful. And it's just, it feels like a weird time for software where the professional side is not being prioritized by these large companies. Some of the smaller companies can't really compete feature wise or just in terms of what the product might be. And it leaves me using some very expensive apps that I kind of like and don't really love and you know, just not feeling great about some of the stuff I use, which I don't know what to do about it.
A
We have reached halftime here on clockwise. I want to tell you about Steamclock bringing you this episode of clockwise. A lot of mobile apps, frankly mediocre. They're not broken, no, just okay. But you notice the difference the moment you use something good and Steamclock software builds mobile apps for companies that care about taste. They're a design and development studio based in Vancouver, Canada and have been shipping iOS and Android apps for over 15 years. Their clients are growing tech companies that care about mobile but don't have the in house team to build something great. Steamclock works with companies to level up their apps so they can go from it's holding us back to it's pulling its weight. Some of their clients discover the hard way that vibe coding your way to the app store just isn't a product strategy. Steamclock has deep experience shipping apps for iOS and Android, so they're good at helping come helping companies figure out the right technical approach for their situation. Their client app's been downloaded more than 10 million times and have helped five of their clients through acquisitions. If you're building something and need a mobile team that cares as much as you do, Steamclock is where to start. Visit steamclock.com clockwise to get in touch that steamclock.com clockwise and of course our thanks to Steamclock for their support of this show and all of relay. All right, we are back from halftime and I have a topic for you. We were just talking a little bit about this earlier, what is your browser of choice? Have you tried other browsers? And what do you like most about the browser you use?
D
Alison well, I'm going to go simple again here. I just use Safari. I like having everything the same from Mac to iPad and iPhone. Even though I give up on having a lot of cool plugins and extensions. I do use things like the 1Password extension which always says it's locked when it's unlocked and some of the other features you can get with Safari. But I just like the simplicity. I mean it's fast, it does what I need. I do use a tool called Velya from guess who? Cindra Sorhas. It allows you to have a specific URLs open in specific tools. For example, we do my live show using Streamyard, which doesn't work for Safari. So when my producer slash husband sends me the link I click it and it opens in Edge instead of safari. I have YouTube open in Edge as well. And with Velia one of my favorite ones is Zoom. Links open in Zoom instead of the default browser and then saying oh, now you have to open Zoom, it goes straight to Zoom. So Velia is in a way is a browser switcher. I don't know if that counts, but I think my final answer is Safari. Except when Velya sends me somewhere else.
B
I also use Safari just like Allison. It is fast and it does what I want and it syncs everywhere without me having to think about it on all my Apple devices and integrates with the Passwords app better than Chrome does, which I use the Passwords app now I don't use one password anymore for reasons see previous topic and and so yeah, I just find it better. It is frustrating when I have a link that only works in Chrome or something like that and I have Chrome for that. But every time I use Chrome I don't like it. I find it weird and janky. And I will say my wife uses Chrome. That's all she uses and I don't understand her but she just does it and I can't. So to each their own. But for me, every time I've looked at Chrome I thought no, no no no, this is not what I want out of my device experience at all. So Safari all the way.
C
Dan I should just say ditto I guess.
B
I mean you type CH and get Safari exactly.
C
Long time Safari user. I mean basically for as long as I've been on the Mac, I think my Chrome days were from when I had to use PCs as well. But yeah, I keep, I think I keep Chrome and Firefox around for some if something doesn't run in Safari. But yeah, the integration everywhere. Although I had a brief flirtation with passwords, but I'm back on 1 password but only version 7 because version 8 is bad. Sorry, that's weird side topic and I also do a little bit of the URL redirection stuff, but with a weird open source thing called finigi. There's certain URLs I need to open in specific apps, but yeah, Safari. Best browser in my opinion.
A
Wow. All right, well it's four for four. Also Safari. There are occasionally things that need to open in other browsers as Alison was pointing out. And now perhaps I have a new tool I need to check out. But for the most part, yeah, I like being able to sync between devices. I was just teaching someone about icloud tabs the other day and that's one of the features that I use regularly and makes all the difference. I'm also a tabs group user but not a Safari profiles user. All of those both kind of get lumped together. So yeah, I have tried other browsers, many other browsers and I like the trim down, slimmed down nature of Safari and its ability to sync across all of my other Apple stuff. All right, thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our final topic which comes from Alison.
D
Do you ever install automation software that you like, forget about you forgot you did something and then later on you have these inexplicable behaviors that take you ages to track down? Or is that just me?
B
Yeah. What? For me it's not so much the automations, although every now and then I have that moment where I'm like, wait, where did that go? What is it trying to do? What is it trying to automate? Is it automating the wrong thing? But for me, I'm going to, I'm going to spin this slightly different which is I have the problem where I have apps that I have set to, you know, or they set themselves to launch automatically and I decide to use a different app and I don't, I turn off that app or change its settings or whatever and what I find is then I the next time I reboot, it doesn't care it's going to launch. I, at one point I had three different menu bar managers running simultaneously, trying to manage themselves and each other because they just wouldn't stop. Like, I forget what I mean, one of them was Bartender, but there were like two open source alternatives and they were all running And I was like, why can't you die? Like, I don't want you here anymore. So for me that's what it is, is that I have these apps that even when you tell them you don't want them to launch anymore, they just don't care. They just keep coming back because they're develop presumably have put them in various places that even Apple's UI can't find. So that's my frustration and is zombie apps that just come back from the dead. Dan.
C
Yeah, of course. I love a lot of personal janky automation and I do this stuff all the time. I have had Hazel rules just like randomly open things or move files around. I was like, what's that all about? The one that gets me the most though is there have been a few apps that crash a lot. I think one of them is textexpander. I think for a while it was Launchbar where I just made a keyboard maestro thing that like relaunched the app. If it quit so randomly, I'll just see like textexpander pop up in my face with an error message like, sorry, it closed. I was like, what is. Oh, right, I told you to reopen when you die. And that's very confusing. But the one that got me forever, which is not my fault, I swear, is BetterTouchTool. By default does the window snapping thing where if you like drag your window to the top or the left or whatever, it puts like a big box saying like, do you want to snap it here? And I was like, what are you. Who is doing this? I have no. It took me weeks to track it it down because I have every automation app possible installed on this computer. But I have to finally, I just have to turn that off because it's a default feature and better touch tool and it drives me nuts.
A
I'm going to flip it a little bit too in saying that it's not that the automations are running and I forget about them and then things happen, it's that I will be doing a thing and I'll say, you should automate that. That and then I'll forget and then I'll do that thing again and I'll go, you should automate that. Oh, remember how you said you were going to automate that and then I'll forget and then I'll come back again. I'll go, this is the third time you told yourself you should automate this. How have you not done it yet? So I almost wish that things inexplicably disappeared and reappeared and moved around because at Least it would mean that I finally did the automation thing I was telling myself I wanted to do. Allison, why don't you round us out here?
D
Well, I love Jason's answer because the other day I was having trouble where I'd hit like the entry key or the space bar twice and random things would paste and I found out I had four clipboard managers running. Oh my word. It was very strange. But the example I want to give you is great. I had this weird problem where two Apple apps, messages and notes were spontaneously just disappearing. They weren't crashing, they were just vaporizing. I'd see the window just poof. And it'd be gone. Then it happened with a third party text editor called COD Editor. And so I knew it wasn't an Apple problem and I searched far and wide. I asked perplexity to search console logs when I caught the apps disappearing. And it could find no crashes and no errors. So weeks of this go by, keeps happening. And one day I searched for the color picker with Spotlight and it offered me a color picker from something called Supercharge. I vaguely remembered installing Supercharge, which is of course by cinder sorhas. So I started poking around, looking. Oh, look, I, you know, I got distracted. Oh, squirrel. And I started looking at all the different settings in Supercharge. It was really cool. And the vast amount of settings, I found a section that allows you to set specific apps to quit after a certain number of minutes of inactivity. And sure enough, there was messages, notes and COD editors set to quit after three minutes. So if I hadn't inadvertently found Color Picker in Spotlight, which was grabbing the wrong app, I wouldn't have known. I don't know how long this would have gone on, but I just, I just cracked up when I found out it was me. It's coming from inside the house.
B
Well, that reaches. We've reached the end. We have only time for a bonus topic. It's going to be quick. And here it is. What's the dumbest thing you've ever used AI for? Dan?
C
I like to Photoshop photos of my friends, as some of you may know. And sometimes I have really dumb ideas that I don't have time to open photo or whatever app I'm going to use to do that. And I will have ChatGPT help me make really dumb photos. One of them was George Foreman cooking on a grill, but all of his grills are MacBook neos. I thought that was fun. It came out really good. But yeah, that's probably the Dumbest thing. I use it for a lot of important things, too, I swear.
A
Yeah. Once we got into this question, I remembered that recently on my grandma's birthday, I sent her in the mail. There's this service that does pinatas by mail mail. And my mom texted me about grandma's pinata and was essentially hinting, given that her birthday was coming up at the time, that she wanted one too. And I jokingly said something like, I'll send you a pinata of me. And so I did, and not really. I sent her an image generated to look like a pinata of me. And it's horrible and terrifying and unsettling. Settling. Terrible.
B
Yeah.
A
What about you, Allison?
D
Well, when Sora first came out, I asked it to make a podcast with my husband and Steve and me as the talent, and I put these words in his mouth. This is direct from Sora.
B
When we were getting ready for this episode, I kept wondering how to introduce you. Honestly, you're the smartest, kindest wife anyone could ever hope to have.
D
Oh, that's so sweet.
A
That's Sora.
D
Yes. And it looks exactly like him. I sent it everywhere.
B
Shame, shame, shame. For me, I was just gonna say asking Claude or ChatGPT about advice for home improvement things don't list. Don't do it. Like, the advice I got was completely useless. It was like, oh, this is one of those areas that I do not believe. They're like, oh, just try this. And I'd be like, that product doesn't exist. Or do this thing. It's like, that's not how that works. Any amount of research I did, it was recommending things that were bad ideas. So I'm just saying maybe stick to letting it generate funny images and write your software for you or whatever, but don't ask it for, like, certainly not emotional advice, but not even like, how to fix something in your house because they're going to give you bad advice. That's just how it is. We live in that world now. That brings us to the end of Clockwise Micah, right? Did we do it? Did we manage to get to the end?
A
We have gotten to the end. And if you out there would like to get ad free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week, can become a member of Clockwise. You go to Relay FM clockwise, you sign up $7 a month, $70 a year to help support the show, it is indeed time to say goodbye to our guests. And Jason, I'll let you say goodbye to our first guest, if you wouldn't mind.
B
Thank you. I remember how this works. Dan Sturm, thank you so much for being here.
C
Thank you for having me.
A
And Alison Sheridan, thank you so much for joining us.
D
Always a delight.
B
And that wraps up this episode of Clockwise. So we'll be back next week, but I won't be here. But Dan will be back, probably. Unless there's, like, complications or something with his passport. And you never know. But until then, everybody out there, remember,
A
watch what you say and keep watching the clock.
B
Bye.
Date: April 22, 2026
Hosts: Jason Snell (guest hosting for Dan Moren), Mikah Sargent
Guests: Dan Sturm (VFX Supervisor at Sandwich), Allison Sheridan (Chief Podcaster at Podfeet.com)
This episode of Clockwise revolves around the evolving landscape of productivity software and app launchers, the growing disconnect between software companies and their users, browser preferences, and the sometimes unexpected consequences of automation. The panel, anchored by Jason Snell filling in for Dan Moren, delivers a blend of nostalgia, practical advice, and lively banter—all within Clockwise’s trademark 30-minute constraint.
(Segment starts at 01:22)
Jason Snell kicks off by reflecting on his recent switch from LaunchBar to Spotlight in macOS Tahoe—and a subsequent return to LaunchBar due to Spotlight’s sluggishness:
"You need to be smarter. LaunchBar is really smart...Spotlight's like, oh, this is the new app now. ... It just needs to get smarter, and it needs to get optimized because it is too slow." (05:54)
Dan Sturm remains a loyal LaunchBar user, highlighting its quirky persistence (like shifting window position after updates) and its shortcuts:
"To launch Safari, I type 'CH' as my shortcut from back when I used to use Chrome as my browser." (03:02)
Mikah Sargent sticks with Spotlight out of habit but is tempted by LaunchBar:
"Even though now when I type in, I don't know, like audio hijack for example... instead the Audible app from my iPhone via iPhone mirroring somehow launched..." (04:10)
Allison Sheridan favors straightforwardness:
"I just want to be able to hit Command, spacebar, type a couple characters, hit enter, boom, I'm in." (05:14) She notes a recent shift toward also using the Dock for app launching.
Bonus Use-Case:
Jason mentions launching web pages and Google Docs directly with indexed favorites—a productivity boost.
(Segment starts at 08:09)
Dan Sturm references an article about Adobe losing its core creative user base amid an enterprise pivot, sparking a conversation on which developers retain the panel’s loyalty.
Rogue Amoeba (maker of Audio Hijack, etc.) earns praise from both Mikah and Allison for being responsive indie developers:
"But ultimately... find out that it was our fault all along and Jason Snell comes through with a fix and everything is better..." (09:13)
Allison spotlights small developers, including Cindra Sorhas and expresses frustration with larger companies:
"One Password is really on my nerves. There's this bug that they know about and they've known about it for months and months and months." (11:08)
Jason diagnoses a recurring pattern:
"Once they get big or they get their funding...they realize they need to turn to an enterprise market or a particular kind of money bag...It's frustrating." (12:25) He laments the loss of user-focused orientation from Slack and Microsoft, and the creeping sense of impending disappointment with Adobe and others.
Indie Apps Praised:
Fantastical, Mindstream, BBEdit, Indigo, Ivory (all noted for "serving individual humans").
Dan Sturm sums up creative software disillusionment:
"I use the Adobe Creative Suite. I don't love any of their apps. I mean, they're like the best bad option, I guess would be a way to describe it." (15:18)
(Segment starts at 18:33)
"It is fast and it does what I want and it syncs everywhere without me having to think about it on all my Apple devices." (19:35)
"Long time Safari user. ... I think my Chrome days were from when I had to use PCs as well." (20:32)
(Segment starts at 22:05)
Allison wonders about "ghost" automations causing chaos. The group shares tales of automation mishaps, including:
"I have apps that I have set to, you know, or they set themselves to launch automatically and I decide to use a different app...But they just don't care. They just keep coming back....zombie apps that just come back from the dead." (22:16)
"BetterTouchTool...does the window snapping thing...It took me weeks to track it it down because I have every automation app possible installed..." (23:45)
"...I'll say, you should automate that. Then I'll forget and then I'll do that thing again..." (24:29)
Allison's Story:
Her apps (Messages, Notes, CotEditor) were vanishing, only to discover a Supercharge automation set to quit them—an accident of her own making:
"...there was messages, notes and COD editors set to quit after three minutes. ... I wouldn't have known. I don't know how long this would have gone on, but I just cracked up when I found out it was me. It's coming from inside the house." (25:28)
On legacy app launcher habits:
"To launch Safari, I type 'CH' as my shortcut from back when I used to use Chrome as my browser." – Dan Sturm (03:02)
On modern software giants:
"The best bad option, I guess would be a way to describe it." – Dan Sturm on Adobe Creative Suite (15:18)
On zombie apps:
"Why can't you die? Like, I don't want you here anymore." – Jason Snell (22:52)
On mystery automations:
"I had four clipboard managers running. Oh my word." – Allison Sheridan (25:14)
On cheerful inevitability:
"It's coming from inside the house." – Allison Sheridan (25:54)
"The advice I got was completely useless...That's just how it is. We live in that world now." (28:16)
The group’s tone is witty, self-deprecating, and rooted in genuine experience with the day-to-day realities of tech. Affection for independent developers and weariness about enterprise drift pervade the conversation, while camaraderie and a touch of nostalgia keep things moving.
This episode is a love letter to indie software—and a cautionary tale about what happens when user-centricity evaporates from technology products. It reminds listeners to periodically audit their system automations and to have a sense of humor about modern AI’s creative, and sometimes absurd, possibilities.
Listen to hear more rapid-fire insights, real-world gripes, and plenty of chuckles along the way!