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September 27th, 2021 × #Developer Tools#Mac Apps#Terminals#Audio/Video

Hasty Treat - Desktop Apps + New Tech We Love

Scott and Wes discuss new and popular developer tools and apps like Lucylang state machines, MD Specs for Svelte, Fig terminal autocomplete, Warp terminal in Rust, Raycast app launcher, Obsidian note taking app, and Descript audio/video editor.

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Topic 0 00:00

Transcript

Scott Tolinski

Welcome to Syntax and this Monday hasty treat. The guys are talking about Latest and greatest new web apps and tech and all sorts of cool stuff. My name is Scott Jolinski. I'm a full stack developer from Denver, Colorado, and with me is my guy, Wes, boss.

Scott Tolinski

Hey, everybody. I'm just trying to switch it up a little bit, Wes. Trying to get some new energy That's good. In that. Yep. Oh, it's good energy. Yeah. I keep claiming that we're gonna get a new, intro bumper or something, and we never do. So I gotta switch it up somehow. I had some ideas the other day about recording an intro song for us, and I was like, Maybe I'll do it. We'll see. Yeah. We'll see. We need something. We need something. We need a change here. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a full stack developer from Denver, Colorado, And this episode is sponsored by 2 awesome companies, Linode and Sentry. You wanna talk about Linode, and I'll talk about Sentry West? Yeah. Linode is the cloud computing

Wes Bos

that developers trust. So if you need any type of servers or computing power in the cloud, Linode is gonna give it to you. So whether you're hosting a Node application or a Gatsby website or Next. Js, you can throw it on a Linode box. Or if you need GPU intensive processing, you can get that from Linode. There's They have all kinds of computing, networking, developer tools, storage. So you wanna you wanna host some images or some large files. They do backups.

Wes Bos

They have fantastic support. So if you need to host anything on your next project, check it out because Linode's gonna give you a $100 of free credit atlinode.comforward/syntax.

Wes Bos

Just sign up there, and you're gonna get $100 worth of free credit, which is pretty sweet because you can host your personal project on Linode For a very long time with $100.

Scott Tolinski

So thank you, Linode, for sponsoring. Cool. This episode is also sponsored by Sentry, which is the perfect place to see all of your errors and exceptions It's happened and gained performance metrics and tracking to understand exactly the performance implications and how your site is running for all of your users. It's Extremely awesome because now with 1 API and 1 service, you can get all of that information and more so that you can really understand what it's like for users using your site. Because let's face it. It's not just about bugs and how many bugs your application has, but it's also about how your application performs and feels. And so these things are all really make up the user experience of your site, and Sentry allows you all of the tools for tracking And really keeping on track of all of that stuff, whether that is making GitHub issues based out of it or it is just giving you the metrics and data for you to be able to see where the issues These are on your site with their new performance tracking tool. So if you wanna check all of this out and more, head on over to century.io.

Scott Tolinski

Use the coupon code tasty treat, all lowercase, all one word, And you'll get 2 months for free. Thank you so much to Century for sponsoring. Alright. Let's get into this new hot tech episode. Now this is something that we started a couple of I think, Couple months ago, and I think that we wanna do with these somewhat regularly where we check-in on new projects and new applications and things for developers that are just, you You know, kinda the latest and greatest stuff, and I'm gonna start this off with something that I thought was really interesting. I saw it in a Chris Coyer tweet, and this is this Lucy language.

Scott Tolinski

Lucylucylang.org, and this is a concise language for describing finite state machines. Now I thought this was a really interesting thing because a lot of people look at maybe x state or some of these other state machine Libraries are state charts, and they'll say, like, I get this, but it feels really complex. Like, this is a lot of code to manage my state for things. And I I can see that too because it is a little bit intimidating at first glance, but what Lucy does is an entirely new language That compiles into x state, which is the Austin State Library code.

Topic 1 03:36

Lucylang compiles to xstate for concise state machines

Scott Tolinski

So you end up writing your things in this new language, and it's a dot l u c y files. Wow. I thought this was so interesting. When I saw this, I I thought, like, I don't know if this is for me or if this is going to catch on or whatever, but I just thought this was fascinating because here we have a Library and a technique and a tool that has some criticisms for being a little bit overly verbose in some sort of ways, but also being extremely useful.

Scott Tolinski

However, this kind of really, you know, opens the doors for a lot more concise writing of state trees, and Yeah. It is Extremely full featured. If you look into their docs, it is extremely full featured. Nested state transitions, symbols, Actions, guards, actors, there's, like, a lot here. Now I haven't used this yet, and I probably wanna get really super comfortable and familiar with State before diving into something like this, but Yeah. I know a lot of people are really into state machine. So this, I thought, was fascinating. I was very into this as an idea. We'll see. Maybe give it a try and practice and see what it's like. This is really cool. If you're thinking like, oh, man, I don't wanna learn another language to build your app. Like, you still build your app in JavaScript or whatever, but this is just how it's kinda like how in GraphQL is how you define your queries and mutations.

Wes Bos

You use Lucy to

Scott Tolinski

define what your state machines are, if I'm reading this right. And it Correct. Doesn't seem like this. It will be this huge thing for you to learn. It it seems like like probably similar to learning the GraphQL syntax. And it feels a little bit like the GraphQL syntax too when you look at it. It does. Yeah. It's overwhelming a little bit for me because, you know, it's like a thing on top of a thing. But I think if you spend some time with it, it looks it looks pretty neat. I might wanna give it a try and at least Do some of the basic examples to see what it feels like. Next one we have here is

Wes Bos

m d specs. I'm gonna let you take this one because on the last One re recorded, which is the one coming out after this episode.

Wes Bos

We talked about why we like MDX so much. But a downside to that is you are Sort of locked into using React. So this m d specs is for Svelte? Yep. M d specs is basically a markdown preprocessor

Topic 2 06:33

MD Specs brings MDX style components to Svelte

Scott Tolinski

for Svelte.

Scott Tolinski

And the way it works is exactly like what you'd be used to with MDX. Right? You can type your documents in MD markdown, And then you can use Svelte components in those components. Now if you go to their home page, it's worth it to see. They have, like, a little animation that It's some MD specs code, and then they add their penguin component, and then they add a prop of walk equals true, and then the penguin starts walking. It's super cute. It's well worth your time to check it out, but there's a lot of really neat little extensions for this thing or additional options, I should say. Have you ever seen this smarty pants? CSF. Smarty pants is an option on this MD spec that transform ASCII punctuation into fancy typographic punctuation.

Scott Tolinski

This is the type of thing that typographic people are gonna be very excited about because it it what it does, like, if you do 3 ellipses, it will automatically convert it into, Like, the actual trailing three ellipses,

Wes Bos

or it does, like, the smart quotes. Like, it does your your smart quotes for you, your fancy quotes. Yeah. The fancy quotes, which is the bane of every developer's existence, so don't use this if for code examples.

Wes Bos

Yeah. That's right. I remember WordPress did this for the still does this for the longest time, and it's great because it actually swaps it out with the proper quotes

Scott Tolinski

for everything. It looks good. I remember having to really, like, do a ton of find and replaces in my code when I was writing straight up HTML because the designers were like, These quotes are not fancy quotes. We gotta get some fancy quotes in here.

Scott Tolinski

So I use this. It's nice. It's basically everything you would expect if you had an MDX in Svelte, Essentially. I wonder if any of the the whole ecosystem of MDX plug ins is under

Wes Bos

Remark and Rehype. Yep.

Wes Bos

And those things are Supported here. Yeah. They're not React specific, which is good. Like, the question we had in the potluck was, like, You're kinda locked into React. Right? But kinda not because at the end of the day, these things are just JavaScript functions that take in data, parse it, and spit it out. So that is exciting now because I use tons of of these plugins in my site. Oh, really? So if I were to ever move to something I felt, then Seems like it would be doable. I bet there'd be lots of edge cases, but this is exciting to see that

Scott Tolinski

maybe one day MDX will not be Just a React thing. You know? Yeah. I don't use any rehype or anything like that, so I'd be interested to learn a little bit more about what you're using there. Yeah. I'm using, thing like a a v s code highlighter

Wes Bos

plug in. I'm using one that swaps out the headings for my own, Which is really nice because, like, I have got these, like, grunge and and whatever on top of it. I use another one for adding anchor links to all my headings.

Scott Tolinski

Oh, nice. Oh, that's neat. Yeah. That's a a great use case. There's I have tons of little markdown ones, like a bunch of my own custom, like, Tags? Oh, I found an awesome rehype repo, so there's a lot of stuff in here. But so because rehype is supported, it looks like, You know, you're not stuck here if you're trying to use this kind of stuff in Svelte, so it's really neat. Beautiful. Inline SVG,

Topic 3 09:34

Rehype and Remark plugins work with MD Specs in Svelte

Wes Bos

prism, highlight JS, Word wrap, truncating HTML, table of contents. Oh, that's the other one I use is on my beginner JavaScript. I Converted the entire thing into text, and there's a massive table of contents for that, and it's all autogenerated.

Scott Tolinski

Oh, that's cool. So Cool. With that plug in. Yeah. Okay. The last 1 I guess I brought a couple of these, but the last one that I brought here is an app called Recut atgetrecut.com, and this is for those of you who are doing any video stuff. This app is fantastic. I've been using this Crazy, Wes. So it's a one time purchase. It's not a subscribe thing, which you know I gotta love, and I'm the type of person you know, listen. I don't make mistakes In my recordings when I talk, I don't make mistakes. Okay? So, really, what I do is I when I record my tutorials or my blog content or anything like that, what I'm doing is I'm largely Talking for a period of time or whatever I have planned out, and then I'll take breaks to rest to think about it. And then, usually, what happens in my editing flow, Especially my blog content, that kind of stuff. What I'm doing is I'm just taking those pauses, and I'm cutting out the pauses, and then that's the final result. What this app does is it looks for any audio dips in your application with a threshold, sort of like a gate or something in the audio world Or Compressor, and it's checking to see when that audio is below a certain threshold, and then it cuts that video out. So for somebody like me, I could run my entire recording through this app and just go straight to publish from this, and that's the edit, saving me a massive amount of time, and I've been really loving this app. It's great. The export is super duper fast, or it can export into your Time lines and stuff like that. So I've been using this to produce my blog content. If you're into video stuff at all, Gitrecut.

Scott Tolinski

It's a really, really great little app here. I looked at this a while ago, and I ended up not trying it because I thought, well, I do a lot of Typing when I'm not talking, and it would just cut out my typing of the actual code. Does it do that? What it does is it, like, Shows you the areas that that's going to cut out, and then you can go and just click them and say, I don't want you to cut out this or that or whatever. So it would be trivial for that. I haven't actually used it or any programming specific type of videos yet, only, like, blog type of me talking head kind of stuff. But yeah. It'd be great for, like, this podcast

Wes Bos

because There's a lot of dead space that it could be cut out when we're just, like sometimes we are talking, and then we just stop talking while we're reading something, and And then we just continue talking because, like like, I'll be like, today, we are sponsored by Linode.

Wes Bos

And then I'll I'll, like, have, like, a 3 second delay or 10 second delay while I'm pulling up The notes for one of our sponsors, and then I'll say they're the cloud computing developer stress, you know, and, like, that could automatically be taken out. So cool. Cool. Cool. I should check that out. The next one here is an app, and I've been really into this one. It's an app called Fig, and it adds Auto complete to your existing terminal and auto complete in terms of, like, you look at Versus code, and as you type stuff, it shows you the little drop down.

Wes Bos

And it's not a terminal in itself. It works with the existing terminals, and then it will autocomplete things like your folder structure. So you can use your arrow keys So go down and hit enter, and it will auto complete that.

Wes Bos

Git commands. So you say git space, and it will show you a list of Git commands.

Wes Bos

It'll also show you descriptions of what those commands do, which is really nice. So it kind of adds docs on top of it. Npm npm install space, and then you Start typing, and it will search NPM and come back to you. That one's really handy is sometimes you forget if there's a dash in the NPM package or not, and you're like, I have to go look it up. So it does that right in the autocomplete.

Wes Bos

There's a whole bunch of, like, features like scratch pad and whatever. I've looked at it, but was like, I don't understand what these are for, so I didn't haven't really used those all that much.

Wes Bos

It's themable. So I got Cobalt 2 theme going already, which is pretty sweet. It's Mac only, which is, like, same with the recut. The recut right now is Mac only says Windows soon. People always ask us, like, is Windows good? They're like, yeah. But,

Topic 4 13:29

Fig adds autocomplete to terminals like folders and Git

Scott Tolinski

Like, all these, like, sweet things that we talk about, it's always like, oh, the Windows version might come soon. Good luck. Yeah. Right. I know. Yeah. A long time Android user. I know it's not the same thing, but that always used to drive me nuts being like, oh, great. When am I gonna get any of this stuff? And now that I I'm on Ios, It's amazing how fast I became that person where I don't, like, acknowledge that, and it it feels really wrong. But, yeah, at the same time, This app is is really nice. I found that the theme stuff to be not great. It is themeable. Not a lot of control. There's not a lot of control if you do the The font size larger. The interface itself doesn't adjust, so the fonts get cut off. Oh. I did that on, like, a live show. I was doing a recording. I'm like, oh, let me bump up the font size so you can see. Oh, this looks Terrible. Maybe I won't do that, but I did like the app a lot. And, Wes, I gotta say, thank you so much for the invite. I've been loving it. So, yeah, Fig is is Fantastic. When we posted this, a lot of people are like, why don't you just use fish or zedsh or

Wes Bos

or anything? And this is not a replacement for Your shell. You still use your prompt, your existing shell. All of the plug ins, I still am using. I even use a autocomplete package for it In zedsh. In fish shell, there is a, like, a drop down version for things like folders and git, but it's honestly, I like to think of that as Vim and people go crazy over that type of stuff. Like in Vim, if you want like a sidebar of your files, You have to install that nerd tree or whatever, and it doesn't look as good. And I like to think of Fig as, like, the v s code of your terminal Where do you have a bit more control over where it goes and what it looks like? And if they wanna bold something or do a custom color that's not available in the terminal, You can do all of that stuff because it's just styled with I'm assuming it's styled with HTML and CSS.

Wes Bos

So I like to think of That phish plug in that has a drop down as Vim and Fig as Versus Code. And we go back to the very first episode of when Scott and I started talking about Versus Code, and we said, We like it because it just adds that extra level of UI over something that used to be very rigid.

Scott Tolinski

And to me, I really, really like that. Totally. I hear you. Along the same kind of lines of terminal stuff is another new app called it's so funny. When I was adding these things, I was like, a new app called Hyper, And then I was like, wait. Hyper has existed for a long time. Yeah. I was just thinking of, like, warp drive, hyperdrive, you know, And this is is actually warp is the name of the thing. This is not a hyper speed. It's warp speed here, and this is warp.dev.

Topic 5 16:17

Warp terminal built in Rust with collaboration features

Scott Tolinski

And warp.dev is a terminal that is built in Rust.

Scott Tolinski

So it's somebody who's saying, you know what? I love Terminals, but I wanna get a new fancy terminal, and I want it to be built in Rust. And I want it to be collaborative, and I want it to be kind of Shareable and neat things like that. Team first.

Scott Tolinski

So this thing is really kinda fascinating to me. I just got access to this, so I haven't really done a ton with it just yet.

Scott Tolinski

But it is very fast. It's built in Rust.

Scott Tolinski

It uses ZSH, so there's no Phish integration. It doesn't work with Fig, but There are some neat features about it. It allows you to, like, easily share errors from the editor. It, like, gives you a link To copy where you can share that link, you can share your terminal state in session across web links so you can share the terminal State in session just straight up with a link. Somebody can click it, and it'll adjust for them. This is native first, so it's not an electron app like many other terminal.

Scott Tolinski

Well, maybe not many other. I guess, just hyper. Hyper. Yeah. So what a lot of people complain about hyper is that it's slower resource or whatever. Yeah. I've never needed to use hyper because Iterm has always been, You know, very good for me. So this is the first one that's made me be like, well, maybe I'll give this a try. It it's kind of a bummer that it doesn't support things like Fig right now or, Like its own thing, or maybe Fig doesn't support this. I don't know which way it is. Yeah. I opened it up, and it was like, oh, it doesn't work with it. And I did the, like, disable

Wes Bos

Fig CSF code, and it still told me it's not working. I was like, alright. Well Alright. I tried.

Wes Bos

But this looks really cool because, like, It has multiple cursors. It has autocomplete built in. It's like chatting in it upcoming as a feature? Yeah. Chatting and real time stuff kinda seems a little like Dropbox See, to me, like, I don't I don't necessarily need that, but probably teams do. What about this? Shared environment variables.

Wes Bos

Yeah. See, that's big. Or, like, you could be able to use this on a remote server. That's one pain I have is anytime you SSH into a new server, You lose literally everything that you have. So, like, being able to, like, keep all of your extensions and plug ins But work with a remote server would be really cool. And, also, for those of you who are like, oh, great. Another Mac only thing.

Scott Tolinski

Yes. It is Mac right now, but it is built in Rust, and it will be available for Linux and Windows and browsers. So it it'll be available across the board That's cool. No matter what you're running. So you'll be able to run it on Chromebooks, I suppose, if it's available in browsers. I don't know how that would work, but yeah. One of the big things I want is being able to just click your mouse cursor on some text and have the cursor go there Seriously. Instead of having to, like, lean on the arrow button. I. You can jump by word and whatever, but, like, you gotta learn all those commands. When I was at, like, a new dev I was just thinking, like, why do people accept this? Why do we all just say, That's just the way it is, and the nerds are like, yeah. Well, that's you know, you can use your command a to jump to the front and command or control k, whatever it is, to clear that. Like, I don't wanna learn all that stuff. I wanna have this be a text editor, essentially, that can run commands is really what I want. And I always felt like I was, like, Weird for feeling like it should be a better experience than that. So I don't know. I wanna give this a little bit more of a try and see see what it's got. Next one we have here is Raycast, which you turned me on to a couple of about a month, a month and a half ago, and I've been full time on it. So Raycast is sort of like an Alfred thing

Wes Bos

where it's an application launcher. It's a file finder, a workflow runner.

Wes Bos

I use it a lot for math and converting currency, things like that. And I've been a huge, huge fan of that clipboard history, Integrates with Spotify and your calendar, things like that. And everyone's saying, like, well, like, what's wrong with Alfred? Why you used to be the hugest fan of that? This is as good as Alfred, but it's even better. It has a better UI, better output for the math, better currency conversion. Like, That used to be an extension that I had to install. And then I always forgot, like, what the thing was in Alfred. I had to type, like, convert space And then this really rigid 100 CAD to USD.

Topic 6 19:49

Raycast is an app launcher and workflow tool

Wes Bos

And then if you put the space in the wrong spot or whatever, then it wouldn't work. And this one is just, like, so much more Resilient to taking in dirty text or whatever was necessary.

Wes Bos

So the outputs are better. It's super fast. Like, it opens immediately.

Wes Bos

The integrations are look like really good, and it looks like it's also really easy to write your own integrations in JavaScript, which is good.

Wes Bos

And, yeah, just just Just been a big fan. The only thing I don't like is you can't style it, and the default styling looks awful. It's kind of like 19 nineties. Right? Like, I don't know. Or it's like I don't know. It's It's not beautiful. It's kinda like dark mode, but that's, like, brown mode. Yeah. I'm a fan. I would love the Alfred style theming for this. Let me tweak it. Come on. Let me tweak it. Yeah. Yeah. Clearly, you're just using I think you're just using HTML CSS for this. I've been a really big fan. I feel like I haven't even scratched The surface of what's possible with this, but I've just been as a as an app launcher, calculator,

Scott Tolinski

converter, file finder, I've been really happy with it. It's fast as all GitHub too. It is just crazy fast.

Scott Tolinski

Cool. Next one you have on here is TablePlus, which Which I hadn't heard of this, but they got a cute little elephant origami icon. I just clicked download. It looks like this is a a GUI for, database management, and let me tell you, that's something I can't Get enough of I love database GUIs because there's nothing worse than the default web ones.

Wes Bos

Yeah. I initially got this when I was working with Strapi Because they use SQLite locally. So if you want to be able to manage your database locally or remotely, you need some sort of, Like, GUI to work with it. There's so many awful database UIs out there that are built in Java. So what is with that? Yeah.

Wes Bos

Yeah. And, like, the icons are blurry and, like, why is this? Like, come on. Yep. Make this thing look a bit better. This one works Great. I just use it for SQLite. I think it works with a couple other databases.

Wes Bos

Let's see. MySQL, Postgres, and SQLite.

Wes Bos

So really good for relational databases, and it's beautiful, super fast, makes a lot of sense.

Wes Bos

It is how much does it cost? $69 for 1 computer, $99 if you want to. That's pretty good for this type of application. I think I'm even on the free version still. Not subscription?

Scott Tolinski

No. Thankfully not. Oh, yeah. You know, so the one that I Studio three t became I think it's just Studio three t. Either way, they charge, like, yearly or now something before, and Really bummed out about that. Yeah. It doesn't do MongoDB, which I've I've still been super happy with MongoDB Compass for MongoDB.

Wes Bos

But Yeah. I use Compass. Yeah. If you need another app for especially SQLite, you're doing any like, Prisma

Scott Tolinski

is now SQLite under the hood, so you can use that to see your data as well. Big fan. Can this do, like, migrations? Like, can I like, one thing I really liked about Studio three t is that, like, I could have a server somewhere, and I could say, Grab all of the tables and everything from this local server and just merge it into the one that exists? Can you do stuff like that? I don't know.

Wes Bos

Table let's see. Table plus migrations.

Scott Tolinski

Import and export, open anything, multiple tabs. I do like multiple tabs. I'm there for multiple tabs. Advanced filters. There we go. In line edit.

Wes Bos

Looks nice. Yeah. It's good. I don't know if it does that type of stuff. They have Export to Laravel migration.

Wes Bos

So maybe oh, that's cool. They'll export the PHP code for you. Cool. Pretty neat. This is not new at all. This is just I needed a SQLite app at one point. Everybody's like, Tableau Plus for sure, and I've been really happy with it. Totes. The next one we have here is Obsidian.

Topic 7 24:00

Obsidian is a Versus Code style note taking app

Wes Bos

This is one we talked about a while ago, and I thought we'd get a little update. This is like a note taking application, sort of like Versus Code for writing mark Down in mind mapping and things like that, I am still using an app called my node. Mind node Mhmm. Which is awesome for mind mapping. I use it to lay out all of my courses,

Scott Tolinski

but I told myself I would check out Obsidian. I themed it with Cobalt 2, and then I never opened it up again. I find myself just going back to Versus Code and using all their tools. Are you using Obsidian? I don't find myself using it that much either, but I'll tell you something else replaced it, and that's my remarkable tablet, which is like an it's like an e ink pen and paper, essentially, what it is. Yeah. And so, like, I know Those notes aren't searchable. They're not linkable. Whatever.

Scott Tolinski

But I find quick notes I'm jotting down on the remarkable. I'm way more likely to do that than to open an app. So for me, that's like it's so weird how that, like, bit of a barrier to opening up an app and doing something. When I just have a pen and paper with me at all times, I can just Note it down. I know these nodes aren't searchable. They're not linkable. There's all sorts of downsides to doing it this way, but I find myself doing it This way, we're not doing it at all. So I use Notion still primarily for categorizing and cataloging, Documentarying, having internal wikis, those types of things, I found that to be Yeah. The database features are just too nice in something like Notion. But if I do need markdown notes, Right? If I'm, like, saying I need something like Apple Notes or or something like that, I am opening up Obsidian to just type something in or So Obsidian would be my 1st attempt there if I do want a markdown note taken somewhere. Oh, yeah. And I do find myself out and about sometimes, and I'm just like, Some brilliant idea that pops into my head, and I'll be like, I need to write this down somewhere, and I'm not gonna use Notion for it because I don't use Notion for ideas.

Wes Bos

So I'll pop open Obsidian and and type it in there. That's the one thing I haven't solved yet is that I don't have a good markdown solution on my phone. Yeah. And I have the Obsidian app. Like, if I have a phone call with somebody, I'll take notes as I'm talking to them, and then those notes are they're in my Dropbox, but, like, That's not a good ergonomic. I have been looking at Joplin as well, which is another sort of notebook mobile syncing Mhmm. Possible option, but I just haven't haven't don't have the time to to get too too much into Yeah. To it. I think at the end of the day, I would ideally like something that I use Versus Code on my computer, and then I can use whatever else on my phone just to view and edit those notes on my phone. I'm not in optimized mode of life right now. I'm in, like, Struggle and survive mode right now. So once I get in an optimized mode, I'll yeah. Freaking pandemic has sort of, like, put a damper on a lot of those, like, new skills, And I've just been, like, keeping up.

Wes Bos

Yeah. Totally. Last one is an app we talked about a while ago called Descript, And this is a both a video screen editor as well as, like, a podcast.

Wes Bos

And the way that it works is that you record your thing, and then it will automatically Transcribe that with AI, and then you can see what you said, and then you can edit it based on The text, like, you delete some text that will delete the corresponding video or audio. Or if you it will also learn your voice.

Topic 8 27:00

Descript transcribes audio and edits based on text

Wes Bos

And if I was talking right now and I said elephant and I meant cat, I could just delete the word elephant and put the word cat in, and it would try to replicate my voice of me actually Dang, cat. Mhmm. I am pretty bullish on this just because I'm I've been using ScreenFlow for years, and their development seems to have It's still moving pretty quickly, but they don't seem to care about a lot of the power feature users.

Wes Bos

It seems like they cater more towards, like, Slideshow makers and people are looking for a lightweight video editor. So I would like to move off of ScreenFlow at some point, And I'm excited about Descript. It's still not there for me. It's still too clunky. It doesn't do

Scott Tolinski

all the stuff I had hoped it had done, but That's just my little update. Have you tried it again in the last little bit? I haven't only because of the subscription aspects of it. You know, I'm not paying for it. I don't wanna, like, use it if I'm not paying for it. And in the same regard, like, I did actually go back to ScreenFlow the other day to do a recording on straight ScreenFlow for the first time in a while because I show you is my no normal one, but I've been doing a lot of content now where my face is in it and my my like, a little thumbnail of me in the bottom corner talking. Yeah. And I show you, now it's, like, out of sync. The so it's so weird. It's never done this before, and it's a recent thing. I don't know if it's an update or something. It's definitely not my computer because what's it called? I or the other one. ScreenFlow does it no problem, but, like, my mouth will not be moving in in time with the audio, and so I've had to throw out a ton of recordings for that. I'm just not gonna just like, okay. Well, I guess I'm using ScreenFlow for this. I have issues with ScreenFlow's proprietary format with their all sorts of stuff, So I would really love Descript, I think, if I could just get past maybe some of those subscription side of Yeah. Things. Yeah. ScreenFlow is not any more proprietary than Descript would be. They all have to have their own file format that is their app can understand. Right? IShowU doesn't Because it embeds it directly. Yeah. They just give you raw MP fours. And that's actually really nice for me, especially because The amount of transitions I'm doing between my face video and the code video is usually once. I'll start the video with my face video full screen, and then I'll move it to the corner.

Scott Tolinski

I can actually do that in iShowU with keyboard shortcuts, and so I can have a little thing over here that says, you know, my face is full screen. I hit command shift f 2 or whatever, and then it moves it to the picture in picture area. And so I do that live basically, a live editing while I'm recording of that video, and I don't mind having those be 1 solid video screen that it gives me. Oh, yeah. So I don't need the proprietary format, then it's usually just, like, an extra step for me, but, yeah, I get it. I I wish there were something like I show you that actually worked. That'd be great.

Wes Bos

Actually, one thing that ScreenFlow does do super well is you can record Like, I've done in the past where I record my camera, my microphone, 2 screens, and an iPhone that is plugged in via USB, and it, like, Handles it really, really well. Yeah. So I'll give them props there. It does do that kind of stuff really nicely, especially, like, yeah, sometimes you wanna Just show your face or, like, I often wanna crop out some of my room so that the the face can look really small in the corner.

Wes Bos

So there's a lot To say, but I'm surprised ScreenFlow has had such a long run. I'm excited to see some new players in the area.

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. Let's get a Let's get a Hunger Games going. Is that what they do in the Hunger Games? Do they fight each other? Is that a thing? I don't know. I've never seen any movies. Let's get a a battle royale going. There we go. Yeah. That's all I got here. So this is some hot new tech. Hopefully, you found some I'm so sorry. This is so Mac focused, but some of these are not entirely Mac focused. Warp will be available for other stuff. Yeah. I'm sorry for non Mac people, but there's a lot of really neat stuff here. And some of these are web dev, and some of them are just apps. You should get a Mac. Yeah.

Wes Bos

So Wes is currently auditioning to become the new Mac guy. You should get a Mac. Hey. I have a funny story to tell. You can tune out now if you just take a fit, but I have a funny story to tell. Me and my sister always say is, my sister and I were at a yard sale once, and the guy had, like, a old Mac keyboard.

Wes Bos

And I, like, picked it up and was was sorta checking it out. He comes over, like, real tough guy. He goes, you Mac guy? Yeah. I got a MacBook. And he goes he just closes his eyes and goes, Love it.

Wes Bos

Absolutely love it.

Wes Bos

People are so weird. Whenever my sister has her computer over, I'm like, You Mac guy? Absolutely love it.

Scott Tolinski

One time, I was working at a computer store, and, Some dirt came in, and they were just like, I would never use a Mac. The only people that use Macs are hipster kids wearing their knit hats and stuff like that, and I, like, look over, and I'm, like, wearing a knit And I'm on my I was like, are you talking about me? Oh, well, you fit the stereotype so well. Yeah. It was very funny. Cool. Alright. Well, that's all we got for you, and we will see you on Wednesday.

Wes Bos

Peace. Peace.

Scott Tolinski

Head n. Over to syntax.fm for a full archive of all of our shows. And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review If you like

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