Show notes
TW 4Visible link or just use friend code 3PB3NQG Brett Terpstra's fix for bin installation with Homebrew Brett's Markdown Service Toolsmulti markdown installerLink to demo of MMD to RTFParallelsDrafts Mail Assistant Jetpack CRMUnmute Michael:[Damashe:[Wait, what? Yeah. I've been using Edge and Windows. So it's been good over there. I actually thought about trying to run it from Edge on Windows, but I was like, let's not. Let's not try to do too much here. Michael:[Damashe:[I think it should work, but I haven't tried it to verify for sure. Michael:[Right, this minute, just playing with it, it seems to be pretty snappy and working well, um, I'm using the Microsoft one core voices. I think whatever the default NVIDIA voices are, I did go change the voice. But, to me, NVDA... Seems like how I'd like voiceover to be on the Mac where I could just use my arrow keys And not have to worry about and maybe I can I don't I've had Struggles with that but to where I can just you know use up and down arrow keys I did try what you recommended enabling well what you had offhandedly recommended enabling quick quick nav and Using the voq key and that seemed to to give me a similar experience ish I need to figure out quick and have a little more though Yeah, quick now does have some abilities like you without quick now, but I've had hit or miss, Lately has been more misses than hits. Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[They're still drawing things in with JavaScript Into the actual, you know body of the page though, and I noticed this most egregiously on the T-Mobile website, when you log into your T-Mobile account, and let's say you click a link, you know, to go to my account or something like that. Like, the page will load, I'll get the little sound that says the page is fully loaded and so far. But there's nothing there in the center of that page for a while, like a couple of seconds, and then it appears, and it's like, I mean, either tighten up your JavaScript and make it more efficient or just stop doing it the way that you're doing it. Michael:[But we'll talk more about a tool that's doing this fairly nicely, it looks like. So provide more feedback to the screen reader user to let them know, hey, stuff is still loading, the webpage is loaded, but we're still loading our stuff. Damashe:[And a lot of times it's just like somebody did this because they could, not because it was necessary, because there's nothing about a lot of the pages where I see this and experience and I know that's what's going on where the information is going to change once it's loaded. You could just do a straight fetch, fetch the data as it currently is and then present that data. If I click on my account in T-Mobile, nothing about my account is going to change. That entire section of the page needs to be dynamically drawn in. Because you're going to show me my account number, you're going to show me the number of lines. That's not going to change, you know, from you loading that page in a few seconds. It's not like it's a counter, like you're trying to show me how much data I've used. You're trying to keep that live, updated, so you're constantly rewriting that, right? That's a different scenario. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[I'm in the process of moving away from T-Mobile. I have joined up with Visible. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Because they are like doing that dynamic, like you click a link to change to a different section. Like, so you click on, you know, billing, right? And you're on the dashboard overview page or whatever, you click on billing. They're not completely reloading the entire page. They're just rendering out the information from what you need, which is a great use. That's a great little feature, right? You see it on a lot of places. It's so quick that I don't notice it though. Michael:[Damashe:[So it doesn't tell me, like, I don't have an ARIA announcement saying, you know, billing loaded or anything like that. That would be nice, you know, especially for people not used to the way that the web works and not, you know, familiar with that. You would click the link and think nothing happened, basically, but the information is there. So it would be nice if there was an RU announcement or some sort of sound that indicates, you know, we have loaded this information up now. Then it would also be nicer if they moved your focus to the beginning of that main content area once it's loaded. But it happens so quickly that if I go up to the little menu, click billing, by the time I navigate back down, like it's there, like everything is loaded. Michael:[Damashe:[Just the ARIA stuff just isn't there to announce it, like, hey, this information is actually loaded. Because if you click it, you'll just sit there like, wait, what went on? And you'll click it again because it's not reloading the entire page. And that is where ARIA announcements are extremely important for web pages that are doing that kind of dynamic loading of content. And that's the proper way to do it. They're missing the ARIA here, but their performance is amazing. Good. Michael:[Damashe:[Service-wise with visible it has been really good. I did a speed test yesterday down was 136 up was like five something so not super spectacular there, but but it's decent. Yeah. [She's still on T-Mobile at the moment because we haven't imported her number over so It was a pretty good real-world comparison of the coverage and before because I didn't get to say this so visible is a MVNO Mobile virtual network operator, but they're owned and operated by Verizon So it's not even that they're just so you know contracting their service through Verizon Verizon at Verizon actually runs that particular MV you know, so One advantage to that I think is that because they're operating it it actually supports the Apple watch So if you have a cellular Apple watch or wearable, they say wearables, you know, of course, I have Apple watch so that's set up But it seems that they would support any kind of wearable device now. They don't have iPad plans, and I'll get into a little bit more kind of who I think this is for and who it's not for. But generally for me, so my process was on Wednesday. Let's see, I set up my service with Visible on Tuesday. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[They're currently right now, as we're recording, and it runs until March 31st, they're offering $5 off for the term of your account. So that means it's not just the first month, as long as you have that line active, you'll get, you know, well $5 off one of their plans, $10 off the second plan. And they basically have two plans for you to pick from. 30 bucks and 45 bucks are the normal prices. So it's 25 and 35 with the current welcome promotion that they're offering. So I set my service up on Tuesday. Got a, you know, temporary number, because I did say I was gonna port a number in. I started the port process on Wednesday with T-Mobile and T-Mobile was the lengthiest part of this because I went through and did everything I needed to do to get my port out pin from T-Mobile. [If you're in the scenario that I am in, where I am not the actual primary account holder in T-Mobile, I'm just the authorized user, so I can pretty much go in and do anything that Letea can do, but the account is actually under her name. In the case of T-Mobile, in order to generate, have the system generate you a port out, you can do it all manually, but you have to be logged into the account, either on the web or in the mobile app, as the primary account holder. So that was a little bit of a hangup for me first, But I did call T-Mobile to find out like, what do I need to do to get this started? And that's how I found that out. So, got my port out pin, went and put the information in, requested from Visible, which was just the account number, the port out pin, the phone number, and the billing zip code. And they started the process. They reached out to me within 30 minutes of me starting that process. I had an email and a text message on the... Temporary number for visible that I had That said, you know, we ran into an issue with your port out request reach out to you know, contact us to help resolve this so So take a step back. Michael:[Damashe:[So I set up eSIM on my phone for the temporary number so that when the port process was complete, that SIM was already in place and everything. And I did that all from within their app, which is fairly accessible. The one area that their app needs to work on, and I need to figure out a way to demonstrate this to them, because there's not a lot of places once you're set up where you need to actually enter information. [So let's say I'm typing, you know, an email address, and I type M-E at, I'm not going to hear M-E at as I lift my finger, I'm going to hear, you know, some random text that is, that voiceover is reading from somewhere else. And that sometimes seems to confuse what gets input or the order that things get input in. If you're looking at visible copy and paste will definitely be your friend, I will say that. That was the way I just got around the frustration, like the little aggravation of it. There's not a lot of text entry once you're signed in and set up. They do allow you to authenticate with Face ID and stuff once your account is set up in the app. So, got the eSIM set up. Good catch though, because people are like, how did you get a text message? [Now, one caveat for anybody thinking about Visible is they do not, like one of the reasons their prices are so low and that they are consistently low is because they don't have any overhead. Like they don't have physical stores, which a lot of MVNOs don't. But they also don't have a call center either. Everything is communicated via chat. And you can do chat from inside the app or from their website. And chat's pretty accessible. There are actual headings in the conversation so that you can navigate. So if you know your focus moves or you leave and then come back or whatever, you can navigate by heading to get through the conversation. Michael:[Damashe:[So that's one thing to be aware of. Me personally, I don't mind it because I very rarely have called, I very rarely call anybody that provides me service. Like I don't call my internet provider, I don't call my cell carrier all that often unless I don't have a choice but to call them because I can't do something and they're holding me up. But chat has been very responsive. I've never sat around for like 10, 15 minutes waiting on a person to connect. I was usually within a couple of minutes of me going through. They do do the thing that everybody else is doing too, where when you first open up the chat, you're talking to a bot that's gonna try to make recommendations, type the word customer service agent, and that'll bypass any of its attempts to try to feed you what it thinks you may need, like links to support documentation, et cetera, et cetera. It is helpful, like it's not a terrible bot, but if you know you need to talk to somebody, just type customer service and it'll get you right to an agent, which is cool, because I've seen some systems where you really gotta, you gotta go through the dance with what they think you may want first before they're finally like, oh, okay, well, let me get you over to a person because I can't help with that. It's like, yeah, I tried to tell you that from the beginning. I know what I'm doing. But my port, essentially, I had to call back to T-Mobile. [It's like no. No, this is not active Okay Well that turns out to be what the hangout was that it was actually happy so got that lifted my port was done within Probably two hours from the time I started and again some of most of that was going to T-Mobile first Verifying that this wasn't you know in place or at least having them tell me that it wasn't in place And then starting the port process communicating with visibles customer support and then going back to T-Mobile and having to do the dance with his Automated system over the phone to get to a customer service person so I could you know inquire about this. Michael:[Damashe:[We can we can let them wait for the next of it Yeah, that's not actually a bad idea. That's a good business idea. Yeah. Oh, man. So my line is ported over I did have them overnight Tia a sim the other thing to know about visible that I'll get into right now Is that each phone line that you're adding has to be tied to his own account? So I have a login and Tia now has a separate login right for visible It's the reason I called up Michael and I said Mike is great But it's not gonna work for you because you have to create an account for everybody that you have a line for your thing It's self for their watches, right? You know Mallory's bring her watch is gonna be up under her account, but they just give you watches and phones and that's it That's all you got. This also doesn't appear to be a way to do. An iPad plan. I haven't inquired about it, but it's not listed on their website. And my only assumption is they would say, well, sure, you can give us 30 bucks a month or currently 25 bucks a month for unlimited talk, text and data. And your iPad will just have unlimited data. It's like, yeah, I don't need it that bad. U.S. mobile would be my solution for that if I were going to do that. Michael:[I may go set up an account and possibly record that process. You should see if they have a referral program and if they do, we might put it in the show notes. We'll talk about that maybe shortly. But visible offers a discount if multiple people pay together. Damashe:[They do offer a referral program. They call it the visible friends and family or something like that. But essentially you to use a link someone shares with you to has their code embedded in it or just enter their code as you're checking out and it gets you twenty dollars off your first month of service and it will give them twenty dollars off their next bill. So works out pretty good. I actually used my referral code when I set up Tia's account. So she got twenty bucks off. So her first month's bill was five bucks. Michael:[Damashe:[And it helps a tremendous deal. So if it's something you're interested in, check it out for sure. Your phone does have to be unlocked when you come there. But that's the only requirement. Watches apparently are never locked. So don't have that problem. I did not set my watch up on data, so I'll be able to talk about kind of what that experience is like. It looks pretty straightforward. I kind of started the process, but I'm not putting my watch back on cellular data right now I want to see if I actually need it. I Don't think I do but I will set tears up. So that's been a good transition for me We're currently kind of in a holding pattern right now with Tia because you're trying to decide if she wants to keep the new number They're visible gave her because it's a cool-looking number or if she wants to put her number here from T-Mobile. So So I haven't finished that process yet. Michael:[Damashe:[But he has a person on who has gotten the Sense Player and they do a pretty interesting demonstration and discussion about it. And yeah, that's one of those things, like when you buy it right now, there's a checkbox on it, you promise not to yell at us if bars not available when you get yours. Michael:[But yeah, I'm intrigued by this device, sir. I am intrigued. It may be the first blindness-related product I buy directly if... Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[That's one of the things that's interesting to me too, is they're setting that up for you to use a high quality microphone to plug in. So it looks very powerful. of that connect feature with the phone though, that he demonstrated with the iPhone. Like that is, I get the sense that that could sell them a lot of players if they handle their marketing correctly. Because unfortunately in this space, like honestly, you know, despite how I may feel or anybody else may feel like the Victor reader stream dominates this, this very admittedly very small space for this type of device. But I honestly feel like the Sense Player is. More of a functional device, like it provides more functionality, and immediately it costs a little bit more too, so that's another thing they're gonna, again, handling their marketing and their messaging. See, channeling does it real a little bit here. Handling their messaging correctly, though, could negate the fact that I think it starts off at about 100, maybe even $150 more than what the Humorware Stream Reader is. So it's an interesting device. I am very interested. I'm kinda feeling like Steven was in Double Tap in that episode of like, man, you're selling me this thing. You're gonna make me buy this. Michael:[I've been playing with numpad commander and navigating Mac OS with my numpad. And I'm like, this is doable. That's nice, huh? Damashe:[Because I really, my Mac is broken to me in a lot of ways. And it's not because it doesn't work or I can't set keyboard commanders for a lot of the things that I may have customized on the Numpad Commander. It's that I don't have those things set up and it's just awkward. Like some of the commands are just awkward. Michael:[Damashe:[Or trying to get the mouse navigated, get the mouse moved to where a voiceover cursor is. Like, I know the command is, what is it, V-O-Shift-Command-F5, I think. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[We tell each other stuff, and then when we discover it, it's like magic to us. Damashe:[Let me write a quick list IRA Parallels on on the Mac Chat GPT. Michael:[Damashe:[Now, funnily enough, I don't actually use the trackpad commander at all. Uh, but there's a lot of options there as well. Michael:[Was talking to Steven about How you and I kind of have when we've recently reset up voiceover or reset up a Mac Slowly made changes to voiceover instead of migrating changes and how that to me has seemed that voiceovers a little bit It's it's not It's not it's not NVDA or you know windows or anything like that. Damashe:[[[Michael:[And the first thing I noticed was what we were kind of mentioned in here a moment ago, when I make a phone call with parallels, all of my audio doesn't to quit. I may be abnormal. Maybe I'm normal. My wife and in Mallory and her co workers feel like I maybe do a little too much. But I always have music going on in the background. You know, voiceovers talking to me sometimes I'll be on a VoIP call. And when I'm making a call in Zen desk in Safari or edge or any browser on the Mac, when you first make that call as it's connecting, you hear everything cut out for a second, and then you hold your breath. And if it doesn't come back, then you know that you lost audio. It's like, it's like audio roulette. And so I noticed the first time once I went through that process of making a phone call that Hey, guess what, I didn't lose my audio for a second. [[My keystrokes were the same. So it was a pleasant experience once I got it installed. What have you been thinking though, Demasi? Because I knew what Windows was gonna be like, but now that I have someone else on Windows, we can kind of try different things or experiment and see what works and what doesn't. Damashe:[But anyway, this justified the purchase of this right there because it doesn't cut out audio. And unfortunately, sometimes I will have to, you know, hopefully get it right with item chooser and find the hang up button and just say to the customer, like, I do apologize, but if you can hear me, I cannot hear you, so I'm going to hang up and attempt to call you right back, right? I have not had to do that since running Zendesk in Windows. It has been a very pleasant experience. I have had to catch up a little bit with NVDA commands that I've forgotten over the years and trying to use it with the insert and numpad more than using the traditional laptop layout for NVDA, which is what I used to use. But it's been a pleasant experience for me. I haven't really encountered any issues switching from Mac to Windows. It's actually so seamless that other than toggling on voiceover when I know I'm in the Windows for a while, like that's the only adjustment that I've made since starting, but it's been a very pleasant experience for me. And I definitely see, one, why so many people liked Parallels over VMware. I do know that they tend to leapfrog each other periodically. [[Like I can command tab when I'm in windows and then I just start pressing windows commands and everything generally works. I've noticed a couple of gotchas, which I gotta say my solution is just toggle off voice over occasionally like the insert key won't do the command that it should do in windows like just nothing happens, or sometimes it will pick up, macOS will pick up a command that involves a voiceover key or a Windows command. So the thing will happen in Windows, but then something else will also happen on the Mac. So I just started toggling off voiceover when I'm in Zendesk, and I'm gonna be in Zendesk for a minute, because I'm going through solving tickets, replying to emails, calling customers back, and then I have started to slowly more integrate the other aspects of the AT guy's work into just doing that in Windows as well, because I'm not doing as much jumping back and forth. Now, if the instant something isn't working or behaving in an expected manner, or I feel like I'm about to lose some efficiency, I just, you know, Command F5, Command Tab, Safari. All right, let's go get this part done over here while I'm talking to the customer, because it's working. But this seamless integration is what's been the biggest surprise to me. It's like, it just seems so natural. Michael:[Yeah, so that that could be that could be something there. So my workflow is I'm using Zendesk like you are. I'm using JAWS and NVIDIA have both of them downloaded. I don't have a preference to one or the other. I just use whichever one works for me. Narrator works well on the Windows 11 side of things. And when I notice focus issues and things aren't working the way I expect them to, for the most part, I can hit Windows D and that'll take me to the desktop and then I can use Alt-Tab. I will say, I was surprised Amazi didn't go there, but sometimes if I hit Windows V, actually I think it consistently works now, hitting Windows V seems to take, or seems to pace, which it should not, and then hitting alt left and right arrow seems to move me word by word, which again, it should not, but that's how you do things on the map. So there's some oddities there that I cannot explain. Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Like my expectation is control, left and right arrow and Windows should navigate me by word. But if that doesn't work, you know, trial, uh, command V option, well option on the Mac keyboard. Yeah. Uh, you know, for me, command is the windows key, but also as Mike said, like command V also pace, which doesn't really seem like that should work, but Hey. Michael:[Damashe:[That's one of those oddities that I've noticed. Like if I have voiceover running is not as consistent as it is if voiceover is off while I'm in windows. So that's one oddity. I believe that using, um, any kind of software, any kind of automation stuff because launch bar works right? Michael:[Damashe:[I've not installed JAWS primarily because I don't have a license key and I don't want to deal with the demo mode. So I was like, well, we'll start with NVDA. That has been working. I am taking advantage of the fact that I am employed part-time by AT guys and using a demo dealer license for, well, not a demo, but a dealer license for the Vocalizer. Add-on. Yeah, Vocalizer Eloquent Add-on is what it is for NVDA specifically. And that is available at ATGuys for $69, since I'm mentioning it. I am using those voices. It works fairly well. It's pretty snappy. [I'm gonna have Michael reach out to you Okay, because yeah, I have no idea man. I haven't touched Windows in 10 years. What do I know? [So you're up and down arrow and every link is on its own line. Even if visually on the page That's not how it's like it out. You can navigate in VDA the same way or you can use in VDA Which I think used to be as default mode where it has things lined up as they are on the page, so if you down arrow and there is a Menu for lack of a proper term because I'm not a real whip I mean, I know some stuff but you know Not knowing the terminology as well as I should if there is a menu that goes across the page so all the links are going across horizontally across the page. NVDA will read those when you press down arrow, you know, home, about, contact us, log in, right, just all on one line. And then you can tab or navigate to those links. You know, you can tab to them or you can use word navigation to get to the one that you want to activate and tap enter to activate that link.That is something that I wish VoiceOver did more of. Michael:[Damashe:[We will definitely be talking more about Windows on running Windows on the Mac and things that we're experimenting with from the side of automating, you know, implementing some of the automation tools. I do love the fact that, though, and you mentioned this to me before, when you first tried it, You can use hazel on Windows because your files from Windows are showing up on the Mac right there right there Oh, that's how I got there Downloaded some add-ons for NVDA and they're in my Mac downloads folder, which is a little weird the first time I saw Yeah, because I downloaded this the add-on before I installed it. Okay. I say why is this file over here? What in the world is going on? Michael:[I'm, I'm envisioning myself at some point getting to the point where I log into a Windows computer on the Mac and my Mac just does all the automation tasks for me and helps me. It's like my assistant. That's weird to think about. All right. Damashe:[Just, just as a follow on to The initial question you asked me about it, because the first time I've used it, like had it open and been in it this long, but it's fairly decent. Think this may become my alternative browser from Safari and ditch Chrome. How about that? Michael:[Damashe:[I mean, you don't have Chrome installed at all I was like Mike's always been the the like not the first app But probably in the first 10 or 15 apps that you install Chrome would be one of those apps And like, nope, I don't have Chrome installed at all. What? Oh, I better go take a look at this Microsoft. That's kind of what spurs me to go look at stuff is either you keep mentioning it to me or you say something like that, where it's like, oh, you have completely changed your entire behavior in favor of doing this thing. I should go look at this. Michael:[And we, you know, tell people we help people with a little bit of things. And if we keep going back to things, then that's when the other one realizes, huh? Maybe I, maybe I really should go look at that. Kind of like this tool that you told me about that I've never had a need for because I've always had a mute button. And then our friend of the show, Marty and cohost on unmute, um, may have been playing with some new equipment that doesn't have a mute button. And he started asking me for ideas that he had. And one of the people he was talking to suggested, Oh, just turn your gain all the way down. Well, as Marty said, that's not going to work. Because how is he going to be able to get his game back to where it was? Because he doesn't have the unmute or he doesn't have the auto gain feature that's available on the vocaster. So I remember that you told me about a tool that would allow you to mute system wide on the Mac. So what tool was that and how does it work? Damashe:[[Because number one, as a voiceover user, I do not know, if anybody has any ideas, please share them. We'll drop our contact info and all of that at the end of the show, but reach out. Like, geez, you can call me. Like, you know how to solve this problem. I can search for something. First of all, searching for Shush did not bring it up. Michael found it on the web. we'll put a link in the show notes. Click that link and it'll take you directly to the app in the app store because it's not showing up in search results either, which is another frustrating thing. But even if you were to have found it in search results, you only really can just click on it and buy it or download it because- You don't know what you're buying. How do you open it? How do you open up the app so that you can see the description and all of that stuff? I've tried all of the things I know how to try. At any rate, ran over about that. Shush is an app that I picked up a long time ago because what it does is it gives you a hotkey and it's a customizable hotkey. I believe by default it uses FN, but it gives you a customizable shortcut key. I used to set mine to F1 cause I never just used the F1 key for anything on the Mac. And that works if you're using your F keys as normal function keys and not as media control keys or whatever. [And then, you know, the button press will toggle it. Now here's the thing, you have to press and hold it. So let's say if I have mine the way mine was normally set. Mike is always open so it's not muted. I press f1 that mutes it But that's like holding down a physical mute button like you got to keep your finger on if you let it go No, it's not a toggle thank you, that's a good way of saying that when it's pressed it's muted if you're holding it It's muted if you let go you're unmuted again Well vice versa or vice versa flip it the other way then yeah You have a push to talk thing then where when you're pushing it you're able to talk and when you're not pushing it and you're unmuted and I used that a lot when I would be sitting in to facilitate recordings, especially for Jon Panner Rees when he was doing his ACSP course. Like I would have it, I would toggle it then so that, you know, I was basically having to push to talk so I could jump in and say, Hey, wait a minute, Jon, can you repeat that? Cause you know, you were breaking up very bad and nobody knew what you said. Michael:[Damashe:[Now. Here's the thing At least when I was using it, um, I stopped using it when I got the SoundCraft because it had mute on it, but this is going to mute all microphones, like at least when I was using it, there was not an ability to go in and say, hey, I only want you to address this specific audio input device. Is going to address any audio inputs on your machine, which. [Now, if you're just pressing it to mute so you can cough while in a Zoom meeting, no big deal, unless Zoom is coming through a virtual device too, then, well, you just lost that audio. So be aware of that. For Marty's situation that he was inquiring about, though, I think it'll be perfect for him because he's not using loopback and for anybody not using loopback like you don't have to worry about it's not gonna mute your output. So if your output for any application is going through your normal you know either speakers or headphones or whatever there's no no concerns about it it's only when you're using virtual devices to route audio is going to also mute those virtual devices when you mute with shush. So just be aware of that otherwise it would just input mute your input microphone so you can very quickly mute if you need to cough or set up push-to-talk if you're in a zoom meeting where you're not constantly talking Press and hold the button have you say have your say and then you know mute that way you don't have background noise people cutting their grass Or whatever going on in your audio, but just as a pretty cool happen mark I think he said it was $4.99 now in the store. Michael:[I don't want to use breaking news. I've got to figure it out. Damashe:[[Well, since I want to say at least Monterey, if it wasn't Big Sur, it has behaved like it does now, where you can search for something and you find it in the search results. Well, guess what you're gonna be able to do? If you've previously bought it, you can just hit down, hit VOSpace and it's gonna start downloading. If you need to get or pay for it though, VOSpace is gonna to bring up, you know, that flow for you to get the app or to approve the purchase. How do I get to the details? Apple, can somebody please tell me, and I've tried VO command, uh, space to bring up the actions menu. I get options to copy the link. So I guess the long way around would be copied the link and then open that link again, so you can get into the app store. But do I want to do that if I'm searching for something and I'm not sure what it is? No. [I know you're gonna listen to this, but... Gotta do better. Hey, I'm gonna do all of my shows as though Apple is listening. And if they're not, well, you know, hey. Michael:[Damashe:[52:07] Someone might be listening, or someone may be listening that can share, as you said. So, you know, I will do the show as though they're listening, right? Because, I mean, can I be bothered to go submit a feedback to accessibilityatapple.com? No, because I won't get a response about it, so I'll never know if they got it, if they understood it, if they're gonna do anything about it or not. Hey, I sound like a developer now. Michael:[And then unless he has anything else, I think we'll probably wrap it up because if we're running a little long today, which is fine, because we don't have to meet requirements. Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[So I really got to take this back to, what are we in now, 2023? So I'm going to say probably 2021. It's the first time I heard about this too. I didn't look at it. It was first time I heard about it, but giving credit where credit is due. Taylor Arndt mentioned this randomly, just kind of in passing and we didn't really get into a deep discussion about it on Discord. So I looked at it. It came up again to me somewhere. I think I was looking at, me and you had been talking about CRMs and HubSpot. Michael:[Damashe:[So I started doing some researching and Jetpack CRM, of course, came up with their website in search results, but they also came up on a few other sites where people were mentioning it.So, started taking a look at it. It is free to start, free to use forever, but they do have paid extensions, which is there, you know, as Bart Bouchat's made famous by the no-silicase always says, follow the money. Well, we know how they plan to make money. You can use the plugin free as long as you want to, just like WooCommerce, but there are paid extensions that they offer. So I started looking at it and poking at it, and the one thing that kind of held me back from it. For a while is there are a few things that I would want to do that it either does not provide or is like it's going to cost me 200 bucks a year to make it work. And I wasn't ready to make that commitment when I first started my business. Because one, I was like, well, I don't need a CRM. I can build it myself. Guess what? I don't have time to build a CRM myself. [And you started reading up on it and because we were talking about a CRM for your business for PayOnMedia. Right. And you started looking at it, so you have to just today, like prior to us starting to record. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[And then we had an issue with the setup of, you will go through the setup and I'll tell you where it is, where it happened, um, Demasi experiences himself too. And then it would just go back to the beginning, but you were able to, well, I should say I was able to, because I was making notes to talk about. So I was able to tab through all of this, uh, the sections of the setup after enabling it. When I went to the second tab though, it said selected radio button two of three, but it's also the same section as the... [So maybe changing those radio buttons to that similar place or that similar style might make it a better experience for setup. And then, um, apparently I chose the stream line, streamline layout and helps if I read the second line of my notes and then I'll be like, Oh, well, that's where I was going with that because I'm trying to read and talk at the same time. So the on and off buttons for the quotes to me did not appear to be labeled I don't know if that's a voiceover issue or if they just weren't real buttons You've seen this in WordPress where you'll see toggles and stuff and things don't work properly when when I got to the Finish and go to your CRM link on WordPress emu and again It could be something we did incorrectly when installing it It would take me back to the startup of the jetpack CRM Um, I, my initial findings with the actual interface though, was I did find myself using the skip to main content link more because that is a, not a heading. Now it might be a region or, uh, something else that I can look into to see if it's a way to navigate by to it. But by default, I tried to navigate by headings and was not able to. So I started getting frustrated and then went and tried the skipped main content and that actually seems to be working with this. [And this may be a bad example though, because you did already have a user role on the site too. Damashe:[Michael:[Um, but it, it is something that I think would help a lot on the company's page. And I found this on a lot of pages after the table, there were two buttons. [I'm not sure what the first one is, but when I press the second one, it pops open something that's not there that the heading says edit filters. So maybe renaming that would be a good way to make that more usable than I'd be able to easily, uh, do that. And then, um, so what I ended up doing and I just have a little bit more feedback here is I set a VO zero as a hotspot. I need to learn more about hotspots and stuff like that because I think I can set them per website and not have to reset them every time, but I set VO zero to add new, and that appears to take me to the add new button on companies and on clients and on quotes. So on any inside there that so whenever I go there right now, I just have VO zero and then that is pretty much the same as me just looking over. I'm clicking on that and then it does not work on the save. So if you're saving a new quote and saving a new client, those don't seem to work. It would be pretty convenient if I could just hit command S and save and that updates like it does in the Gutenberg editor. Damashe:[Michael:[And I think that's why I wanted to look into this. Cause right now I'm fighting with a couple of different tools just to send out invoices or quotes. And there's no need for that when I'm in WordPress anyways. And I told Demasi this months ago, my ideal day would be to start on a WordPress dashboard and go do what I need to do in my business. And I think this could definitely help with facilitating and making that possible. Something like GPT-4 might be interesting to see how we could build our own add-ons to it as well to give additional functionality and integrate with third party services. It does have Zapier integration, though. Damashe:[A couple of little gotchas here and there that we should, you know, mention to support and try to get them to work on improving accessibility. But it's a tool that you would be willing to invest in, I would say. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[So I want to ask you this question. This is mostly self-validation for me, but I think it's good to put it out here publicly for people because I think it's a good activity for people to do sometimes. So having read, you know, probably some of their marketing material, looked at the capabilities with some of their extensions, my Hesitancy to just be like, yep. This is the thing. Let's run away with it Not because of any accessibility things but like am I just getting caught up in the hype? Michael:[Damashe:[But I think I have found a solution to the, how do I send invoices to people and have them pay them in Stripe without resorting to me having to install WooCommerce as a solution for that. That still seems overkill for me, me, you know? Some people may make sense. For me, though, I don't sell anything but time, right? It's a pretty ethereal business. I mean, I can't even get paying for for people through a firm, through Stripe for people to pay some of these exorbitant invoices off over a period of time because, yeah, all that's selling services. But I think I made a couple of good solutions. Michael:[Damashe:[Like, it should be right there as a checkout option. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[I mean, really think about it. But a lot of people sell software through Stripe. I see more and more. And the funny thing is I can remember years ago, here's a segment. So Steven recently started a segment, hashtag EBB. I don't know, EBB, yeah, hashtag EBB. Embarrassing blind blunders, right? So I'm gonna start one here because I started it last week and just to follow up on it, but I'm gonna start one, you know, things I irrationally said that I had to walk back on. [I did not find the audio because really this week has gotten a little crazy and I wasn't able to get everything done to try to locate it. I did start listening back to old episodes, have not found where I actually said, I will never buy Parallels, but I'm pretty sure I said it, where I bought it and I'm using it and it's cool. There's still accessibility problems with their interface getting this set up and in some of the areas of configuration can be a little challenging, but it does work and I'm using it as you've heard us talk about. So walk that back, cause I said it, I know I've said it. [The best integration, it's one of the reasons I started using Stripe initially, is because you could set up things like Gravity Forms, there are different ways to do it with other plugins or hand coding it yourself, where when people checked out to pay on your website, regardless of what they were paying you for, they stayed on your website. They were not bounced out to a site but then they had to log in or find, you know, a confusing link that kept moving around arbitrarily by PayPal. Yep, I'm calling them out. For I don't have a PayPal account, I just want to pay with a debit card situation. No, people stayed on your site, which was a great experience, because it's like, hey, I'm providing this service, but I'm also not giving myself the liability of storing your card, because it's going straight to Stripe, never touches my server. Loved it. Always told people, do that thing. Well, now. [I was like like you were going to go out to check out that stripe comm slash a bunch of gibberish and Make your payment there on stripes checkout page and then get sent back to the website or wherever they redirect redirect you to after your purchase and I started doing this because honestly is sort of the future It was the future at the time when I started implementing it for a few people where Stripe wanted you to go. The other thing I noticed though, and the reason that I fully embraced it is because there are a lot of big companies that are doing the exact same thing. And they have the money, they have the staff, they have the engineering to build the site that they're running. They could easily integrate Stripe. And some of them actually have had Stripe integrated more on their site with just a little checkout frame or the Apple Pay buttons or whatever. And they're resorting to using the checkout by Stripe because it's easier to integrate, it's less trouble, and people are now familiar with seeing those types of pages. So it just makes the experience and the trustworthiness of your checkout seem just a little bit more normal. It's like, oh, this small business is using checkout with Stripe, but so is Parallels. So it's like, okay. [Oh, really yep So you could have like you know mine probably at some point be Once I loosen my budget up a little bit more in the business will probably be payments not bedrock innovations calm just so you still see my domain but you're looking at Stripe's interface and everything is being handled through Stripe. [And big shout out to Stripe for implementing, they did this a while back, but implementing the custom domain for your emails that come from Stripe. So people see the email, you know, invoices.pay at bedrockinnovations.com. You know, they pick what goes in front of the at sign, but the end of it is bedrockinnovations.com. So, you know, it came from me. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[So they increment and they all look the same now. Damashe:[POM, for pay home media, I think. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[I think Stripe is trying to dominate the .new domain. Damashe:[And it's a one-off thing, like it's just a one-off situation. Go to payments and you can put in their customer info or to pull from your customers if you already have that person there, but you can just type in the number of what the amount is that they're going to pay you and then send that invoice to them. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[I just think they changed the rates on that a little bit, so you'll pay a little bit more of a percentage off top if you're manually punching in a card. But, so, payments, and if you go to payments.new, it'll take you right there. Michael:[Damashe:[I believe, Mike, you looked into this a little bit more than I did. It ties into your phone number, right? Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[Right. So I have all of those turned on. But link is a way that if you notice, as I have been noticing how many people are actually using Stripe for their checkout process, just to store your information online, if you typically would enter your card number. Now for me, I just do the Apple Pay because, you know, makes life great. And I don't have to remember card numbers or go do any weird copy and pasting. But if you normally would enter your card number, or if you're encountering a lot of places that aren't using Apple Pay for some reason, or you just don't have that, like, you know, use Link. It is provided and managed by Stripe. Your data is secure. All of those things that they're known for, they wouldn't get into it if it wasn't secure because they really can't afford to have their reputation as a financial institution damaged because that's basically all they do. [I think I paid myself $5 or something using my Square app. This is a little bit more involved, but essentially you activate it from your Stripe account. You activate the functionality, and I don't think I had to really jump through any steps to get it to work. Just turn it on, have it as a accepted payment method. When someone's checking out, paying an invoice, or purchasing a product, they'll see Pay With Square. They click that button, open up their Square Cash app, and this is the thing why I say it's a little bit more involved, because I'm not sure how it would work on mobile. I did it from the desktop. So I took my phone, opened up Square Cash, hit scan code, and it scanned the QR code, and then it showed me that I was gonna pay this amount of money. Did I agree? And I agreed, and it sent the payment. Michael:[Damashe:[I don't, I'll do some more research because we haven't sure to investigate it before I say, hey, yeah. Because if the QR code is the same every time, which I could see it being that way for a product, for sure, that would make sense for that QR code to be the exact same thing, like just save the QR code, people scan it with Square Cash and pay you. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[They can choose Apple Pay, Google Pay, if that's you know if they're on Android or link if they have link connected or Square Cash or whatever they want to use. But that putting it on the box like man that is an excellent idea. Michael:[So before we wrap it up, I wrote an email like Demasi talks about all the time in the mail application. And I used markdown to give it headings and hyphens to make it so I had bulleted lists. Which is great, by the way. I'm going to still start my emails in drafts because putting hyphen once and once means that when I hit enter, it'll add it. And I kept forgetting to add it there, but thank you, it's a real display, so I had to throw that in there. And then I went up to the service menu after I selected my text, and then I said, convert this mark down to rich text. And then it gave me an error telling me that I didn't have something installed and I needed to press this button so that I could go to the webpage to install it. And I thought I installed everything you told me to, Demasi with Homebrew. Damashe:[That is looking for multi, yeah, no, that wasn't confusing at all. Michael:[Damashe:[Workflow itself, the automator action, for lack of a, to just be more clear about it, the automator workflow that's being run up under the hood there is looking for multi-markdown in a specific location on your machine. It is looking in slash USR slash local slash bin, B-I-N, slash multi-markdown, specifically is what it's looking for. That's not there though, because you installed it with homebrew and on apple silicon to my knowledge is when this started it could be os specific but my memory really is telling me that on apple silicon is where this where this begins and the only time this happens homebrew now installs things into slap opt opt slash homebrew slash some other stuff i don't remember because i didn't look that deep at it but it's it's not using the same old path that we that we're used to and that everything would be in when we were on Intel Macs. [And it's probably why he doesn't actually realize that this is probably broken because either people have figured it out or something, or they're just reinstalling multi-markdown again because they forgot to install it with brew. That's also a possibility. But he's doing this and I have subsequently started doing this too because it just makes life easier. So, the first thing you're gonna wanna do, essentially what you're going to do, the end result of this, is you're going to make a symlink for the folder. That Homebrew is currently using, you're gonna make the slash USR slash local slash bin a symlink that points to the folder where Homebrew is installing stuff. So that means if something is looking in that slash local slash bin folder, it'll find it because it will be pointed, redirected on a low level to the actual location. Before you do this, read the Brett Terpstra article that will be in the show notes, So that way I don't have to go through all of the steps and keep randomly spitting out, you know, terminal commands and paths that people are not going to remember. Read the post, though, because if you currently have, especially if you've upgraded and have not wiped your machine at all in years, you have stuff in that slash bin directory, you're going to want to move it. [But read the article, it'll give you step-by-step how to do it, making sure that you move any current binaries to the new location before you do it. But that resolves the problem. Now for those not using homebrew that want to use these multi-markdown services, they They can be downloaded, and we'll put them in the show notes as well, a link to those to download them and just install. You can, the cool thing about downloading the actual zip file from Brett's site is you can install the ones that you actually want to use, whereas Homebrew gives you all of them. Michael:[Damashe:[1:20:21] And then you can also go to multimarkdown.com, and I'll link to the direct page to download that. Package installer, and it will install it where it probably normally would be expected to be, which is the slash USR slash local slash bin folder. So that will resolve those issues if you're not a homebrew user. But the video that we're also going to link that I did showing me converting Markdown in an email and just a regular email body into which text and then sending it to Michael and then Michael reading that email on the other end, and being like, hey, this is how it showed up to me. We'll link to that video. If you like that trick, you don't have to go use Homebrew if you don't want to. You can just go download the things that you need and install them normally. So that'll be in the show notes. I will round this out with a... We'll follow up on it next week for sure. Michael:[Damashe:[Michael:[Damashe:[1:21:42] What did I say? Michael, ah, yeah, see? That doesn't work. Demasi.yourownpay.com or michael.yourownpay.com will take you to us on Mastodon. I'm not sure, I don't think Michael's been on Twitter. I have not been on Twitter because I don't have an app to use, so. Michael:[Damashe:[Because you know what I'll do? I'll just go use the website first I have to use it for some reason but the thing that we're gonna follow up on next week and Share with you for sure it will be in the show notes if it does exist so I encourage you to go to your own pay comm slash TW and Check out the show notes because everything we've talked about will be linked there And if this action still exists in drafts, it will also be there But there was an action that I had and I may still have it installed That you could type your markdown in drafts and run this action and it would send an email converting the first line of the draft to the subject and the rest of the draft to the body, but doing the markdown to RTF conversion on the fly before it got your email and send it. Michael:[Damashe:[If you do look at show notes and you see a link to it in the show notes, then you know that it exists and that you should definitely get it if you are a drafts user, because this is going to change Michael's life and probably start me back to writing emails and drafts too, if it still exists, so. Michael:[Damashe:[And if you're using LaunchBar, at least you can send it to the service through LaunchBar and then have it pop back out on your clipboard and just go paste it. Well, look, I guess I just gave you the tilt button. Michael:[Sometimes Double Tap, other times other places. Damashe:[It really is a tech show, I promise you, but it's a very raw, real tech show, because tech is deeply ingrained in all our lives, and what I appreciate about that show is that It's not just for advanced people. It's not just for starter people. It's for everybody because they touch on everything. So check out Double Tap at doubletaponair.com, and on the AMI, ami.ca. Michael:[Damashe:[You may not hear about it for another month, but it'll come back around once we got it in place and we're like, hey, here's what we did. Same with our site redesign for payon, for youronpay.com. That is coming. It has started. The process is in place. Don't have anything for you to go check out yet. We're not ready for you to do that yet, but we have started that process too. We're technically working here. We appreciate you listening Listen in next week, There was some I had for out and I forgot what it was now Probably to tell them to listen in next week to find out about CRM and how our experience is but then you just said I think it wasn't that it was something anyway. We are technically working. We hope that you are technically working too. And we shall see you next week. 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