[00:00:09.03] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.20] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.07] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.00] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.26] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last 7 days. And thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:24.11] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:25.10] - Gordon
I've got my jumper on. It's starting to get a little bit colder. I think we've had some nice weather this week, but it's just definitely changing weather, isn't it?
[00:00:36.23] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:37.00] - Gordon
Lots of— you can probably hear by my voice I've got a bit of a sore throat. So this is the time when people will be coming down with illness and so on. So just take care, look after yourself. Any news you would like to talk about first of all?
[00:00:51.16] - Taylor
No.
[00:00:52.12] - Gordon
No? Okay. There is one bit of news, but it's sort of my topic, so we won't go into that right now. Would you like to go first, or shall I?
[00:01:00.14] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:01:01.17] - Gordon
Off you go.
[00:01:02.02] - Taylor
So this week I came across a new app, new Mac app called Bloom. Now this is built by a company called Spatie: S-P-A-T-I-E, and they're a Belgium company from Antwerp, and they produce or they maintain a lot of open source packages for Laravel, among other things. And they are quite well known. I think they have over 2 billion downloads across all of their different packages and things like that, which is quite a lot. And they have recently released something called Bloom, which is an app that allows you to manage all of your projects, development projects, in a single app and run work trees kind of in parallel. So work trees are what I've mentioned before, is a way for agents, multiple agents, to run and work on the same code base without basically overwriting each other's work. And what they've done is they've built it so that the most common projects that you work on, you can kind of import, and then you can see all your different agents that are running in work trees, and you can chat to it like you can with the terminal version or the Claude desktop. But what's really nice is you then have a bunch of things like the setup or startup scripts.
[00:02:26.26] - Taylor
So every time you create a new work tree, you've got to run the build scripts, you've got to get everything reconfigured. And they kind of built it for their own workflow. So they built it for their own team in their own company, but they've made it open source so anyone else can use it. Now it's very, very early. You know, they're still in version 1.8 or something. And they're, you know, releasing new versions, you know, maybe once or twice a day. And it's been really useful. I found I've been able to add kind of some of the projects that I work on regularly, and I can kind of dip in and dip out. And then it has things like notices and icons that show you the state. So if something's currently— an agent's currently working, it will show like a spinner. If something's waiting on you to review something, or if something's waiting on you to reply and give feedback, then it will show that. And it kind of speeds up and allows you to keep a nice eye across all your different projects that you're working on. And then also archive and clean everything up after.
[00:03:26.11] - Taylor
So it deletes the work tree once it's done, deletes everything along with it. And yeah, then you can spin up a new one. I think you can have up to 10 per project, which is really nice.
[00:03:37.08] - Gordon
Okay. And this is something that's open source, you said?
[00:03:39.28] - Taylor
Yes, on GitHub.
[00:03:40.29] - Gordon
So it's free to use currently. Who knows what might happen in the future, but at the moment it's open source, so that's good. And any limitations that you found with it so far?
[00:03:52.00] - Taylor
So the one that I found was that I use a software, an app called Herd, which what it does, it basically does a bunch of rewriting of URLs on my localhost so that instead of having localhost and then a port number, I can have stuff like taylordrayson.test. And so I can have .test as a local and development server. However, the app was always hard coding the port and localhost when it opened the browser. So I submitted a PR and said, "hey, can we add the option to define what URL we want the browser to open?" Because they basically have the option to open a browser within the app so that the agents have access to the browser. The agents can see what you can see, and you can create screenshots and stuff directly from it. And yeah, they merged it in. So this was a great idea, and yeah, merged it in. So now I'm able to set the URLs to be nicer URLs rather than port numbers.
[00:04:54.06] - Gordon
That's very good. And something that AI has been doing a lot of recently, I've discovered, is that they have their own built-in browsers, so they can go to a page that maybe you've asked them to change or do something on and actually see what it is that's there so that once they've made their change or their fix, they can actually go and check to see if it's correct or not.
[00:05:19.28] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:05:20.22] - Gordon
Because a lot of the problems we had, you know, maybe this time last year and, you know, beginning of this year was telling it to do something and then it's not, it's just not right. And then you have to try and do a screenshot or you have to then sort of tell it that this is wrong and can it go back and try again. But now it's got to a point when visual AI is working really well, so it can go and check its own work, which is really helpful, don't you find?
[00:05:50.08] - Taylor
Yeah, it still can be wrong, and sometimes when you're asking to design, you don't give it enough context, and so then it's wrong because you just, you don't know what you want really. But yeah, it can definitely find a lot more visual issues. I still found it, yeah, it can pick up a lot more than what it could do.
[00:06:10.08] - Gordon
Yeah, which is very good. Okay, so we'll put a link to Bloom in the show notes. So if that's something that is of interest to you, go and take a look. It's got the stamp of approval from Taylor. So that's a really good thing. Anything that Taylor brings into his workflow is something that he's happy to try and anything that works really well will stay. So we'll see if you still have it in a couple of weeks' time.
[00:06:35.00] - Taylor
I mean, there's a lot of other— they're kind of called orchestration apps. So there's lots of other platforms and apps out there that do this kind of thing. But this one is an open source one and also is built by a company that has a big reputation. And so— and also they're building it internally for their own company. So it's less likely to get abandoned because they're going to be using it every single day for all of their employees and all their developers that are in the company. And so, you know, they're going to be dogfooding their own products. So they're going to be fixing stuff based on what they find when they're actually using it.
[00:07:14.13] - Gordon
Very good. Oh, pardon me. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:07:19.08] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:07:20.16] - Gordon
So this week on the Wednesday, there was an Apple announcement. They do it pretty much every September for the last however many years, and so it's something that people who are Apple fans look forward to. And I don't think it's a surprise to any of our listeners or watchers that both Taylor and I are big Apple fans. We like what they do, we like the way they do it, we like the privacy that they build into all their products. So it's something that I've always looked forward to, and we actually went to the cinema on Wednesday, so I only got to see a little bit at the beginning. Um, and I've still got the rest of it to watch, but, what I saw was very interesting. So they've got a brand new iPhone 18 Pro, and that is of interest to me because I normally, or have done in the last sort of 10 years or so, upgraded my iPhone every 2 years. So normally you don't get a big jump from one year to the next, you get sort of minor upgrades. Or there is a big jump and then the next year is a minor upgrade.
[00:08:31.03] - Gordon
So either way, going every 2 years is normally quite a big jump from one to another. So I currently have an iPhone 16 Pro and I am now looking at the iPhone 18 Pro. Now I'm going to do some more research just to make sure that it's something that I actually want to get. It's definitely not something I need to get. It's definitely a want thing. Having said that, the new Apple Siri intelligence thing is something I think I would end up using a lot, because I quite, I quite often use Siri.
[00:09:05.29] - Taylor
Mm-hmm.
[00:09:06.19] - Gordon
And if it's got, you know, a much better brain and it's got more context and it understands my life better, then, you know, that's gonna make my life easier. So I'm gonna check just to make sure that is actually what's happening, because I think that's what's happening, but I do want to check. But by upgrading every 2 years, I normally get quite a good trade-in price with my existing phone because it's only 2 years old, and I try and look after them so they don't get any scratches and they don't get any damage at all, any dents, that sort of thing, so that when I trade it in, I get the most that they will give me. You can sell it privately, and I have done that in the past, but it's you know, a lot more effort. And there's a lot more unknowns because if you're selling it to someone you don't know, you're sending something off in the post that is worth, you know, a reasonable amount of money. And you don't know if it's going to arrive safely or if the person at the other end is honourable.
[00:10:09.08] - Gordon
Because so many, so many stories about people saying they didn't receive it when they did and all that, you know. So yeah, the trade-in is probably the safest option, if not the way to get the most money from it. They have also, from what I saw, upgraded the ANC, so that's the noise cancellation, on all of their AirPods. So they, they've added a new one which is the sort of the cheaper version from the Pro, which is the normal AirPods 5 taking over from the AirPods 4, and they are coming with ANC now, which is very, very good. So I think that means all of their AirPods have active noise cancellation, which is really good.
[00:10:58.02] - Taylor
That's good.
[00:10:59.08] - Gordon
For open-ear headphones, that's a really good thing to have. They were talking about the Apple Watch. I don't— I'm not going to be upgrading my watch because I've got an Ultra 3 already, and that's something I bought just recently, so I don't need to upgrade that. And, you know, there's other things which, if you haven't watched it, you know, I've seen the headlines obviously, but if you haven't watched it, I won't spoil it. Go and have a watch. Why do I bring this up? Well, when you run your own business and you have hardware and tools that you use to run your business, it's really important to know what is available and what they can do. So for example, I've got the iPhone 16 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro has come out, I'm going to go and look to see what it can do, see what differences it has over and above what I already have. You know, the battery for example will be much better, not only because they increase the batteries year on year anyway, but because my battery is 2 years old.
[00:12:08.24] - Taylor
Mm-hmm.
[00:12:09.11] - Gordon
And it degrades over time. So, you know, getting a longer life battery is a big advantage for a start. But knowing what is possible in hardware that's, you know, the next generation to what you have is really important. Cos if you want to do something and you think, "what I've got won't do it anymore," but you have the knowledge that the next generation does, well, you have a very clear upgrade path. You know where to go, you know what you can get. That will then give you what you need or what you want. The iOS software is upgrading, the Mac software is upgrading, all the operating systems are upgrading. And again, even if you at the moment don't want to upgrade because maybe it's going to break some legacy software that you have that has to run on Intel— by the way, that's a big upgrade for the Mac this year macOS 27 will drop all support for Intel apps. macOS 26, which is what we had previously, will still run them, but 27 has dropped support. So if you're running software that has Intel code in it, then it won't run if you upgrade.
[00:13:23.07] - Gordon
So check before you upgrade. I think we're just in time. I think it's— I don't know when it's coming out, but it's probably a sort of couple of weeks or so. So just check to make sure that your software is compatible before you upgrade your operating system, because you do not want to have to go backwards and downgrade your OS, because that is a lot of hassle. And the easiest way to lose data is to go backwards in your OS. So many things can go wrong. So yeah, that's one thing. But by knowing what the new operating system can do, again, you don't get to a point which a lot of people that I've spoken to get to where they've got a product and they say, "I wish it could do this." And knowing that product, I can then turn around and say, "well, it does." And they go, "what?" And they've maybe had this product for a year or 2 years, and it's something they've always wanted to do.
[00:14:19.13] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:14:19.23] - Gordon
And they didn't know it was actually possible. You know, very few people read manuals these days or guides. They, you know, just do a little bit of research. Watch the Apple presentations, that's a really good way of doing it. Watch some YouTube tutorials if you're one of these visual people. Listen to a podcast about it, that will tell you as well. But make sure you know the capabilities of the hardware and the software that you already own, and the hardware and software capabilities of the next generation or the latest generation, so you know what's possible. Because these can all help in your business, and you just don't want to be left behind just because you're not able to do something, or you think you're not able to do something, but in fact you are. That's a really important thing. Knowledge is very powerful for this sort of thing. Anything you want to add to that?
[00:15:13.07] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's always fun to upgrade.
[00:15:16.04] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:15:16.13] - Taylor
Only if it makes sense.
[00:15:17.22] - Gordon
Yeah, exactly. You don't want to just throw money away, obviously. I upgrade every 2 years because I would like to do so. I don't have to. I get better cameras. I use my camera a lot. I use Siri a lot. It sort of runs my business and my calendar and my diary. So all of those updates, you know, being able to have email while I'm on the go is really important to me, and there's always updates and changes to those. So I am going to research it properly, but the chances are I will upgrade at some point. And, yeah, I'll probably come back to you and let you know what I did and why I did it in the future. That's everything from me.
[00:15:59.15] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:16:00.07] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we are on YouTube, so please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:16:06.27] - Taylor
You can also go to our website, thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all of our past episodes.
[00:16:11.09] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, we're on all the major podcast platforms, and your smart speaker, just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." All being well, we'll be back with you next week at 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:16:29.14] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:16:31.26] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:16:32.10] - Taylor
Bye.
