Windows 11, Being Flexible and Productive – Anything But Idle, the Productivity News Podcast

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This week, Augusto Pinaud and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss their tips on how to move more productively, Windows 11, Being Flexible and Productive, and more productivity and technology news this week. Enjoy!

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In this Cast | Windows 11, Being Flexible and Productive

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Headlines & Show Notes | Windows 11, Being Flexible and Productive

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Telegram for iOS updated with group video calls, screen sharing, animated backgrounds, more

Save the Files You Need More Easily With Import Folders

Your recently closed Tab Groups in Chrome will soon appear in Tab Search for easy access

Google Contacts rolling out new people pages optimized for Workspace

Is Your Desk Holding Back Your Productivity?

These 3 Superpowers I Learned From Working with Beyoncé Supercharged My Productivity

Americans aren’t just quitting they are retiring at record rates too

New Tools of the Week

Shortcutter (Android)

Paprika App

Featured Story of the Week

Other News

Raw Text Transcript | Windows 11, Being Flexible and Productive

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:02

Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to Anything But Idle. The Productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by co working space by personal productivity club. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:13

I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:15

And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. Today’s episode is episode number 67. Windows 11 being flexible and productive and more productivity and technology news this week, we’re recording this on June 28 2021. Each week, we read and review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. And we’ll usually start that off with a little bit of a discussion around a theme. And I just pulled from last week that this last week, we had international Yoga Day. And so I figured we could talk about flexibility and productivity, how to be flexible and productive. And so to start things off with gusto, I just wanted to kind of pick your brain on what you think about having, say, slack in your personal productivity system, how do you create a little bit of kind of elasticity in your personal productivity system so that you can stay on track even when things you know have given given take on either end of projects?

Augusto Pinaud 1:17

Okay, I’m going to ask Curiously, since I was going to ask you to answer in a completely different way. But, you know, it’s like it is one of the key components of be productive. And actually, in my opinion, one of the only ways to be productive, I have seen when I work with clients, they bring this 87 thing list in front of me and it’s okay. And when are these going to happen? Well, tomorrow, how many things can you accomplish prior? Well, last three days I have done for, okay, so eight hours times 432, we have an issue here. And that’s something that happened. And for most people, and there is a story that was brought to me recently by somebody and I want to share with her listening, sir, during the one of the World Cups was Russia vs. Brazil, on the World Cup. So the Brazilian coach came and said, Okay, this is how the game is going to happen. We are going to do this and do this. And that’s going to be gold, number one, then we’re going to grab the wall again. And we’re going to go to the left to the bottom. And then Goal number two, and then we’re going to get the ball again and go to the right and do other diagonal gold number three, and then one of the players, you know, raise his hand and say, have a question, Coach, what is your question? It’s not clear. No, no, I just want to know if the Russians are going to play. And the reality is we all like that coach plan, are they that way, and it is healthy to ask are the Russians playing today? Because they’re not playing, Hey, your plan may work really, really well. But if they are, you may be in trouble. And based on that, I try to the best of my abilities to plan what is in that calendar that cannot be moved, what is on this task list that cannot be moved. And I keep that list short. And then I do a second list that I call Plan B. Okay. And Plan B is the list that I’m going to look when everything failed. Okay, so I get to the meeting and the meeting now start 20 minutes later, I’m sure that happened to a lot of people. So the problem is, if you wait for those 20 minutes to plan, what you’re going to do, you’re out, you need to know, when these people is out, you should be able to grab something that says this is my plan. This is the plan B items that I can get done anywhere, no matter what, in 10 minutes or less. So when those things happen, you can really maximize all those windows. So those two things allow me to keep myself pretty flexible. I work at home, I’ve been working at home for a long time. And I have two kids, yes, they’re growing. But still, they come in to teach them what is important in a way and trying to understand what is important from their perspective. And even though they are your kids, it applies the same when you talk about the office. You know, you need to train your team into what is important and what is important for you and what’s really important for an interruption. So all those things, if you put them in place helps significantly with that slack.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:52

Yeah, absolutely. I think about the concept of flexibility and productivity knowing that life is chaotic and And it’s within that chaos that we find eyes within the storm, and we’re able to be productive in those spaces. And so not so much about trying to control the chaos of life, but really trying to be productive in those pockets of calm. And that’s really how I see flexibility for me is basically, pre empting, what could be mess, chaos, disorganization and otherwise, and try to stay ahead of that as much as possible. And I feel like the other side is not to really self flagellate and really be negative toward myself, because there are enough people around to do that. I don’t need to, I don’t need self, you know, talk or self speak to be negative, I don’t need, I certainly don’t need it from people around me, but it’s going to happen. And so the goal is to be able to work through ways in which you can, within the space you have, create a locus of control, and then also focus on positive self speak, in and around those areas. And that helps you be both flexible and dynamic, both emotionally, mentally, and with regard to managing projects. And I think that it’s just a good reminder to us all that, you know, we can twist ourselves up in knots over all kinds of things. But most things are not important enough that they are life and limb, right? if if if there’s something that is really causing you immense or immediate physical harm, then you should deal with that, dodge the car, talk to the bus, you know, call 911 you do what you need to do there, everything else, you can really have a moment of pausing and planning, and the world’s not going to fall apart. And I think that level of flexibility and, and dynamism in our own personal productivity systems need to be built in so that we know, okay, you know, when I say something’s going to take five, take me five minutes, I should say 10. Right. And and then if it if it only takes me five, maybe it takes me six, now I have four minutes that I can put something else in that space. And, and for me that is really the flexibility is having that extra space, that extra stuff that I can do in that space. If I’m in the queue at the grocery store, well, I can read a few emails, I can, you know, do a couple of things in line because I have my mobile phone with me and I can handle that time in a productive way. So we can be flexible in so many different areas of our life. And it’s good to keep mindful of that as well. Alright, we’ve had a little discussion about flexibility and productivity at gousto. Let’s go ahead and cover and discuss the productivity new news headlines of this week. Let’s get into the headlines.

Augusto Pinaud 7:37

So the first thing is telegram for iOS gets updated with group video calls to screen sharing animated backgrounds and more. The other news are cool. The group media chat was interesting. I’m a big fan of telegram and having multiple people in the screen being able to share the screen. And even bidding in a certain way Apple to the game. With FaceTime, we have talked about it. So put telegram in a really, really interesting place. Suddenly, I don’t have everybody on telegram. But that means I will continue pushing for telegram because it’s getting more and more powerful and better and better.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:25

I think this is great. I love the gram. I every time I hear people who don’t know about telegram, I encourage them to install it and use it. It is a great centralizing application. It’s very secure. And it gives everybody a robust, stable platform in which to collaborate. And yeah, so it’s a great app. And you know, you can do it in the in the web browser. You can install the desktop applications. You’ve got the iOS and Android apps. It’s just really flexible. And I feel like it’s a really strong application. telegram is one of those apps where everything feels right. Like as you’re working in the application, everything just feels right. And they do things in this way that are just these very subtle, but important features. Like if you if I call you a gousto via telegram, it does that little beeping. But if we disconnect for some reason, it actually gives me an audible beep to tell me that we’ve disconnected and it does it on both sides. So you know, so continue talking to yourself for five minutes, right? Person reconnects, and it’s it’s those kinds of subtle details that are just really really nice about it and I’m really appreciative of them doing that. All right onto onto some Evernote news. In full disclosure everybody. I am an Evernote certified consultant and I’m one of the Evernote regional leaders for North America. But not withstanding that Evernote has brought back import folders to Windows and they have brought to Mac for the first time import folders. Not sure what Yeah, what I said before Yeah, import folders, import folders to Windows is back in the new Evernote import folders is now in Evernote. for Mac wherever no desktop on the Mac, which is just brilliant, I’m really excited, they’ve really made the whole process seamless. And I really liked the way in which they’ve implemented that going forward, I really hope they add some kind of monitored folder in, you know, maybe for images or something like that on the mobile, really, really like that for them to be able to you take a photograph. And then you know, Evernote just basically monitors for photographs to be added to your folder, and for them to suck those images into notes for you. not there yet. But at least we have Evernote desktop with import folders back. Next up is to the

Augusto Pinaud 10:37

next news we have is Google Chrome is bringing back that is your your race. So soon, you will be able to find in the search, all those stats that you close that you have recently closed will show in Chrome soon will appear in the search tab for easy access. So I’m sure you have close a tab like I have done and then suddenly, it’s like what is now they will come to have that available for everybody.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:09

So to clarify what it is actually is a close tab group doesn’t mean that you’ve actually closed the tab group as in like shut down the tabs, it means when you have chrome open, you can expand the tab group. So you see all the different tabs, and then you can close the tab group. So it shrinks it accordions into just the label for that group of tabs. And so you can now search in that group of tabs. Now, quick note, though, if you ever were to close that tab group, you could just use Shift Ctrl T or shift Command T on the Mac, and that will reopen the closed items. So utilize that shortcut, it’s so so helpful. If you accidentally close a crew a, you know, a couple of tabs and you’re like, Oh, I needed that, Shift Ctrl T or shift Command T and that will help reopen those, but this new feature is gonna allow you now to search the tab group, even when it is accordion closed. Good. Alright, next.

Augusto Pinaud 12:05

Our next news is Google contact is rolling out new people page. I was really excited when you can go inside of workplace and look okay, what is the relationship? What are the things that are happening kind of in a CRM view? For people? Every organization should have a CRM, but not every organization have one? Okay, that’s a fact. But their organizations that don’t have one who leave into Google, this will be really useful for people to see, okay, now you can see somebody and see what are the relationship with managers? What do you have the last interactions you are having? What is their information of this person? So, really, Google is taking this to the next level.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 12:54

Now, I love the I love the recent interactions, widget that they’ve they’ve added here into the context space. Now that you can see, okay, the least the last couple of emails that I have with that person, this is the last meeting I had with them. I just recently, you know, looked at this in early release. And I saw Oh, well, I looked at a contact of mine. And I hadn’t talked to them in several years. And so now it’s like, oh, that’s going to remind me that the last time I talked to them was this time. So the next time we speak, I have more context, I have more information about that person. Even though we email all the time, we actually haven’t been quote unquote, face to face to face in a considerable amount of time. And that’s more information that’s really useful to me. So I’m really I’m really glad that Google is doing this for us. All right, next up.

Augusto Pinaud 13:40

Oh, those are the articles we have for for for this we have short articles to this week, because our feature story of the week we know is going to take longer, so we decided to keep short the article so we can keep the show in the time that normally.

Sponsor Voice Over 13:57

Fantastic so now for a word from our sponsor this week co working space by personal productivity club we’ll see after the break well working in person may be normal for you. It’s unlikely your co workers are as interested in being productive as you are, or working remotely or from home can be isolating and there’s something powerful about being with productive people, even virtually that helps you be more engaged. If a flavor of these sounds familiar, co working space by personal productivity club is for you. co working space is a virtual work community designed to help members be more effective and efficient in their work and personal lives. At its core. We provide goal tracking and host focused action sessions throughout the week for accountability and camaraderie. Visit Anything But Idle comm forward slash co working to learn more CO working space lives inside personal productivity club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiasts. So you can find people who use methods and tools You do to, again, head over to Anything But Idle comm forward slash co working to see how co working space can help you be more productive. And now back to our show.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:13

Welcome back everybody to Anything But Idle on Ray Sidney-Smith joined with Augusto Pinaud for the second half of the show. And so with that gousto let’s get into our productivity articles this

Augusto Pinaud 15:26

week for our next article is from lotek Syrah and is called is your desk holding back your productivity. And I must say, I love this article. So many times, people think is the desk is a routine is, as he mentioned in the article, all these things instead of thinking, Well, what is holding me back and looking really into the actual, real reason, you know, as he said, Well, you know, if the I love that he said on the article, yeah, this great for it. And I said nothing one. And you know, I should have that and that will improve my productivity. And, and I must say that guilty of charge on an early part of my life, okay, in which I was convinced that the certain toys or the latest toy, or the new toy, was going to help me that said, careful, there is extreme, okay, don’t go to the one extreme by never neutral, or to the other extreme falling apart. Because you’re you cannot buy the tools. There is a healthy medium under that. But what is important is what is the work you do? What is the difference you’re trying to make? And what is the quality of the work that you’re putting in has nothing to do with the desk, the technology, the tool, or the tool is going to help you? Yes. But if you have the best tools, but you don’t have the first most important ingredient, what do you bring to this equation? The tool, honestly, is irrelevant.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:09

I think it’s a mixture of both you have to have, you know, both of those items. And if you don’t, you’re really gonna hang yourself up. And so good article, I enjoyed it. And I think, folks to check it out. We’ll make sure we have a link to it in the show notes. Next up

Augusto Pinaud 17:23

the three superpowers I learned from working with Beyonds supercharge my productivity by Cal magliozzi. And I apologize to her for choppin her last name. But this this started the article tell story about a person getting invited to or the star with a phone call. Okay, you got a call from a client to reschedule. Great. Well, we’re going to do tomorrow because Beyonce is going to be insert. Oh, okay. And what she’s saying is really what are the things that you can see in this in specifically ambience, on that the kindness, the recognizing her team? The how things work? Well, but how also she was taking time to be kind to be real to be genuine? Yes, it’s she a superstar, no question about it. But one of the things you mentioned, Gail mentioned in the article is was interesting for me how human they are I’m, I have had the good luck and good fortune to meet a couple of people. Maybe not like beyond spelling in good high levels. And as always impressed me that you know that? Yes, they are humans like you and I they just live in a different world. But they are humans like you and I and they’re kind and they are in generous and they really are interested in so we tend to think that we are in a place different without noticing that. What part of what take them there is that they were that way before they got there. They did not get to that place and then turn into kind and caring. No, no, they care and they were genuine and they were kind before they go there. And I agree that he’s a productivity superpower.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:22

Yeah, I will say that celebrity, the way in which I judge celebrities or the way in which they treat the the staff around the people who are not on camera. And I’ve been in many similar circumstances. Now. In a past career, my mother came into contact with lots of celebrity folks. And I would always watch as a kid to see if the celebrity was nice to the people who were off camera. And that’s how I decided that I’d like that celebrity or not. And that rule has stuck in in, in to my adulthood. And so I’m yeah, I think it’s a really great way to judge People is that it’s like, who’s who’s doing the right things when no one’s watching? Right, that’s the that’s the middle of a, of a moral and ethical person. So all right on to some news about Americans retiring at record rates?

Augusto Pinaud 20:17

Well, this article by team for holds, it’s springing that since the pandemic star, their retirement rate has increased to 18 19%. That is significant and struggling a little bit of what’s going to happen because suddenly retirement for people doesn’t mean our graves, this oldest bunch of people retire we have the people who are coming in. As a coach, I work with a lot of small businesses. And usually there is not a path of what happened with so and so retired. And it’s a problem because in many cases, we don’t even know what’s unsold. So and so it’s been doing this for so long that we don’t know. And I wish to tell you that larger corporations don’t have that problem. But that’s the not always the case. So these things, it’s going to cause another set of issues coming out of pandemic when we try to fill these spaces. You know, we have been noticed that in past weeks, what there are other articles are being saying about people not wanting to come full time to want to do a radical change to what is the work and how certain organizations or many organizations I’m fighting to go back to 2019 and how other people are saying may not work. So this is just another variable added to that complex discussion. Because if you have now the senior people, senior people bring a lot of experience brings a lot of knowledge, bring a lot of know how that is has not been well documented, now is lost. And that’s may cause for many organizations an interesting gap.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:10

Yeah, I think this is a good thing and a bad thing all in one. Right? You know, the good thing is that there are a lot of young people who this is about the time in which millennials should be raising in ranks to higher and senior level positions. And since we have longer lives, our lifespans have extended so dramatically. The the course of of people being able to elevate into higher positions has been somewhat stagnant for several decades. And so you know, if you have a baby boomer with no disrespect to anyone of any age, it’s just a reality factor that they’re going to stay in their job if there’s healthy and capable and competent to be able to do that job. But that, of course, kind of holds up other people down the chain of succession. And that has been a challenge. So the more retirement, there’s more money going back into the economy, potentially, in those short term timeframes, people will elevate meaning they’re going to get, you know, salaries that are going to allow them to be able to spend in the economy, I hope a lot of these retirees start new businesses, I hope they go to their local Small Business Development Center, and they start a business. And, you know, and let those economic development agencies help them grow and foster their local communities with businesses. On the other side of that, as you said, there’s a productivity hit, when you have this massive amount of change. And so you’re gonna have a lot of churn. And those, I mean, like, I seriously, everyone who has senior staff, they need to start doing desk audits for those senior staff, so we can see what it is that they actually do and how they do it. There are so many soft skills, and, and, and policies and heuristics that they just do that are great, and that they’re, that are lost when you have these changes of the guard. So I really hope that people start thinking about desk audits, making sure they’re interviewing those retirees as they leave their organizations. And that way, there isn’t as big a productivity hit as there could be. And so the folks who are really capable of diving in and saying, we understand you want to do something different. And now because of the pandemic, you know, just like spice of life wanting to take the bull by the horns, great, go out there and enjoy your golden years. But can we have a day with you to know what it is that you do? So we can make sure that we can transition that on to the next person and be comfortable in that sense. They’re all right. Next up, we are going into new tools of the week because of Cousteau and I, we come across a lot of personal productivity stuff, tools and services, as well as the articles and news related items that we bring to you each week. And so in this segment, new tools of the week, we try to bring you April we think you might like and so this week, we’ve brought you two tools, and the first tool is us A tool called short cutter. And you’ll note that a couple of weeks ago, we had Art Gelwicks on the show, and he had brought up a particular tool that does something similar. But this had come across my desk some time ago. And I’ve played around with it on occasion. And it’s called short cutter. And short cutter provides you with a, basically a super powered shortcuts, slash widgets, control panel. And so the application once you install it, this is for Android, it gives you just a lot more power in the drop down menu. But what’s more powerful is this sidebar this like shortcut sidebar that you can actually install into the system, you can do a whole bunch of stuff with it, including having it run particular scripts, to do things. And so really, really powerful. And then you have this pinned shortcuts area. So you can actually, you know, basically have these shortcuts to do things all throughout the Android ecosystem. So really interesting product. So if you if the prior I apologize, I can’t remember the prior application that that Art had brought. But if you go back, I think two episodes or so you can find that in the new tools of the week, you can kind of compare and contrast that with short cutter, I think, is a pretty good contender in that space. It doesn’t do the search capabilities that the prior application does. And so that is one drawback. But this one is extremely flexible. And it gets a lot of good feedback from from folks. I mean, clipboard management, all kinds of fun things inside of short cutter. So that is short cutter Agusta what’s your tool.

Augusto Pinaud 26:37

So let’s go and cook, let’s go to paprika. paprika is a recipe manager. And it works iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. What I like about paprika is all of us has found a recipe somewhere in the web. But then that disappear. paprika you can get the URL, put it into paprika, and paprika will track the recipe. So now you will have them organized with color. with instructions, you can even go and say well, the recipe calls for one person now. Or for four person, I’m going to do eight and the software will do it automatically. Or I’m going to do one person and the software will do it automatically. You can also plan your menus. That’s one of the features I use. Because when you get the recipes in there and you plan the menus, it will create your grocery list and it will add the thing. So if you had three tomatoes in different recipes, he will tell you do you need three tomatoes instead of unit one tomato Do you need one tomato, and you need one tomato. And that’s a nice thing. When you look at that grocery list. I’ve been using paprika I don’t know since when, for a really really long time, you can sort you can create categories. It is a really fantastic thing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:57

Wonderful. So those are the new tools of the week, which brings us along to our featured story this week. And of course, last week, Microsoft held a a livestream press conference where they quote unquote unveiled although I mean people had been talking about it for weeks prior to, but they unveiled the new windows 11. And so windows 11 is a re envisioning of how you interoperate with or how you interact with windows that generally. And so we wanted to spend some time in this episode, talking through what windows 11 is going to look like if you are in the Windows Insider program. Technically, as of I think today, you can go ahead and download the beta and have access to the beta. Remember, if you’re Windows Insider, and you’re downloading a beta, it is test software, you do not want to put test software on your production machines. So put this on a spare, you know, Windows machine, but putting beta software onto your machine does allow for potential bugs and security things and whatnot to get onto your system. So be mindful of the of that. But being an apple person, a gousto. What stood out for you in the windows 11 announcement.

Augusto Pinaud 29:18

Well, then

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:20

you are you’re reaching to find something nice to say about Windows.

Augusto Pinaud 29:25

Well, no, that’s not true. There is a couple of things that I really like but I but I wanted to cover you know, the first thing was the fact that there are centering on the on the on the bottom bar. That’s cool, even if you move it to I hope that that works. Even if you move the bar to the left. I think that’s a that’s a good thing they’re they’re doing. The other thing is the fact that they are allowing Android applications on Windows I think that’s great. That is a great way for Microsoft to really tied up with Android and really be the desktop partner of Android in the same way, the iOS is the next uponor of the Mac. And I think that was really good about the performance improvement and optimizations, I need to wait until I will hold my my reservations in that I’ve been used. I don’t use any windows products day to day. Now, I live on an iPad, and I don’t know, they might, and you have

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:38

to have an you have to have an NVMe device, you know, you have to have NVMe storage in order for that to even work. So anyone who’s installing this on non NVMe technology is not going to get the benefits of that of that new cloud storage capability. So it’s not going to really be much of a thing. But if you do get it, my understanding is that it’s supposed to be a mark of a remarkable improvement performance wise.

Augusto Pinaud 31:01

Well, one can hope. Again, I don’t know, I don’t. But, but that those were the things that, you know, I in the same way, Apple play with their marketing windows, obviously play with a marketing when we have all these epic Apple thing going, oh, we’re going to do commission free. Well read the little font is not that commission free, as they said, but hey, yeah, is what it is. Um, it reminds me of Windows 10. And windows 10, or Windows seven, when seven came, you know, people was really tired, they tried to introduce a bunch of things, modern, what surprised me is they break for years, Windows has been done their software pretty much backward compatible for you can go pretty back. And again, they came and say, no, this time, we are going to limit how far you can go. And that was an interesting change. So I wonder how long they’re going to keep now windows 10 and Windows 11. And if they’re going to do a similar approach, as Apple is going to do that is going to keep and try to maintain two operating systems at the same time.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:30

Remember, they’re still maintaining windows seven, in the long term service channel. So they’re willing and capable and ready to do that for people. I think there’s some really good positive pieces here for Windows 11. As they demonstrated during the event, they showed how having a convergence device basically something like the surface, you know, tablet Surface Pro tablets, you have a keyboard that’s docked to it or any one of the Acer switch devices, you’re running a Windows machine, but it feels like a Windows desktop operating system that you’re using with a touchscreen convergence tablet type computing device. And they’ve they’re they’re trying to bind those two pieces together. So now, if you have your keyboard on, you’re working out a laptop, it should feel the same when you disconnect the laptop, and now you’re in tablet mode. Those things, I think really make sense. And that’s why they’ve centered the taskbar, I’m not particularly you know excited about that. I like having the taskbar fixed in one position. So I’m not sure how that’s going to really work because then the Windows button is potentially going to expand as you have more things in in the taskbar. But we’ll see, it’s it’s early days, I like the widgets, I think that’s going to be really powerful. they’ve introduced that in Windows 10 in some light fashion. Now they’re going to explore that much more in the system, I hope they don’t tie all this went with top to edge, because I want the flexibility of being able to use utilize my browser of choice. So I hope they keep those things mostly separate. But I do like that glass kind of transparent glass screen where you can know where you are. So you don’t lose your place, even when the widgets do come up and are on screen. I’m very skeptical about these Android applications, where they have utilized Amazon and the Amazon App Store in order to be able to bring Android applications to the ecosystem. They had partnered with Samsung and Samsung Galaxy devices to bring those Android apps to Windows 10. By virtue of emulating the screen of those galaxy devices. Now they’re having Android apps installed directly on those windows 11 machines, and you’re operating them from that environment. Ah, I don’t know. I’ve never been impressed with the Amazon App Store. And so it’s all about having the right applications in there as to whether this will really last and will really flourish. I want it to be successful. There’s no question in my mind that I want to be able to use applications that are mobile only on my desktop. And that’s just my, that’s my working Zen place. You know, I don’t want to be working on like you Cousteau I, if I never had to work on my phone or tablet again, I wouldn’t, except when I’m away from my, my desk, right? I want to be able to use those devices, when I’m away from my desk, when I’m at my desk, I very rarely want to actually be utilizing those tools. And so it’s just a different working style. And that’s the you know, that’s the flavor of things. But I’m very, very cautious about this idea that when I go into the your phone app right now on Windows 10, I very limited functionality. But just recently Instagram said, Well, we actually might allow you to start posting from the desktop web, which means that they’re going to start reducing the barriers that Instagram once had about me being able to utilize Instagram on the desktop. And the more they allow me to use it on the on the web, the less I am likely to use Instagram on my phone, and they’re not getting me any less. But I’m now going to do it in my place where I’m comfortable. And even if that’s my laptop, you know, sitting on the couch, I would just rather do it on the larger screen. And you know, I use Instagram on my iPad quite often because it is that larger screen, this is easier to see things. Maybe I’m just getting old. I don’t know. But I just like the larger screen. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the Windows Store. I’ve now gone in and installed a couple of applications from the Windows Store. It all seems and feels like every other windows purchasing experience in the Windows Store. Yeah. Yes, I haven’t been particularly impressed with that piece of it. And I have to say like, it looks, it looks very nice. You know, like it clearly they put some design thought into it. That’s, that’s good.

Augusto Pinaud 36:52

They did. And then there is another feature that I want to mention. That is I think they call it the snap rounds, the layouts, and how many options are they going to give you you can cut that screen in for you can cut the screen to 2550s you can call it even and put in little things and big thing from the middle that that was impressive and really, really interesting. And I hope that Apple follow path into that, even if their marketing says that they’re going to invent it, I really hope Apple follow that because that was really interesting. The other thing they did was the desktops. And we have seen this on Chromebook, which you could do that on the Mac. So now you’re going to be able to Windows to do an EC EC or than what is possible today, and have your office your home your entertainment. So that was really cool, too.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 37:45

Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. But the snap layouts, I think are going to be very, very powerful. They remember the layout when you when you I’m not sure whether it’s just minimized or closed, but it remembers them. I’m very strong user of the desktops right now. So that I have this desktop is for this kind of work this step desktop is for that kind of work. And so I’m a heavy user of that. So I’m curious to see how layouts work currently with tiling tiling has a lot of sophisticated features on Windows. Unfortunately, I can’t quite get it to work consistently when I want it to. And so if I want to be able to tie things in a past life, you know, I spent a lot of time having screens side by side so that I can data enter things from one screen to another, you know, we’re looking at Real Estate documents on one side and and tabulating those things on the other. And I would want to quickly snap those screens into place, look at them, and then pop out to a full screen after that. And many times, you know, if you don’t do everything exactly the right way in the right order, then it all falls apart. And now you have a bunch of windows that are like, you know, little tiny boxes for the rest of his life. Because he got to expand it and fight with it. It was just a nightmare. And and so we still have some of those remnants, it’s gotten better. And I’m hoping that Windows 11 really solves for this, I will say that the best thing that Windows did here was it made windows 11 upgrade free. And so you’re going to get windows 11 for free, which is a real great benefit. Most people upgraded from Windows eight, or 8.1 to 10 for free. And Windows has continued that kind of stretch, because they want windows to stay relevant. And they want windows 11 to be adopted. And so they’ve really, you know, made it incredibly easy for people to say, Sure I’ll try it out by virtue of going to this next level. But honestly, it’s going to be more secure. It’s going to be hopefully faster, even without the NVMe storage. But I’m hoping that Windows 11 really becomes better user experience for all of us on Windows. And that’s what I’m really looking forward to on the platform

Augusto Pinaud 39:46

and that will be fantastic. I I don’t know. But that will be fantastic because again, I understand that I’m an iOS user, I have a Mac but there are certain classes To one windows and I, once in a while need to go into that. And it’s painful experience, it is painful. So hopefully that will improve things.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 40:14

Yeah, and it’s not even that like, for me, I’m a Windows user. And, you know, I have Macs and Linux devices around me all the time. But for me, I like Windows, because I know a lot more about how to make things under the hood work. And that very functionality is built for productivity, in that sense for me, and I know that people can be highly productive on on Mac devices. That’s not to say that, but it’s just that I know windows better. And so I’m always going to have an affinity for that operating system when it comes to working. And I get that same sense about Chrome, that there’s a leaning into efficiency, more than in, say, design and style. And windows here is starting to do the work of maybe melding those two a little bit, you know, and and maybe Apple has just basically refined that, over time better and faster. I don’t know. And I mean, I’ve been, I was for many years, a hardcore Mac user on the road. So it’s not like I’ve not been highly productive on the Mac. It’s just for some reason, when I think of a desktop computer, I don’t think of the iMac first. I don’t think of it in that sense. So it’s just getting my head wrapped around.

Augusto Pinaud 41:27

Dude, you may be in agreement with Steve Jobs when he said PCs are like trucks and you like your truck when you feel at home? I don’t know.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:34

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Not a truck guy. But, but I do like I like a car with good torque. But the the idea here, though, is that, you know, I think that we’re seeing a convergence a an overlap between apple and where Apple has come from, and where Windows has come from. And they’re both starting to be closer and closer to being so similar. The same applications are available on both platforms. They’re both interoperating with their, their mobile, you know, the mobile standards that lean into each other. So you’re seeing iOS and iPad, connect more with Mac OS, you’re seeing Android connect more with Windows OS, and Chrome OS in that in that case, as well. And so, yeah, I’m really curious over the next probably two years, we’re gonna see more and more of this overlap between what these devices can do. And I’m excited to see what windows does when windows 11 does come out. And it’s a formal sense in the fall. So that is our featured story this week about Windows 11. Anything in terms of doing announcements? Do we have anything else that we have?

Augusto Pinaud 42:42

No, we have other news. So when you visit our episode on the notes, you will find a bunch of other news that we didn’t cover this week. That’s it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:51

Fantastic. All right. With that, we’ve then covered the productivity and technology news headlines for this week. Thank you to steppin out this and every week for joining me here on Anything But Idle. Thanks, Cousteau. It’s my pleasure. All right, everybody, did we miss something that’s not in the extra stories that are in the show notes. If we did, feel free to head over to our contact page at Anything But Idle com Anything But idle.com. You can also tweet or dm us on Twitter. We’re at Anything But Idle. And so we have our DMS open, you can go ahead and message us there you have a question or comment about anything that we discussed on this episode, feel free to head over to Anything But Idle comm forward slash 067. Every episode is numbered. And if you go to the episode number as the page, so Anything But Idle comm forward slash six, seven, you’ll be taken to the episode page. And you can go ahead and leave a comment for us there while you’re on Anything, But idle.com forward slash 067, you’ll find our show notes, they’ll have links to all the stories that we discussed today tools of the week. They’ll also have our extra stories that we didn’t or couldn’t cover. We also have a text transcript on our episode pages. So you can go ahead and expand it by clicking on that Read More link. And then you can listen or watch along and read along as well. In that transcript, you can also click the Download button that’s below the Read More link. And that’ll download a PDF to your local system for you to be able to do that. This is the first time you’re watching us feel free to subscribe to the podcast through YouTube. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast app just by searching Anything But Idle, come up there. Give us a thumbs up or a rating, a review. All of those things helped to increase our personal productivity listening community. And so thank you for doing that. With that, we’ll see y’all next time on Anything But Idle. Here’s your productive life.

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