 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the No Silicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, March 10th, 2024, and this is show number 983. You know I'm a big fan of Tom Merritt, the host of The Daily Tech News Show, and I'm guessing quite a few of you are as well. If you've followed his work over the years, you know that he's extremely knowledgeable about tech. To be fair, he's extremely knowledgeable about pretty much everything, but tech specifically and the businesses behind tech. Someone once said that he's also almost pathologically unbiased about tech. So the good news is that Tom has written a nonfiction book called Sinked, Understanding Technology and Make It Work for You. And this book is to help you understand tech without undue outrage or optimism. The book is being published by a service called Unbound, and you can back the project by going to tomsnewbook.com. I bet it's going to be awesome. Frequent contributor to the No Silicast and good friend of mine, Jill from the North Woods has a new podcast out called Buzz, Blossom and Squeak, and it's wonderful. The show is all about encouraging you to discover nature outside your door. In the first episode, she talks about things like fighting the power of the coach, how hard it is to actually get up and go outside. She encouraged us to slow down when out on a walk and really look and listen to everything around you. So on my next walk, I took out my headphones and I got on my hands and knees to watch a pill bug crawling on the sidewalk. Then on another part of my walk, I took Jill's advice and I stopped and I closed my eyes just to listen. I heard the sound of wind whipping through the palm fronds above me. A small bird was chirping a little ways away and then I could hear the rustle of a flag nearby. It was a really interesting way to experience the walks that I go on every single day. It was a very different experience doing the kinds of things that Jill suggests. If this sounds fun to you and you know it's Jill, it's fun. You just got to smile when you listen to Jill talk. So I highly encourage you to check out the Buzz, Blossom and Squeak podcast in your podcatcher of choice or go to BlossomandSqueak.com. Let's start another one of the fine interviews from CES 2024 thanks to Steve Sheridan putting them all together for us. Every morning, I'm so spoiled. Every morning Steve brings me a cup of coffee and he brings it to me in my ember mug. An ember mug is basically a rechargeable heated coffee mug. It keeps my coffee hot. We like our coffee hot and so that's why we're in the ember booth with Jake Singer and he's going to tell us about other products, new things coming, what they've got here today. I love to hear it. I start my day that way every day too so I love to hear it. Steve brings you coffee. That's amazing. Come on over anytime. So along with our typical classic product offerings, we've got our six ounce, ten ounce, 14 ounce mugs with accessory lids available. But we recently launched in September our new tumbler. This is 16 ounces. Perfect for a grande coffee from Starbucks. Comes with two lids in the box. We've got a sliding lid for quick drinking and then a handle carry lid as well. So this one you can for on the go. So both of those come in the box. We have never gotten the travel mugs before. That's kind of interesting. So the mugs at home, they sit in a little saucer and that's how they charge us. That's right. Exactly the same way. Yeah. And on the charging base on the coaster, it'll last all day. Keep your coffee hot all day. So that's if you're drinking from your mug, sitting at your desk. Exactly. But if you're on the go, that can also hold the charge. Yeah. Last for about three hours with the lid on. Even I don't drink it that slow. So that sounds great. So what's that travel mug called? This is the Ember tumbler. And yeah, this is our latest greatest. So we also have the travel mug. So this is the Ember travel mug. I'm sorry. Tumbler, not travel mug. Tumbler and travel mug. Okay, great. So the travel mug, this is a 12 ounce mug, but the main difference with this is you can actually change the temperature directly on the device itself. Oh, he's tapping up and down on the plus buttons here and it says 125. I get, oh, I should mention one thing we would like, we would actually like to go hotter. Our mugs only go to, I think it's 140. 145 is the hottest. So 120 to 145 is the total range. We order our coffee at 180 degrees at Starbucks. So if you can heat that baby up, we'll go even hotter. Okay, we'll do it. We'll take the feedback. Maybe not a hotter baby, but once you see it might be nice. 145 is pretty hot, but yeah, most coffees brewed around 185. So 145 is a nice drinking temperature for most people. Yeah, yeah. We're just weirdos. No, all good. Okay. So actually, I don't want you to go past this. I didn't say up front, this is an audio podcast. Some people will be watching videos. What have I got my hands on here? So this is the Ember baby bottle. This is the first branch outside of the coffee products for Ember. So we took the heating technology from the mugs and put it into a baby bottle system. You can take your bottle out of the fridge, drop it onto, we've got a smart warming puck, which is basically where the batteries are. We've got the bottle itself and then over the bottle, you can place our double wall stainless steel vacuum thermos, we call it the thermal dome. So you take your bottle out of the fridge, you can cover it with the thermal dome. It'll stay cool for up to four hours until you're ready to feed. Oh, I was thinking immediately this was going to heat it. This is to keep it cool. The thermal dome keeps it cool and then the system is intended to heat. So you can heat from fridge temperature to body temperature in five minutes. In the same unit. In the same unit. Oh my gosh, this is cool. You can double tap the button on the front or if it's in the other room downstairs, you can also start heating with your app. Okay. Okay. So I need to take one home with me today for my grandchildren. This is great. When I started working on this, I had a six month old, I had another baby in the meantime while we were working on it. I can tell you, it is a game changer. Parents love it. Oh yeah, for travel, for home, everywhere. Take it on a plane, take it in the car, even, you know, before you go to bed, you place it on your nightstand. It'll keep it cool. And when your baby wakes up in the middle of the night, it's perfect. Boom, five minutes, feed the baby. Exactly. Not going out to the kitchen for the bottle also. No. P.A. free dishwasher safe bottles and we also have adapter collars. So you can use it. We have our own anticholic Ember nipple that we've designed, but you can also use Phillips Avent or Dr. Brown's wide nipples. So those adapter collars come in the box. Now, and so what is this product called? This is the Ember Baby Bottle. Ember Baby Bottle. And what's the price point on this? $3.99 for the full kit. We also have a starter kit that has the bottle only and one bottle and one pack without the thermal dome, without the adapter collars, with a lower, lower entry point. But we need the thermal dome. And I just want to say thermal dome. All right. Anything else here we need to see? Yeah. If you want to see our cold technology. So we have a cloud-based shipping box. So this is the world's first self-refrigerated cloud-based shipping box. This is, we use this to ship drugs or pharmaceuticals that need to be at maintained at refrigerator temperature. So this has onboard cellular and GPS. So you can use our cloud-based dashboard to track your package in real time. You always know exactly where it is and what temperature it's at. So that when the medication arrives at your doorstep, you know it's safe, effective, and not spoiled. Wow. Can you open it up for us? Of course. Yeah. Put up the lid. And inside we've got a cold ginger ale. You can feel the walls. It's actually quite cold in there. It's quite chilly, but that's about the size of a ginger ale. Yeah. And that's what, right now we're shipping drugs like Humira and a pens that'll fit. The payload will fit perfectly in there. Oh, okay. So it's maybe three ginger ale's tall, one ginger ale wide. So it's in a pretty big box though. It's always at 10, 12 inches on it, 14 inches on a side there. I believe 14 inches, 14-inch cube, yeah. Then when you're ready to, so you've taken your medication out, you're ready to ship it back. We've got a one-touch return to sender. We have an e-ink shipping label display on the front. So you can actually just push one button. The label will change to the return, and it'll notify the carrier to come pick up the box. He said that very blasé, but there is an electronic display here that is a shipping label. I mean, it's a, who is it? UPS or somebody? Yeah. UPS ground. And it's electronically put that on. That's crazy. That's really cool. It's convenient. No printing labels. You know, it arrives at your door, you take one button, and it'll call the carrier and change the label for you. So who is this for again? Is this for medical companies to ship to you, and then you press this return to sender? Exactly. Yeah. So right now we're piloting with some of the largest pharmaceutical cold chain distributors. Very, very interesting. I'm not going to ask the price point because I don't think it's something that a regular human... It's enterprise. Yeah. I like the idea of you guys solving this problem. You're going the whole hot to cold thing now. Hot and cold. That's been the vision all along. Yeah. Start with the coffee products, and the baby bottle and this cold chipper have really been part of the vision since the very beginning of Ember. We're a precise temperature control company. Very good. Very good. And where would people find Ember products? Ember.com is the best place, Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Apple Store, lots of retailers near you. All right. We'll be drinking our coffee and thinking of you. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming. Well, I do have to say this is a case of an interview costing us money. While we did have the Ember mugs, just the regular coffee mugs, we've been using those for years and years. We ended up buying each other Ember tumblers, which is a 16-ounce, the 16-ounce container that they sell. We bought them for each other for our anniversary. And I'm going to do a full review of it so I don't want to spoil what we think of them. But anyway, that one cost us money, so you're welcome if it costs you money, too. I'm about to play you an interview with Jen Warren from Belkin that we recorded at CES. She's fantastic. We've enjoyed meeting up with her every single year for years and years and years. Well, a few weeks ago, I taught you about the new Che2 standard and what it means for charging devices, both Apple and Android. The interview with Jen took place before I did the research to learn about Che2 so that I could teach it to you. Because this is out of sequence and I did this interview before I did the research, you will hear me misunderstand a few things she says. At one point, you'll hear her say, we're waiting for people to come to the party. Android? I didn't catch what she was saying. She was talking about the fact that now that Che2 is out, Android vendors need to create new phones that adopt the charging coils and firmware to be compatible with Che2. When they do, our Android friends will be able to use the beautiful Belkin Chargers Apple folks have enjoyed for years. So we get it basically for free. We still get to use Che2 because it uses the Apple MagSafe standard that got turned into, I forget what the name of the standard is anyway, inside Che2. So we'll be able to use them right away, but the Android vendors need to make the phones compatible with Che2. Oh, the other thing that I messed up was I got her name wrong at the beginning, even though I've known her for years. Her name is Jen Warren, not whatever you're about to hear me say. It absolutely would not be CES for me if I didn't get a chance to interview Jen Way from Belkin. We're like old friends. We've been doing this for so many years. I've missed you, Jen, and the pandemic, and everything glad to be back with you. Same. It's like a family reunion. There you go. All right. We're going to do a speed walkthrough to some things and then see some new products. But the first thing here I see is the Belkin charger that I have at home, but you say it's not the charger I have at home. Describe what we're looking at here. That's right. It is a familiar form factor. It's the beautiful Belkin design. As you know it, premium materials, stainless steel, chrome stand. However... This is the three in one, right? So this is the iPhone and the Apple Watch and then a charger. Wireless earbuds. Okay, there we go. Yeah. But what's new? The difference is this is a G2 module and it also rotates. So you can adjust it for optimal viewing. Now, a lot of people might not know what G2 brings to us. G2 allows us to have 15 watt charging and it has nothing to do with Apple blessing you as MagSafe anymore because it's a standard finally. So that's got fast charging. That's going to be a lot better for us, right? That's right. So we're hosting the party. We just need... We need people to come. Yeah. So come on, Android devices, you know, if everyone starts adopting the G2 module, then it's a party. It's going to be great. All right. What's up next here? So lots of more G2 products. We are in the G2 section of our table. This is a convertible pad to stand. Okay. So I'm going to describe it. So it's an iPhone MagSafe kind of mount and then it folds down into kind of a flattened puck sort of thing, right? So you can take it with you on the go. Oh, nice. It's meant for travel. Nice. I like that. Very nice. Yep. Then we have a two-in-one. You have here a G2 module on one side of the device and then a wireless charging surface that's good for wireless earbuds. All right. Great. It's more flat. Okay. And then we have our family of G2 power banks. We have a 10K, an 8K, and a 5K. And are these MagSafe? And these are G2. G2. So does G2 include magnetic mount? So G2 is essentially wireless charging surrounded by magnets. Oh, okay. I thought it was just a charging technology, but it's a magnet as well. It includes the magnets, yes. Great. Okay. So you can charge and watch on your device horizontally or horizontally. Because it's got a little kickstand on the back. Very nice. Very nice. And then it has additional two USB-C ports, so you can actually charge up to three devices at the same time. That's fantastic. So obviously, for the audio-only audience, this is thick, medium, and thin based on how much charge you want to get. Mobile flight, heavy-duty CES day, just a regular day running around doing it. There you go. I like it. I like it. Okay. What's next in our lineup? All right. We're moving over to the GAN section. So that's gallium nitride? That's right. GAN stands for gallium nitride. It allows us to create higher-powered product in a smaller form factor. So this first product here, it's about the size of an Apple TV, I would say. Yeah. It's a 6-in-1 dock. So it's half the size of other 6-in-1 docks. It has six features. It has HDMI, Ethernet port for Internet. It has two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports. Oh, wow. So, and the way that it plugs in, it's just a cable. There's no power brick because of the GAN technology. So if you have a small workstation at home like I do, this is perfect. Nice. Nice. And I'm going to stop you on price first. What's the price expected on this particular 6-in-1 dock? $139.99. That's really inexpensive for, let's go over it again, two USB-A, two USB-C, and it's got HDMI so you can hook up pretty much most of the stuff you need for, that is a really good price point. Yeah. I would agree. Most docks are about $300. That's right. That's good. All right, what do we got next? So the next GAN product is a 200-watt USB-C four-port charger. So we have two ports that give you a combined 140 watts. Another two ports that gives you a combined 60 watts. So we're talking power-hungry laptops, we're talking multiple tablets, four phones. It's also like all of our new products, made out of 72% post-consumered recycled plastics. Oh, I did not know that, excellent. This is a new Belkin initiative. I wanted to especially point it out for this product because if you have recycled materials housing, a 200-watt charger, that's potentially thousands of dollars of devices plugged into it. You want to go with a brand that you can trust that's going to deliver the highest quality of products. And again, it's a cable that you connect to the back, oh boy, 200 watts is heavy. But when you need all of the power, all right, that's very cool. So this thing is, that's a hefty brick, but man, that's going to get it done, right? Yeah. Okay, wait a minute. Now she's got an iPhone that's rotating, oh my gosh. This thing is flying around in circles, it's rotating up and down. What are we doing here? All right, so this next product is the Auto Tracking Stand Pro. It uses phase tracking technology from Apple called Dock Kit in order to track your every move. So what I want to do is come over to this other unit and let's see if we can get it to work. So we're looking at, we've got a tripod with the, what is the name of this device again? Auto Tracking Stand. The Auto Tracking Stand, so she's got an articulated, it's got azimuth and elevation going on here, it's on a tripod and she's going to stick her phone on it. So you need an iPhone 12 or later because it attaches via a MagSafe module. You need iOS 17 on your iPhone because that's what will activate the Dock Kit technology. I haven't even heard of Dock Kit. You're teaching me. Yeah, it's kind of flown under the radar a bit. So let's see if we can get it to work. So she's holding the phone near the, we're in a very challenging networking environment. Okay, so we're trying Steve's phone and this looks much more promising. It's got green bars around tracking your Dock. All right, connect. Wilkins Stand Pro. So I've never seen this pop up before. This is great, but I did see her doing this earlier right before we walked up. It was working great. It says it's 820, so it's like, I'm done. Yeah, yeah. I was done 20 minutes ago. Done. You promised me a drink now, right? All right. It's coming. Exactly. Okay. So it says configuring accessory for first time use. This may take a few minutes. Okay. Done. Okay. So now we put it on the MagSafe module. I want you to keep your eyes trained right here. Okay. And it's going to give us a signal when it's ready to go. Okay, so it's gone up and down in elevation. It gave it a nod. It gave us a nod. It gave us a nod of approval. Okay. So now I'm going to open a native app. I'm going to use the camera app. I'm going to turn it to face me. And a yellow box is going to appear on the screen. And now it's tracking me. It has 360 degrees horizontal rotation. It has 90 degrees vertical rotation, as you can see here. And she's going up and down. She's doing deep knee bends here as the phone is just tracking her completely. And I can use a rear view camera. It's going to look for me. It's just spun around. And now I've found her on the other side. So lots of use cases here. Teaching remotely. Telehealth for physical therapy patients who can't get into the doctor's office. Face timing with your best friend while you're cooking and trying to move around the kitchen. Immediately I thought cooking. I need to talk to my kids. I'm washing dishes. I'm running all over the kitchen. I could have this on the counter. Right. And then obviously for content creation. Yeah. So what is this device called? One more time. Auto tracking stand pro. And when will that be available? If you go to belkin.com right now, you can click a notify me button. And it is coming very, very, very soon. Very, very, very soon. We can quote Jen here. And what's the price point on this? 179.99. All right. Perfect. I mean, I appreciate you sticking with us. This is very, very cool. And it actually is a better proof that it worked with just Steve's phone right out of the box. You didn't have to do anything special. There was no nothing up your sleeves. Thanks for meeting with us again. We'll see you next year, Jen. Thank you so much, Allison. All right. That was so much fun. But the funny part is after we were done with the interview and we had packed up our camera and audio gear for the night, we were about to leave the exhibit hall. This guy comes running up after us to give Steve his phone back. I live in Southern California, so we have very temperate weather. It doesn't get all that cold or does it get all that hot since I'm relatively close to the ocean. However, if you've ever met someone who's lived here for any length of time, you know that most of us are just big babies when the temperature gets below say 70 degrees Fahrenheit. You'll hear people say it's literally freezing outside when it's like 66 degrees. I've actually seen people not just once all the time this happens. I've seen people walking along the pathway next to the ocean wearing Ugg boots, down jackets, scarves and knitted hats when it's 72 degrees outside. This is when I'm running and I'm in shorts and a t-shirt. Now, to be fair, many people are surprised that it's actually cool at night in Southern California even in the warmer summer months. I grew up in Michigan where if it's hot during the day, you also get these lovely hot summer nights. They're lovely except for the swarms and mosquitoes, of course. Where I live now, the temperature will drop a good 15 degrees at night so it's always good to carry a sweater if you go out in the evenings. Now, in general, I've adapted to the outdoor temperatures, but I'm often uncomfortably cold when inside my house. We had a new heat pump put into our home with two zones so we can separately change the temperature upstairs and downstairs with a fancy app and we've got all kinds of automation and everything, but now we're constantly adjusting the temperature up and down. I've also determined that temperature is not absolute. I can be happy at 69 degrees inside in the morning and freezing at the same temperature at night. I don't know, it's probably a humidity thing. I don't know. So I'm an avid crocheter so I have a good dozen blankets available and Sandy made me a gorgeous quilt so I could layer up when I'm on the couch wearing a switcher to combat this frigid 69 degrees air inside my house, but that doesn't help me when I'm sitting in the kitchen for a meal or working at my desk. One day, Barry Falk came to visit. We decided to go to a wine bar because Barry and wine bars go very well together. We knew we might be seated outside and I was shocked to see Barry just put on a hoodie sweatshirt while I was reaching for a down jacket scarf and gloves. It was March for crying out loud. At first I assumed it was because Barry is from Chicago originally, but that wasn't why he knew he'd be comfortable in a hoodie. It was because it was a heated hoodie and that's why this whole story fits into a tech podcast. His heated hoodie is from a company called Aurora and that's spelled O-R-O-R-O from Aurorawear.com and they make not just hoodies, they make vests, jackets and parkas and pants and gloves and mittens. I was intrigued by this idea of heated outerwear from Aurora and I began perusing the Aurora website in pursuit of the perfect thing to buy. I finally settled on a vest, which is something I haven't ever worn before. I argued myself with myself for a long time about it, but I'm delighted with my choice, specifically because of my use case. Before I tell you about the vest and how it works, I have to say that customer service on my purchase was fantastic. I ended up buying and returning two of them because they didn't quite fit the way I wanted them to and there were no questions asked and no cost to me to be so finicky. The Vast uses a 4800 mAh battery, they call the Mini 5K to power coils sewn into the fabric to heat the wearer. The battery sits in a little zipper pocket that sits kind of on my left hip. One of the reasons I exchanged the size was because the battery made the jacket fit a little snugly on my hips and I like my clothing roomy anyway. The battery charges via USB-C and can be used as a charger for other devices using its USB-A port. The one thing I wish was different is that it connects to the jacket using a proprietary circular cable so you can't just use any old battery to power your clothing from Mororo. Since it's proprietary, it will cost you $80 for a replacement. That's pretty steep for a battery but in addition to the black one that came with my vest, they do come in red, pink, purple or orange, so that's fun. The wires in the vest are in two places, the upper back across the shoulder blades and on the front across your stomach. There are even more heated wires across the back of the collar. This placement of heating is really well thought out. By heating your collar, you don't feel the need for a scarf. By heating the belly area, when your hands are in the pockets, they get heated too and the heat across the shoulders warms your upper body. The vest all by itself is pretty warm especially since my primary use case is to be cosier inside my own house. I know that sounds goofy but how much does it cost an energy to heat a big house by just heating little oh me? If you want to use the heated function of the Aurora, there's a button on the left side high up on the chest. If you press and hold it for a second or so, it'll glow red, indicating it's on its highest heat setting. If you press it again, it'll turn white, indicating medium heat and a third press will turn it blue for the least amount of heating. I usually start with the red setting because remember, I'm freezing in my house at 69 degrees. After a while, I realize I'm feeling much better and I'll look at the button and it will have changed from red down to white. I'm assuming that's intentional and it's not some kind of bug. If I'm still cold, I can always press it again to go back up to red. The Aurora Sight says the Mini 5K 4800 mAh battery will last for 10 hours of runtime for all Aurora heated vests, heated jackets, and heated hoodies. Now that's on the low setting. They say 6 hours for medium and 3 hours on high. I haven't timed it but I've definitely worn it from early afternoon to late in the evening and not run out of juice. I suspect the way it steps itself down when I heat it up pretty well contributes to the long battery life. Now they say it takes 4 hours to charge the battery with a 5 volt 3 amp charger. The battery has a button that lights up 1 to 4 indicator lights to show you how charged it is but there's no accessible way to determine the battery level. The indicator light is a fun conversation piece, the one on the upper chest. No one can miss that you're wearing an unusual piece of clothing. Even my 3 year old granddaughter notices it, she likes to push the button to see the colors change. If you don't like attention to your clothing this might be a downside but as a chatty nerd I like to tell people about my jacket. I said early on I hadn't worn a vest before and it turned out to be the perfect thing for my indoor needs. I can wash dishes or eat without getting my sleeves all messy and paired with a long sleeve shirt it's pretty cute if I do say so myself. I am always, always, always cold on planes. I mean like when we go to Hawaii I wear a long sleeve shirt and a coat and pants it's really annoying when I get off the plane but I'm just always cold on planes. We went to Texas a few weeks ago and I decided to see how it would be to travel with my heated vest from Aurora over a long sleeve shirt. I gotta tell you I was quite comfortable on the plane without having to carry a terribly bulky jacket. Carrying it was a little bit tricky because it's slippery like all down vests but it's also weighted down on one side by the battery. I soon figured out that carrying it with my arm through both arm holes balanced it nicely. On our flight out my jacket did give the TSA inspector's pause. I had told the agent before I put it on the conveyor belt that it was heated but I still got the extra bomb wiped down just in case. The guy said well look at all those wires I didn't think about that. Anyway it didn't take that long but if I'd been in a hurry it might have been a problem. On my way back I was much more explicit. I showed the agent the battery and explained that the jacket was full of wires to heat it. That time I sailed right through. I asked Barry who's a very frequent traveler if he has a strategy for getting through TSA. You know a stock phrase he's found that always works. His answer was funny he said they've never questioned it but they do look a scant at his corkscrew on occasion. If there are a line if heated warm weather gear sounds interesting to you keep your eye out for sale opportunities on the website. Every time I've been to the site something's on sale. Maybe the exact jacket you would see first isn't but a different color maybe or a slightly different style might be. The women's classic heated vest and off-white that I bought is $169 but it's 25% off right now because of their end-of-season sale. Note that let's see they do sell the battery separately I thought you had to always buy it separately but Sandy bought one of the vests just like mine did come with the battery but if you want to buy one of the cute ones the purple one or the pink one they're on sale for 25% off right now too. As I sit cozy in my house saving on my electric bill I'm reminded of the saying that that sage expert on weather barbeau shots always says he says there's no such thing as bad weather there's just the wrong clothes. If you enjoy the podcast we make here at the pod feet podcast but you can't afford to contribute financially there's another way you can help out and that's by telling your friends and family about the show you can toot about it on mastodon tweet about it on the service formerly known as Twitter chat it up on Facebook and even stop people in the grocery store and tell them about the show as they try to choose their fruits and vegetables or you could probably even give it a review in Apple podcast or wherever you can find a way to rate the podcast. This week I read in the tidbits newsletter the awful news that my favorite mapping tool iThoughts from Tokettaware was being discontinued. If you've had a beloved tool shut down before you know it's like losing touch with a dear old friend. The developer Craig Scott has been a favorite of mine as well. I was worried about how sudden this was and that maybe he wasn't okay but I chatted up with him and he explained it was just an opportune time to shut his business down after 11 years of serving the community. The good news is that when you point in the future he points out an OS update will inevitably break it. Well a while back Dan Moran said on the Clockwise podcast that he likes to quit apps before they quit him and I agree with that philosophy. I've got breathing room but I immediately went on the hunt for a replacement mind map. Before I go any further I should at least briefly explain how mind mapping programs work and what problems they solve. Mind mapping is a way to visually just kind of plop all of your mind into the screen in little connected nodes. You can drag the nodes around to sort things out to make sub nodes to help it make more sense once you get your ideas into the app. For example let's say you're packing for a trip to Hawaii. You could start by just brainstorming everything you could think of from your toothbrush to a bathing suit to sunscreen to flip flops. After you have enough nodes added to the mind map you'll start to find patterns to the disorganized the other nodes under the appropriate category nodes to organize your packing. I use mind mapping for my screencast online tutorial videos when I'm learning a new app. As I'm poking every button on the new app I plop into the mind map what I'm learning as I'm learning it. Well this is always a very disorganized pile of thoughts but after I have enough content I start to see how to rearrange the nodes and make sub nodes to tell a coherent story about how to use the app. Now who can forget I thought it would be fun to try to map all of the iOS 11 settings. It took me over a month to do that but my mind map of Doom is really something to see. Based on the capabilities of some mind mapping apps out there it appeared that people use mind maps to schedule tasks as well. I've never gotten into that myself so it's not one of my criteria but some people must do it. Before going on my hunt for a new mind mapping tool I documented what would make an acceptable alternative to having native mac iOS and iPad OS apps. Must allow some sort of syncing between devices it can be via iCloud or Dropbox or I might accept a hosted syncing system. It's got to have lots of keystrokes to get things done. It can't be ugly and I'm not a style snob but the app can't look like it was designed in the Cold War era. It needs to have reasonable pricing and I'm willing to pay a subscription if I have to but I'd prefer a one time fee. A subscription probably $60 a year or less would be good for me. It must be an active development. It must have a privacy policy that does not include sucking up all my personal information. It has to have the ability to import or even natively open my nearly 300 iThoughts mind maps and finally it needs the standard export capability to opml for outlining and opening in other tools. You can also search for free apps open source apps or apps by platform such as maybe you want just windows only. I use this tool to search for mind mapping tools to replace iThoughts. I also use the Mac App Store figuring that would narrow down my results. I did a search and set up just in case I already had an app that would meet my needs and of course I did some plain old Googling. In my search it became obvious pretty limited and as a result many of these search results included a lot of apps that had nothing to do with mind mapping. Many were notes annotation tools for working with existing documents. I was able to find four mind mapping apps that sounded like good contenders. We'll start with the free and open source freeplane from freeplane.org. The first thing that surprised me was that it was Java based. I cannot remember the last time I installed a Java app. It looks like I could get the job done. It has the classic look of open source with overly bold icons for buttons which I don't put in the category of pretty. I gave it a quick spin with voiceover and while the buttons were labeled nicely and were functional the mind map area itself was inaccessible. I started noticing more non-standard design elements. For example it doesn't use the standard save as dialogue boxes for macOS. I was used to because it actually reduces the functionality of the tool. Freeplane doesn't work on iOS which is a deal breaker for me. It was unable to open my iThoughts mind maps natively so I would have to open all 300 or so of them and export to opml to be able to go back into them with freeplane. Freeplane isn't a bad app at all and if you're looking for a way to dip your toes into the app in the mac app store I found a mind mapping app called eDrawMind but then I noticed that it was an iPad OS app being allowed to run on an Apple silicon map. I followed the link to the developers website at eDrawMind let's say eDrawMind.wondershare.com and found that not only do they have a native mac app it also runs on Android and Linux and there's even a web app version. eDrawMind met my pricing criteria with both a subscription price of $1. How do they know I said under 60 anyway $59 per year or a perpetual price of $118 you get one gigabyte of free cloud storage with the annual subscription and ten gigabytes with a perpetual plan along with some other perks the iPad OS app was in active development with very recent updates but three things tripped me up with eDrawMind to test it out on iPad OS I had to create a login I literally could not do it when I pasted in my long strong memberable password created by beta.xkpasswd.net it said it was too long ah you know that happens not a big deal that kind of thing does happen but the screen slid halfway down when it erred out and I could not bring it back up to change the password I'm sure with enough effort I probably could have beat it into submission but the real thing that stopped me from investigating eDrawMind further was the privacy policy from the app store data linked to you said purchases contact info identifiers diagnostics financial info user content and usage data so that would be no thank you at this point I was already out but when I tried to download for macOS it said it worked on macOS 10 and 11 well we're on 14 here kids with macOS Sonoma well there were recent updates to the iPad app it sure didn't look like they were keeping the desktop version up to date now the third consideration is a real top contender it's called mindomo from mindomo.com I found it via alternative.to that I mentioned earlier it's cross platform with apps for windows macOS linux android ios and it even has a web based cloud version but which of those platforms you can use is dependent on your pricing plan for example you get just the desktop versions windows macOS and linux with a free plan but if you do the $5.50 per month plan you also get android ios and cloud if you buy it for a one time fee of $69 you don't get the mobile platforms looks like they really want you to do the subscription plan at $66 per year it's $6 over my threshold but I think we'll allow it the free plan is a great way to test out mindomo but it limits you to 40 topics per mindmap and it nags you pretty relentlessly to pay for syncing if you like mindomo you'll probably get the free plan which allows you to sync your mindmaps between desktop cloud and mobile after downloading on my mac where they have both apple, silicon and intel versions I downloaded mindomo onto my ipad the privacy the privacy policy brought a smile to my face no data is collected at all mindomo is probably the most flexible and powerful of the mindmapping apps I tested normal mindmaps have a primary tracking spidery legs apps often let you format so they all hang down off the center node more like a family tree for example but that's pretty much the end of the variability in contrast mindomo has so many layout options it would take me hours to describe them all one of the template options looks like a bunch of grapes complete with grape leaves at the top one looks at nodes encircling that there's so many options for templates it's actually hard to decide which one to use if you want inspiration on how to plan your work or maybe display it in interesting ways mindomo is the place to start when I'm making a mindmap I often want to change the color or shape of a node for example I use a mindmap to plan out my new compave process as I install apps I change the color of the app you get a downward chevron that when selected gives you quick access to change everything about the way that particular node looks no hunting around for formatting palace the options are always right there hovering near apparent node gives you an obvious minus button which will fold up all of its child nodes mindomo is the only mindmapping app I've seen that subsequently tells you how many nodes are now hidden I really like that mindomo has lots of useful options and they seem natural to use such as double enter after naming a node gives you a sibling node and a tab creates a child node option and arrow keys will move a node up and down the hierarchy as needed now I thought it's allowed you to select a node and then type the number of child node levels you'd like to see for example if you selected the central node and typed zero all levels would collapse then typing one would reveal the first level that's limited to one to four levels remember I remember on my iOS 11 mindmap that it was really fun to show how complicated it was by starting at zero and going up to nine to reveal more and more levels that one was so big I could have used more than nine levels mindomo has one of the simplest interfaces I've ever seen other than the two icons to add a child or sibling node with a click and a few zoom buttons a search and share button there's no other the tools menu has a few fun features you can have mindomo auto number your nodes which I thought would translate to the outline view but oddly it didn't and not quite sure why I'd want just the graphical interface to be numbered I've had occasion to use a mindmap as part of a presentation and mindomo makes that super easy and slick in mindomo you choose presenter from the tools menu and from there you hit the plus button and drag across the section you want on each slide the nodes you selected get translucent boxes over them and then they're numbered for the order of the slides look kind of messy when you see it but it's really intuitive to set it up this way the movement between nodes in the slideshow is very elegant it's easy to reorder the slides and the slideshow itself is preserved when you back out of presenter mode I think it's a lovely implementation of the concept if you store your mindmaps locally rather than using their cloud syncing services when you save a map it creates three files the mindmap itself with .mom is the file extension a .mom.loc file and a folder containing any images you might have embedded into your mindmap having your images in an external folder is actually a good thing as sometimes a lot of embedded images can really slow down an application I had one showstopper problem with mindomo but Tiberiu from the support staff was able to replicate the problem I'd found and find a workaround while they fix it not only that they got back to me really fast so the problem I had was with the ipad app when used with the physical keyboard in my case the magic keyboard I would use the keyboard to create new nodes and then use the standard double enter would not work to create siblings I found that control enter would work but right after naming my new node it would disappear and by disappear I mean into thin air vaporize no amount of command zing done do would bring them back what the support staff figured out was the onscreen autocorrect keyboard thingy you know that little thing that shows you that you can tap to put in words anyway that was interfering with the physical keyboard they also figured out that if you just minimize the onscreen autocorrect keyboard thingy all normal keyboard shortcuts work with the physical keyboard the keyboard they work just dandy I mentioned this bug because it may trip you up but I also laud mindomo for amazing and fast support so let's get back to features there's a paintbrush at the top that lets me do a lot of nifty reformatting and changing of shapes and layout so I really like that you can also view and create slideshows just like the desktop app I'm afraid mindomo isn't accessible with voiceover either most of the buttons are unlabeled I was able to navigate into the mind map and it told me what node I was on and even said I could start typing to append text but typing did the weirdest thing every character slowly zoomed in on the map so yeah not for the voiceover mindomo won't open iThoughts maps natively so if you're an iThoughts refugee like me you'll have to export them to opml before iThoughts stops working I think mindomo is a fantastic choice for a mind mapping replacement for iThoughts the free version will give you the flavor of how it works and if you like it 66 bucks a year is just around my threshold $69 one time if you don't need to use it on mobile is another good option with mindomo from mindomo.com and don't forget this one is cross-platform everything i can think of 11 years ago when i chose iThoughts my second choice and one i actually also bought was mindoad from mindoad.com i had a feeling it was where i might end up this time but i first wanted to give the rest of the playing field a good test to make sure there wasn't something new that would turn my head i'm glad i did because i was able to find mindomo as a result the pricing model for mindoad is flexible on macOS which gives you most of the simpler capabilities that i use so it's a great option for the casual desktop only user of mindmaps well there's a free 14 day trial of mindoad on ios and ipad os you can't use it on those platforms for free indefinitely i'm glad to say that of the paid for mindmapping apps mindoad is very reasonably priced at $3 per month or $25 per year this gives you mindoad plus which gives you all of the features mindoad plus is also included in the app so you may already have access to it mindoad's privacy policy is reasonably good they link data about purchases identifiers and contact info to you and while they collect diagnostics they don't link those to you it became obvious to me that mindoad would be my choice in the end when i realized that as i was learning about mindoad i created a mindoad and put in nodes like blah and another node and here's another another node but with mindoad i very quickly used it to get real work done starting with themes mindoad does provide a few but i wasn't super fond of most of them i found one that i liked reasonably well and i found i was able to easily tweak the colors and shapes to save a new theme of my own it's nowhere near as flexible i was glad to see i could hide children with option dot but i haven't found yet a way to hide a specific number of levels like i could use zero to nine in i-thoughts it'll be a bit more tedious to simplify the view of a mind map using mindoad maybe i'll just suggest that as a feature request use a command with the arrow keys to move nodes up and down and change them from children to sibling to parents works extremely well in experimenting with this feature as a way out if you start with a primary node and you add a sub node it will go to the right if you create a sibling to that node it will go below the node as you add more siblings it will continue to go below so far this is just like the way i-thoughts worked but let's say you want to balance your mind map so there are sub nodes on the right and left of the central node as soon as you start working on the left nodes any new siblings will be created above that in this order nothing wrong with this idea and it actually makes moving nodes around with command in conjunction with the arrow keys more efficient but it did catch me by surprise it's a little bit harder to pick up a node and change its parent node than it was with i-thoughts the parent node you're trying to attach to has a tendency to kind of squirt out of the way to make room for the incoming node with keystrokes i think i might do that anyway in general i pick a theme and stick with it but for some types of mind maps i like to change individual node colors or shapes i mentioned this earlier when talking about my new concave process changing colors indicates completion with my node there's a right sidebar pane that allows you to change everything about a given node or set of nodes shape, color, border have the lines attached to it and more the side pane of my mind domo in this formatting pane i found one of my favorite visual changes the branches between nodes can be rounded or angular like in most mind mapping apps while rounded is swoopy and cute looks a little too adorable for my taste and it puts the nodes pretty far apart but sharp right angles and most mind mapping apps look a little too rigid for my taste it's a tiny thing but i immediately changed my theme to adopt it because it makes me happy with that right pane still open i discovered that you can add and view nodes for nodes and you can also add nodes to a node in a right-click menu nodes can even link to external files which is super useful it's not uncommon to want to reference other information outside of a mind map and having it as a link is much better than dragging them once you create some tags you can select nodes and hit the plus button next to the tag name in the sidebar and it puts a tiny little color dot in the node indicating which tag was applied once you've tagged some nodes if you hover over a given tag in the sidebar you can hit a little eyeball and the entire map will turn gray leaving just the nodes with that tag visible but those visible nodes are not as big old tagger but maybe you'll find this useful if you open the left sidebar it reveals the outline while still viewing the graphical mind map if you select a node the outline scrolls to the node if you folder unfold the line in the outline the mind map changes folding at the same time you can switch to view just the outline and in all view modes export option to opml where I can open in an outline application so this is an upgrade for me the interface to mind node is clean but more feature rich than mindomo the menu bar also holds very useful options one of them adds a checkbox to a node so you can use mind node as a simple task manager I assumed this would just add a graphical element but it does something magical I'll walk through an example and you click the checkbox icon on the main node that top node gets a light gray hollow circle on it and the four sub nodes get circles too when you check the circle on one of the four sub nodes the upper node circle turns black around one quarter of the circle indicating your overall progress on that task when you've checked off all four sub nodes the upper node circle is a solid black circle now my node intelligently deals with sub nodes where every node has children that has children gets that progress circle and then adds progress to the top level node it's brilliant I'm not sure but it might be able to take the place of my changing color method for my new compave process I ran my usual test for accessibility with voiceover and I'm afraid that on both macOS and iPadOS the graphical nodes aren't accessible however the outline view is accessible would a blind user want to use a graphical view like a mind map or would an outline view give them everything they need and if that's true wouldn't they want an app dedicated to outlining rather than paying the price for all these slick graphics that have no benefit for them I wish I had an accessible outlining tool suggestion for them but the one I use cloud outliner doesn't appear to be accessible while it does let you navigate all around without issue in my limited testing I couldn't get an outline all right moving on to more features about mind node it supports something called connectors and I've never found this feature useful in a mind map these are arrowed lines that let you point from one node to another in my experience they seem to get tangled up and make things way too messy for my taste but if you like those mind node has them I never thought I'd say this but I love the stickers and mind node using the little image button the stickers are emoji the stickers are generally pastel graphics so they're not as blaring and loud as emoji they can fill a node or be added to a node with text they add a playful and yet useful way to let you see at a glance what a node and its children might be about I thought I hit a real showstopper with mind node right as I was completing my testing on iPad OS I tried to open the mind map I'd created on my Mac with my node and I was treated opening failed there was an error extracting this document the contents.xml file seems to be missing or corrupt oh no I did a bit of searching and I found a support article over at mindnode.com that explained what was going on they said unfortunately third party storage providers like Dropbox or OneDrive do not support our file format as my node files are package files on iOS my node will automatically save your files as the default storage location you selected I've always kept my mind maps in Dropbox because I can get to them from my personal account on all of my devices and also critically from my screencast online user account luckily they also provided a solution in mind node settings on macOS you can change the default document format from package to single file that will let all new documents be stored in third party cloud services and openable on iOS and macOS they don't mention whether there's any downside to changing this file format to change existing documents to single file format with the document open select the file menu and pull down to advanced and you'll see the option to toggle file type from package to single file I tested that option and my mind node mind maps now open from Dropbox on my iPad and one very important note they also say sadly Google Drive doesn't work at all with my node files at the moment we contacted their developers and hope it'll change in the future so keep that in mind after I was done testing these four good options and documenting my findings I was in the app store looking for a link to one of them when I stumbled across a lot more mind mapping apps to choose from some of them weren't good choices like a couple of them had all of the screenshots were in Chinese or they had terrible reviews but if you looked promising like SimpleMind from SimpleMind.eu it's 27 euros for macOS and another 11 euros for iPadOS so around 40 bucks total it might be good might even be great I had to draw the line somewhere so I have not given it a good pod feed shakedown I'm going to interrupt myself here and I'm going to read a comment by Bart Vanderpot I had told Brett Terpstra about looking for a replacement for iThoughts because I knew he was a big fan and Bart writes Hi Allison Brett informed me about your pod feed okay I had the same feeling when I heard about iThoughts it took me a couple of days to get through this message like losing an old friend I definitely had the same feeling I knew SimpleMind that's the one I just mentioned that I haven't tested yet he said I knew SimpleMind already for a lot of years also because I've met the vendors they were living in my hometown I was surprised by the flexibility of this mind map tool the wide variety of features of several devices and without a subscription nevertheless the outstanding features of iThoughts like conditional formatting and calculations I think I don't think it has it is what he means SimpleMind gives us a very good mind mapping tool for a relatively small price I would like to encourage you to dive into the possibility of this tool okay so I don't know if I will or not but don't be surprised if there isn't more to this mind mapping story in my bottom line before I heard from Bart I'm glad I took the time to look at several different mind mapping tools before just defaulting to mind nodes since I'd heard of it already I learned more about what I found important and it caused me to give them all a better deeper dive you may have figured out by now that mind node is the app I've chosen to replace iThoughts it's pretty it has keyboard shortcuts it's cross-platform with my iOS devices and my Mac devices it has a few nifty features I didn't have before and it's even really priced I'd hope to find a mind mapping alternative that could natively open my 300 existing mind maps created with iThoughts and to my utter joy mind node can even do that I don't have to go through the tedious process of exporting every mind map I've made in 11 years to OPML on the off chance I might want to open it again someday if I just open the ones I end up needing in mind node I can immediately save as to native mind node files perhaps after hearing my analysis of the open source free plane because it gets the job done for free or maybe you'd like the enhanced functionality and templates of mind NOMO and its ability to do slideshows and works on all platforms I'll be going with mind node from mindnode.com for my mind mapping needs unless simple node turns out to be really cool well after all that it's going to wind us up for this week did you know you can email me if you have a mind mapping tool you've always wanted to tell me about podfeed.com or maybe just have a question or a suggestion you can send it on over remember everything good starts with podfeed.com you can follow me on mastodon by going to podfeed.com slash mastodon if you want to listen to the podcast on youtube you can go to podfeed.com slash youtube if you want to join in the conversation you can join our slack community at podfeed.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely nosilla castaways or just stop those people in the grocery store and tell them about the shows and if you want to join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic nosilla castaways thanks for listening and stay subscribed