[00:00:08.940] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.430] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.910] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.770] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.080] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon." A weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days.
[00:00:23.210] - Taylor
I was getting ready to kind of brace for when you always shout the beginning of our introduction and you didn't this time. I was shocked.
[00:00:32.220] - Gordon
I didn't. I said it very quietly, very nicely. Hopefully everyone can hear us okay. We've got a light out today, so we might look a little bit more shadowy than we normally do. Taylor's got his war paint back.
[00:00:49.090] - Taylor
Yep.
[00:00:49.480] - Gordon
If he sits forward, we've decided, that helps with the war paint. It stops the shadows from the glasses, the light from the glasses. We will have to look at this and see what it is. It's only happened since you've changed your glasses. So the only thing I can think of is that these glasses are at a slightly different angle to your face.
[00:01:07.240] - Taylor
Maybe.
[00:01:07.930] - Gordon
Anyway, enough waffle.
[00:01:10.120] - Taylor
So, something that we had a little Easter egg last week for our video watchers, which was that I didn't wear any glasses. And I don't know if anyone noticed, but if you didn't, then go back and check and you'll be able to see I wasn't wearing any glasses. This was to try and combat the lines that appear on my face from the light and my glasses. And I was like, I'll just do it without and see if anyone notices.
[00:01:38.520] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:01:39.030] - Taylor
If you did notice well done, if you didn't, go back and have a look after and see if you can spot it.
[00:01:43.630] - Gordon
And you can see what he looks like without glasses. So, last seven days, any news first of all, Taylor?
[00:01:53.740] - Taylor
Not news, but I obviously launched Snippet Club.
[00:01:57.190] - Gordon
Yes, of course you did. Yes. And how is that going so far?
[00:02:00.340] - Taylor
Yeah, it's going really well. I think I exceeded my expectation on how many people would sign up initially and things like that. And I've got really good feedback from lots of people. I have a couple of different requests people have made for new tutorials.
[00:02:14.590] - Gordon
Which is one of the advantages of being a member.
[00:02:17.490] - Taylor
Yeah. so yeah, there's been great...
[00:02:20.820] - Gordon
That's great.
[00:02:21.810] - Taylor
Great feedback for it.
[00:02:22.560] - Gordon
And the Lifetime Deal is still on at the moment?
[00:02:24.900] - Taylor
Yes. So the Lifetime deal ends on the 9th October.
[00:02:28.180] - Gordon
Okay. So there's still time to go and get that amazing deal, so that you can basically tap into Taylor's mind whenever you have an idea of something that might be developeree, developer-ee.
[00:02:40.930] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:02:43.460] - Gordon
If Taylor thinks it's going to be of interest to other people, he will consider it as a tutorial. So yeah, I'm really glad that's going well. And I'm so glad you've launched it, because that's something that was a long time coming and it's very good to actually see that through and have it launched. So, topics for the day, what are you going to talk about today?
[00:03:05.940] - Taylor
So I'm going to talk about email. I'm going to talk about a new feature that has just come out for a plug-in/add-on that I use for my email.
[00:03:15.670] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:03:16.690] - Taylor
So, most people that use Gmail or new kind of MacMail users, there has been these scheduled emails that you can do. So you can schedule an email to go later, for example, whether it be half an hour or you can schedule it for a specific date. Now this is nothing new. Lots of email clients offer this already and I think it's great. So it means if you write emails on a weekend or you write them late at night because you work during the day and you don't have time. For example a lot of trades write emails during the evening. You can schedule them for a more work... A time that's in the workday more like, that people are going to be able to catch your email at a better time really.
[00:04:02.360] - Gordon
I was just going to say that's not actually available to MacMail at the moment, but it is going to be available in the next OS update.
[00:04:10.600] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:04:11.660] - Gordon
Ventura?
[00:04:12.840] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:04:13.480] - Gordon
I think. It's going to be available in that. So it's not available to us yet as standard, but it will be soon.
[00:04:18.990] - Taylor
Yeah. But I use a kind of add-on for MacMail and they have add-ons for the other clients, Outlook and Gmail. And it allows you to send emails later on the MacMail. And the new feature that they released was being able to cancel scheduled emails. You might think, well, "why would you want to do that?" Or "that seems kind of standard." But I haven't really seen it anywhere. And the use cases for it are, for example, a lawyer. They have meetings with their clients and then as soon as the meeting ends, they will write up an email, schedule it for 30 days time, basically saying, can you get me this content, send this information over, and they schedule it for 30 days time. So, when it comes to 30 days, if they haven't received the content, it sends an automatic reminder. Now what happens if the client sends an email? You don't want to send a reminder because they've already sent you the email, so you'd have to go in and manually cancel that scheduled email. And if you've obviously got lots and lots of scheduled emails kind of set up, that isn't going to be easy to find, it's not going to be very manageable. So what this does is, if it tracks and it's smart, so if you receive a reply from that contact, it will cancel the scheduled email, it won't delete it. So you've still got all the content if you've written stuff, but it will just not kind of send it, it will put it back into your draft essentially.
[00:05:48.260] - Gordon
So I guess that depends on what the reply is because it's not looking at the content of the reply, it's just looking to see if there's been a reply.
[00:05:55.230] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:05:55.600] - Gordon
So you can then make the decision as to whether that was what you were expecting, and in which case the scheduled email has already been paused. But if it's not what you are expecting, you can then turn it back on again and allow it to go out still?
[00:06:10.450] - Taylor
Exactly. So when you go into the scheduled or the cancelled scheduled emails, it will say, "what do you want to do? Do you want to continue scheduling it? Do you not need it anymore? Or do you want to edit it?" Because sometimes you may have sent a scheduled email to multiple people and obviously only one person replied, so you can take them out, but you can obviously keep the other people in there that you want to schedule the email for. And I think it's a really useful situation where whenever you need to get new content, or you want to schedule an email, but it's all dependent on kind of following up with them, essentially; that you can do that without having to worry that you're going to send them a redundant email and kind of look a bit unprofessional because sometimes...
[00:06:52.760] - Gordon
Because these emails are supposed to look like they're coming from you there and then, not being scheduled. So if you send one that says, "I'm still waiting for that information," and you've already got it, it makes you look like you don't quite know what's going on, right?
[00:07:05.550] - Taylor
Yeah. And you can have confusions. Sometimes if you send an invoice and then you have a scheduled email and it says, "please pay this invoice," and the client's like, "well I already paid." And then you kind of get that weird thing, of like, "why are you trying to charge me twice?" Or... And you don't want that. So, yeah, that was a new feature that recently came out that I thought was really, really useful.
[00:07:27.450] - Gordon
And what software is this?
[00:07:28.960] - Taylor
So it's called 'Mail Butler' and it's a kind of add-on service because they send emails through their service to do the scheduling and stuff; so it means your email and your devices don't have to be on for them to still send, which is obviously really good. It has lots of other great features which are, you can create tasks and you can link them to things like Evernote, Asana, Trello, Jira. And so you can create a task in your email or you can have all your tasks appear in the sidebar of your email so you can see what needs to be done and also you can connect calendars and things like that. So there's lots of things you can do. Scheduling emails for the recipients best time, so it works out "okay, what time do they normally reply to emails?" Then you'll send emails at that time, which is very clever because you're going to catch them at the point that they're normally going to be checking their emails, which is what you want to do, you want to get your email at the top of the inbox at the point that they're going to be looking at their email.
[00:08:34.930] - Gordon
Yeah, because then it will be dealt with.
[00:08:36.540] - Taylor
Yeah, exactly.
[00:08:37.470] - Gordon
Doesn't get buried down below.
[00:08:40.010] - Taylor
So yeah, that's just some of the features. There's lots. They're always releasing new updates every single month. I get a nice email with "this is what we've added." It's all user feedback. So they have a roadmap with things people can kind of upvote and things like that. So they're always feedback orientated, which is nice. And something that they've recently taken out because it's come to most email clients, is the attachment reminder. This has recently come to Apple Mail and if you write "please see attached," for example, and you go to send it, it will say, "hang on, did you forget to attach something?" And it's very clever, so it just looks for those words and if you say, "please see attached" for example, or something along those lines, it will say "oops, did you forget to attach something?"
[00:09:38.800] - Gordon
And MacMail does that already?
[00:09:40.330] - Taylor
It's coming to the new version.
[00:09:41.950] - Gordon
To Ventura?
[00:09:42.690] - Taylor
Yeah. So that's why they've taken it out, because it's coming natively and it already is native to things like Gmail and Outlook, I believe already.
[00:09:50.080] - Gordon
So that's really good though, because it's a company that's reacting to their user base and not putting in features that are just going to make the file bloated and add functionality that's just really not needed because it's already elsewhere. That's a really good way of doing it.
[00:10:09.520] - Taylor
Well, I mean it was already in, but they decided to take it out.
[00:10:12.340] - Gordon
Yeah, but that's what I'm saying.
[00:10:13.260] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:13.540] - Gordon
They're taking things out, so they're not bloating the software and they're not giving you extra features that you've already got, which is very good. I like the idea of that company. This isn't a software that I actually use, it's something maybe I should have a look at. It's a paid for software, isn't it?
[00:10:30.010] - Taylor
Yeah, it's quite pricey for what it kind of I guess you could say what it is. But for me, because I use MacMail, I know Gmail for a long time has had scheduling emails and stuff which we just didn't have in MacMail and I always wanted to be able to do. But also these kind of like adding in reminders, so I can add a reminder to an email to say, "follow up with me," or create a task to say, and I can set a due date and I can set priorities and things like that. So, it's really useful to be able to keep track of emails you've sent. If you've got tasks or things you want to make notes about and you can create a kind of like user contact profile for your email contacts.
[00:11:12.180] - Gordon
Okay. That's very good. We'll put a link to Mail Butler in the show notes, so do go and check them out because it's got Taylor's highest recommendation. So it sounds like it must be something that's really good. I know you've been using it for quite a long time now.
[00:11:29.920] - Taylor
Yeah. And then one last thing, which again is quite a big thing, is it has kind of email tracking, so you can see when people opened emails, and also if they've clicked on links, because many times I've had people say, "I didn't get the email," or "I didn't see the link," when I've seen that they've opened the email. And it can be useful for things like that really.
[00:11:51.410] - Gordon
Yeah. Checking if your clients are lying to you.
[00:11:53.790] - Taylor
Yeah. You don't want to happen, but it's always there that it's kind of like you don't want to be...
[00:11:59.310] - Gordon
It's always nice to say to them, "actually, this was opened last Tuesday, at 4:30pm. And it sort of reminds them, or shows them that you have that ability and it will stop them saying, "yeah, okay, I did get it."
[00:12:16.240] - Taylor
That's another of one of the features which I quite like.
[00:12:19.770] - Gordon
That's very good. Anything else you want to say about Mail Butler?
[00:12:23.560] - Taylor
No, I think that's everything.
[00:12:24.750] - Gordon
I think we should point out we're not sponsored by Mail Butler in any way. We just, Taylor in this case, really likes the software and that's why he's talking highly about it. So Mail Butler, if you're out there and you're listening, please get in contact. I'd love to have a free copy, and I'm sure Taylor would as well, but we're not sponsored by them. Right.
[00:12:47.100] - Taylor
That's everything for this week.
[00:12:47.910] - Gordon
Okay, so this week I want to talk about... Well, this has got two headings this has. It's "upgrading your tech stack," or the technology that you use / New toys. Okay. So, this week I've actually got two new things. I had a show on Sunday and it was a morning show, and once I'd finished that, I drove to Blue Water, which is a shopping centre, big shopping centre, and I picked up my new iPhone 14 Pro.
[00:13:29.510] - Taylor
Wow.
[00:13:29.510] - Gordon
Now, I've been looking at them for a while, and I had a 12 Pro before that. And so I normally try and upgrade every two years, if there's enough for me to upgrade to, because I figured that two years there's a big enough technology jump for it to be worth upgrading. But it also means that my two year old phone has still got some value in it, and I make sure I look after my equipment really well, so my 12 Pro is pristine. It's been in a case, it's got no scratches or anything on it, works perfectly, so it's got a good resale value for me. And that will help to pay towards the 14 Pro. But why did I upgrade? Well, one of the reasons is the cameras on the 14 Pro are much better. And I had a look. The cameras on the back, the lenses are so much bigger on the 14 Pro than they are on the 12 Pro. And obviously the bigger lenses means less light needs to come in, better low light, better quality, etc, etc. And I do take video and photos with my phone all the time. The front cameras also had an upgrade for me, and so it allows me to do work videos. So, if I'm doing a video where I'm sending a personalized video to a client, for example, then I can do that and see it and it's going to be a higher quality, which is always what I'm aiming for, to give higher quality service. And if I'm doing it for social media, again, the quality is higher, the picture is better, etc, etc. So, that is a big upgrade on this new phone. It's also a lot faster. It's using newer technology, it's got a better connection with my AirPods, which I use a lot. When I'm talking to people on the phone, I put my AirPods in so that I can sort of walk about and talk to them with the phone in my pocket rather than holding it up at my ear the whole time. So that's another good thing to have. I also upgraded the storage space from 256GB up to the 512GB. That wasn't my intention, but because it's a new phone, they are very hard to find at the moment. And I've been sort of checking every day to see which stores around me have the phone that I wanted in stock, and none of them have had them. There was once when I found one that had it, and my payment failed. And so I put it in again and it failed a second time, at which point it said, "ah sorry, phone's no longer available." So it's like they took it out of my bag and said, "look, he's messing about, he's not doing a payment properly. We'll give it to someone else." So that's effectively what they did, so I lost it. But I did get shown up sale. This is Apple at its best. I wanted a 256GB model. It said there are none available. However, if you want to pick one up tomorrow, because I was looking at this on Saturday.
[00:16:53.010] - Taylor
Yep.
[00:16:53.010] - Gordon
Then you can get it at Bluewater tomorrow. But it's the 512 model, which is like 200 and something pounds more.
[00:17:00.900] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:17:01.540] - Gordon
And I thought, well, I didn't actually need the 512 model, but because the cameras have got a larger sensor, it means the file sizes are going to be bigger. Therefore, I figured having more storage would be a good thing in the long run. So that's why I went and got it. So when I got there, picked it up, of course I need to get a case, so I spent more money to buy a case. I've got one of the Apple leather cases. I had the... It's not polystyrene, that would be a rubbish case. There was like a sort of plastic, hard plastic, so not rubber, but a hard plastic cover that I had on my previous one. And for £10 more I could get the leather one. And I thought, well, if I'm buying an iPhone 14 Pro, it's a reasonably high cost phone, I might as well spend the extra £10 to get the leather case. So that's what I did. So that's another 60 quid that I spent out to get a leather case. But again, it does look after my phone, and I do like the fact that if I look after it, it keeps its resale value. The other thing that I had I was looking at was, I've got a soundbox. My soundbox has everything I need for my show. It's got my music, it's got my radio mic, it's got everything all plugged in and ready to go. I just plug it in at the wall, plug it into the speaker and everything's ready to go. It's a great system. However, at the show on Sunday, I was just turning the antenna up for my radio mic and the metal antenna sort of came away in my hands. I don't think it snapped off. I don't know quite how it's connected because I could press it back on and it would stay there, but it was still loose and it would just fall off again when I moved it. But I don't know quite how it's supposed to be on there. So anyway, I have been having problems with my radio mic in the last few months where I've been having lots of noise come through as if someone else is on the same channel.
[00:19:23.790] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:19:24.250] - Gordon
And sometimes you get radio firms etc, and you can get interference on a radio channel. Plus, a while ago, sort of maybe eight, nine years ago, something like that, the radio frequencies that were allowed to be used by radio mics changed so that they changed into a digital format rather than an analogue format to give you more channels basically, in the same amount of airspace, in the same wavelengths. And I didn't upgrade because it's quite a big expense, and I didn't want to actually go out and buy one when I had a system that was working fine. However, now it's started to play up a little bit. I don't want to be having to say sorry to everyone every time I'm performing because the speaker's playing up. It's not speaker, it's the radio mic. But I didn't want to have to do that. So I looked into the new technologies and I have a Sennheiser belt pack and receiver. And so what I was doing was looking to see what the replacement was, and I spoke to Sennheiser on their live chat on the computer and they were saying, "go digital." I was thinking, "okay, yeah, that sounds reasonable." And I was expecting sort of £800ish to replace it. Doesn't include the mic. The mic is completely separate, it's just the belt pack and the receiver. And the digital version was about 560ish pounds.
[00:21:01.360] - Taylor
Good then compared to what you thought it was going to be.
[00:21:03.270] - Gordon
Yeah. So it was less than I was expecting, so I thought, okay. I looked at the specs, I talked to the man, I figured out which system I thought would be the one that I wanted, that would then be able to be usable by me with my head mic that I've already got. And I said, that's brilliant. I went and looked at all the different stores and they were "eight to ten weeks, we'll get new stock." It's like urgh. And you know how it is when you thought, I've done all the research, I know what I want, I just want to get it now. And then you find that it's not available anywhere and you've got to wait two months. Well, that didn't happen. I spoke to a local company and they said they could get one, and there's lots of different versions of it. You could get one with a hand mic, you could get one with a radio belt pack head mic, you can get one with both. You can get one that's meant for musical instruments, where you can plug it in, you can get one that doesn't have any of this, and it's just the belt pack and the receiver, which is the one I was looking at, and that's the one that's out of stock everywhere. But for like £15 more, you can get the one that's meant for musical instruments.
[00:22:17.680] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:22:18.100] - Gordon
The only difference is it comes with a cable that plugs into the belt pack and has a large jack on the other side, so you can plug it into your guitar or your keyboard or whatever it is you've got. And there was plenty of them. So I went looking. And I found a company in the UK, it was about half past six at this point, in the evening, and I thought, "well, I'll make the order because it'll be a few days now, maybe it will get to me by the end of the week, so it's time for my shows." And this was back on Monday, and I ordered it about half past six, with a company called "GeartoMusic," which I have bought from before, and it offered me next day delivery for £2.99. And I thought, "okay, well, that's quite impressive." And it was quoting Tuesday as being the day that it was going to arrive. And I thought...
[00:23:14.770] - Taylor
That's very good.
[00:23:15.930] - Gordon
"Yeah, it's not changed, it's going to be Wednesday, because they've finished work by now." Anyway, I paid my £2.99, left it, and about half past 10 at night, I got a message saying, "your item has been dispatched and will be with you tomorrow." And I was thinking, "okay, that's really good service." So, not only did they have a reasonably good price, it was a good price. It was a reasonably good price. It was slightly more than the £550, it was like £570, because I was having to pay for the extra cable and things, or wait for two months, and I thought for 20 quid, it's really not worthwhile waiting. But it arrived on Tuesday, and so I plugged it all in just to check it was going to do what I needed it to do. And in my house, it sounds amazing. This weekend, when I go out to do shows, I will get to try it out for real so... I think I've got a show tomorrow, so I can do it tomorrow, and I'll report back and let you know. But hopefully that will stop me having interference. It also has an app on the phone, so it's using Bluetooth to connect the two together and you can change certain settings on the app. And if you get to a venue that's got lots of other radio mics, like sometimes I go to gigs with DJs or bands or whatever, and they have radio mics as well, you can just do an auto scan and it will search for the best frequency and it will just redo your receiver and transmitter to a frequency that's clear, which is great. Yeah, a really nice thing to do. So, that is a very long winded way of saying that I've upgraded my technology to basically give a better service to my customers. So, all in all, I've spent nearly two thousand pounds in the last week, just on two items, a phone and a radio mic receiver. But it's going to make a big difference to my business. And my business is doing really well at the moment, so I felt it was okay to invest in it. And when your business is doing well, it's a good time to invest because the money is tax deductible and it's a good way to offset some of the profits that you're getting, as well as bringing new systems and processes into your business.
[00:25:43.570] - Taylor
Wow! Great!
[00:25:44.770] - Gordon
That's it. So, anything else you want to say?
[00:25:47.710] - Taylor
No, that's everything from me this week.
[00:25:49.660] - Gordon
Episode 102 who'da thought? Well, thank you so much for watching. As always, you can find us on Facebook and on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:26:01.030] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.
[00:26:07.360] - Gordon
We'll see you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name's Gordon, I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:26:12.840] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:26:15.210] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:26:15.790] - Taylor
Bye.
