Hands On with the M4 iMac and New Apple Intelligence Image Tools 370 –

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Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 370

Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security for Thursday, November 14, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast. Headlines include: a report on the newest Apple Intelligence features rolling out in Apple’s latest betas. Spoiler alert, we weren’t exactly thrilled with some of the image tools. Apple’s M4 processor is coming to every Mac. Will this be the new default requirement for future features? And speaking of, we have a hands on look at Apple’s new M4 iMac. Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast. Veteran Mac journalist, Kirk McElhearn. And Intego’s. Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.

Kirk McElhearn 0:49
Good morning, Josh, how are you today?

Josh Long 0:51
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?

What new Apple Intelligence features are available in the latest Apple betas?

Kirk McElhearn 0:53
I’m doing fine. We’re going to talk about cats in this episode of the podcast. I like cats. I have two cats. You probably heard you mention it. First, we want to talk about the latest developer betas of Apple’s operating systems. So these are the third dot two developer betas. Now, if you’re keeping score, you’re currently at dot one on your iPhone, Mac and iPad, and if you’re set up to use the developer betas, and I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article explaining how you can use them. You can also have the dot two. And the main difference between the dot one and the dot two is that you may be able to use Apple’s new image creation tools. I say May, because you have to go on a wait list. And I think for me, it took about 10 days. For you, it took a little bit more to be approved. I didn’t even get a notification. It’s just like I opened up my iPad, because that’s where I’ve got the 18.2 beta, and I tapped on the icon for image playground to see if it was working, and all of a sudden, it was working. I expected to get some sort of notification with confetti and balloons like you get on your birthday.

Josh Long 1:59
I did notice that I got a notification on the lock screen. So I actually have the setup on my wife’s iPad, because even though I do have a new phone that’s capable of Apple Intelligence, I kind of don’t really want to run an early ish beta on my main device, so I’m only really using this on the iPad right now, but I did notice that there was a lock screen notification saying that she got access to it. So yeah, so Kirk and I have both been playing with this. We’ve been experimenting a little bit with seeing how good of a job it does at generating images of people that we have in our in our photo library and contacts as well as as well as cats in Kirk case. So tell us about your experience with generating your own cats.

Kirk McElhearn 2:45
Well, I do take a lot of photos of my cats because they’re so good looking. And I tried several different photos, and I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a tweet that I posted showing these two I was going to say photos of the cats and generative images of the cats taken from the photos, they look remarkably like my cat. Now, of course, there are some differences. Titus, who is the browner cat, he has very faint stripes and not as visible as this. So the tool actually picked up on that. It picked up on the contrast of the stripes. What’s interesting is two legs in front of him are joined into one pore that looks like it has about eight fingers. Rosalind on the other hand, the white cat, she looks a lot more like her picture that I use, and she looks a lot more like herself. What the image creation tool did pick up is both of my cats are British, short hair, and that’s a breed that has fluffy cheeks, so the cheeks are wider than a lot of cats. And the image creation tool did pick up on that. And if you look closely at the images, it’s really detailed. The way the hair around the edge of the cat gets really fine, just the way it is on a real cat. So both of these are from photos that were in my photo album of the cats lying down on the ground looking out, and their faces do look remarkably like my cats. Now other photos I tried, they don’t look as good. And I tried, you know, a dozen different photos in different positions. These two were the best, but others, they just look like generic cats. And my cats are anything but generic.

Josh Long 4:11
Of course. So here’s the experience that I had. I tried this for both me and for my wife, and I got one out of I think it generates up to like 2025, images per prompt. So you you pick the person that you want, and you can pick, like, a background, some kind of scenario or whatever, to put that person into, and you pick the key photo that you want it to be based on. And I It wasn’t super great. I mean, I found one that kind of looks like me, that I was like, okay, that one’s, I guess, close enough. And there was also one that kind of looks like my wife. I’m like, Yeah, that’s kind of close enough. I guess these aren’t great. And I’ve seen other people posting some of theirs as well, and they’re not super happy with the images that were generated for them either. Again, this is the best. One that I could find, and it’s not, it’s not perfect.

Kirk McElhearn 5:03
If I saw this, I wouldn’t think of you seeing this. I really wouldn’t. But then again, there’s one photo that I tried from your social media profile photo, and it makes you look who’s the guy in Back to the Future, the professor, guy with the weird hair and all and like, you got these eyes that look like you’re on drugs, and I know you’re not on drugs, Josh, so it was really surprising. Now, while you were talking, I took a screenshot of you in zoom, and I just did a couple of examples, and I’m going to show you one here that makes you look about six years old and doesn’t look anything like you at all. There’s just some way that some photos work and some don’t. Now to point out, you said you pick people, but you can actually choose a specific photo in your photo library. Right on the bottom you have, you choose a person, then you choose a style. The styles are animation or illustration, and the final button is to choose a photo, or even to take a photo, which is probably what most people are going to do with an iPhone, when they get this, is they’ll take a photo with this, and then they’ll make the thing. But I mean, literally none of these look like you in any way. And it’s really hit or miss this sort of thing. And I kind of wonder if this works, I think it’ll go viral among young ish people, let’s say teens to 20s, right? And they’re going to be taking pictures of their friends, and they’re going to send them, haha, look at this. And they’ll, you know, set some sort of a thing, like, here’s so and so on a beach or in a forest or next to a swimming pool. But if they don’t look like the people in the pictures or the people in reality, I see this as being a big problem.

Josh Long 6:33
Yeah, I think a lot of people are going to be a little bit upset that it’s not as accurate as they would like it to be like, especially when you’re making an image of yourself or a loved one, right? Like, if it’s just a friend and you’re kind of goofing around, maybe it doesn’t matter quite as much, you know you you want it to look like you, right? Like, if you’re thinking about maybe using this as your profile picture, or something like that, well, you want it to actually look like you. So it’s a little bit problematic. But you know what this is the very, very early stages of this beta, and you have to wait a while if you really want this feature. As soon as it comes out, you’re probably going to need to put a beta on some device that is capable of running Apple Intelligence, just so that you can request access to this early. Because I have a feeling that as as soon as this operating system that the point two. So this is Mac OS, Sequoia, 15.2 iOS and iPad OS 18.2 once those roll out, the rumor is maybe around December 8, there’s probably going to be tons and tons of people that, all at the same time, are going to be requesting access to the image creation beta, which might mean that it could take a month or longer before you get access to it, if that many people are requesting it at the same time right?

Kirk McElhearn 7:50
You think new users are going to have to request access? We don’t know yet. They could just make it available to everyone, but I kind of we were discussing earlier. They don’t want this to fail. They don’t want this to be if you’re old enough to remember, like handwriting recognition on the Newton that people make fun of. So I’m more likely to think that you will have to request it. Unlike the writing tools that we already have, which are not the Apple didn’t invent anything. There are a lot of websites that offer this sort of feature, but for something like this, it’s really important that Apple gets it right. Now. It’s worth noting that the two styles, animation and illustration in no way look like deep fakes, and that’s what Apple wants to prevent. They look like. The animation looks like anime with the big eyes, and the illustration looks like, I don’t know, like a New Yorker magazine cover and some of them sketch kind of thing. Yeah, it’s a sketch without bright colors, no vivid colors. And so you can’t deep fake anything like that. And you can request to certain things, right? You can type a prompt. You don’t have to use a photo of a person or an object. So for instance, I asked it to create a an image of an iMac on a desk in a forest, and said, I can’t do that. So then I said, create an image of a computer on a desk in a forest, and it made a computer that looked exactly like an iMac. That’s funny. Okay, so what about Genmoji? Now I haven’t even bothered to try this because I don’t like care about emoji, but you have.

Josh Long 9:07
Yeah. I’ve only tried this once so far, and it took a whole bunch of tries. So the way you generate a Genmoji is a little bit different. Now, remember, Genmoji are not actual emojis, so that means you can’t use them in places where you can only input normal text. This is very specifically meant to be used with iMessage in in iMessages, you can treat it like an emoji. So you can use it as a tap back reaction to something that somebody else has posted. It kind of is more like a sticker than an emoji, but you can use it in line in an I message conversation as part of a text message as well. So I happened to generate a kettlebell because I was having conversation with somebody about kettlebells for working out. And it did a pretty good job. However, it made again, it kind of. Did a whole bunch of things that were very similar. And typically on a kettlebell, you’ll have, like, how many pounds or kilograms it is in the center, on on the front or back and back side of it. And the one that I got to look pretty good was just like a circle in the middle, and that’s it. It tried to do all these weird things with numbers. So it was kind of like it wasn’t sure. It knew some kind of number was normally there, but it didn’t really know what to do, and sometimes it would put this weird symbol there. So it’s not great, but at least they give you a lot of options. And I found one that looked okay, so I kind of like this. It’s not necessarily super compatible with older versions of iOS either. So if you’re running an older operating system, you may not be able to actually even see what this looks like. So that’s also something that you need to be aware of too. Just because you can generate this Genmoji doesn’t mean that other people are necessarily going to see it. They have to have a new enough version of the operating system to be able to see these as well.

Kirk McElhearn 11:05
Okay, we want to talk about a couple of AI stories quickly before we get to the break. We talked about some weird notification summaries. So one of the features in 18.1 and 18.2 is notification summaries, and this is particularly if you get a long message, it tries to summarize it into that little notification slab. Or if you get a number of alerts, it will group them together and kind of give you a summary of them. So we have an article in The Verge showing some of these things. And here’s ring notification, multiple people at front door, back door and driveway, or another 110, or more people detected at front entrance. Is this like a zombie apocalypse warning. Some of these notifications are really funny. Some of them are kind of dumb, we’ll link to the article, and some of these are kind of useless, and some are helpful. And I think it’s just, we’ll just have to see what happens. We have a story in Mac rumors again, very quickly. It seems like AI companies are struggling to improve their latest models that all the major companies seem to have hit a wall, and they’re talking about Google and anthropic and open AI. One of the problems is it’s difficulty in finding new, untapped sources of high quality, human made training data. So they’ve scraped the web already. They need more data to make these models more efficient, and they’re probably finding so much AI generated slop on the web that they’re able to detect, and they don’t want to put them into the model, because this will make the models worse that they’re kind of stuck. And I think every company is facing this, and maybe this whole AI boom has reached its sort of apex at this point, and it’s not gonna go much further.

Josh Long 12:42
Well, okay, I think this might be a little bit over exaggerated. I do think that the technologies are still improving, and in my opinion, they’re getting better. I mean, we’re getting better models all the time. Maybe we’re getting to one of these kind of plateaus or bottlenecks. But I feel like this is not an insurmountable problem, and it’s just a matter of time before we can move beyond this. So you can look at a number of things with technology, right? You know, there, there’s been a problem with processors, right? We can’t get processors to go a whole lot faster than this. We’re getting to a point where we’re going to be stuck, and we won’t be able to make faster processors. Well, guess what? You find a different way to make the processor right, and eventually we can make chips using a process that allows us to go even smaller, like fewer nanometers in a chip. So there’s things like that that inevitably happen and and I feel like that’s probably more accurately where we are with AI, I don’t, I don’t think we’re at a point where it’s completely stalled or stagnant. And you know what? On the bright side, too, Apple is still very early in this game, so you know where other companies are stalling. Maybe this gives Apple a little bit of a chance to catch up.

Kirk McElhearn 14:01
Okay, we’re going to take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the new M for iMac and more.

Voice Over 14:08
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M4 processors and extra RAM across all Apple lines hint at future feature requirement

Kirk McElhearn 15:19
Okay, Mark Gurman, Apple’s designated leaker has said in one of the solution newsletters that Apple will be updating other Macs to the M4 so this would be the MacBook Air, the MAC studio and the Mac Pro, and this will be the first time that Apple has updated all of their Macs to the same processor family, because we have the M4 M4 pro M4 Max, and potentially the M4 Ultra, the first time we’ve done this in more than a decade. And this makes me think that the M4 is going to be a dividing line in a few years for these Apple Intelligence features. The other thing that Apple did, and we talked about last week, is that all Mac sold now have 16 gigabytes of RAM by default. So it looks like we’re going to need this processor power for something, but Apple isn’t doing this for this year. I mean, if you think about the iPhone and what they did with the iPhone 15 Pro, only being able to run Apple Intelligence, that was a bit of a blunder, but it looks like they’re preparing something. We’ll talk about this in a minute when we get to the iMac but we have a couple of other stories we want to talk about. Want to talk about. Police were discovering that phones that they had confiscated from criminals, they could no longer access them with these tools like gray key that can read the devices, because the phones rebooted themselves. And these police were thinking that the phones were communicating with each other. And of course, that doesn’t make sense, but it turns out that Apple introduced some sort of a code that reboots phones after a certain amount of time, not just to prevent the police. In fact, probably preventing the police is not why they did it. They probably did it in case phones are stolen, that if the criminals don’t do anything with them, they’re going to reboot and then they can’t do anything at all.

Josh Long 17:00
Right, so, and by the way, this is something that I happen to notice that a couple of times when I’ve been using my iPhone, which is on iOS 18.1 or even the iPad that I’ve been using that’s on the 18.2 beta, I’ve noticed that this has started to happen where I’m like, Really, it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long since the last time I unlocked it, and yet it’s sort of behaving as though it rebooted, and I just kind of dismissed it. But evidently, this is happening to a lot of people, and it is a feature, not a bug. I think this is a good thing. I think in general, this is a good thing because it makes it more difficult for iPhone thieves to be able to break into your device, right? So it has the unfortunate side effect that, of course, law enforcement, who have legitimate reasons to be able to break into phones, are now finding it more difficult to do so. So this is always the trade off, right? Apple will find more ways to protect users privacy, and that isn’t always super compatible with what law enforcement is trying to do in order to catch the bad guys.

99 reasons why you need a Mac antivirus

Kirk McElhearn 18:06
Okay, so you have an article in the Intego Mac security blog giving 99 reasons why you need a Mac antivirus. The first thing I think of when I see 99 is how many bottles of beer there are on the wall.

Josh Long 18:17
Right? So our malware analysis team reached out to me recently and said, Hey, we found 99 unique samples of this base 64 encoded shell script. So it kind of all of these scripts look pretty much the same, and what’s similar is that they all have kind of the same, like three chunks of code and then there’s a script that come that mashes them all together, decodes it and runs it. And so the actual contents are a little bit different, but the formatting of this is exactly the same, so 99 unique samples that are all pretty much the exactly the same thing. So what this all leads to, if you decode this, basically what it’s doing is it’s copying some Steeler malware from a disk image. It first of all looks to see, hey, is this particular disk image mounted right now? If so, then I’m going to copy it, run it, and then it’s going to be Steeler malware that’s going to run on on your system. So they’re looking for, kind of the usual things that we see steel or malware looking for. They’re going to look for cryptocurrency wallets. They’re going to steal your browser cookies, which keep you logged into sites. So remember, if someone gets your cookies, they can usually get into your accounts without knowing your password and without any sort of two factor authentication. So that’s a big deal. They also are looking for Microsoft Word documents and some other things as well, and stealing all those things, exfiltrating them to an attacker. So we do detect all this. Obviously, if you’re using virus barrier, you’re already protected from this malware. So make sure, if you’re not using antivirus, that you get virus barrier installed and set up on. Machine as soon as possible.

Hackers are always dreaming up new schemes

Kirk McElhearn 20:02
Okay, another technique that hackers are using is they are concatenating zip files to evade detection. Now, if you’re familiar with working on the command line, you can use a tool called Cat, C, A, T, to concatenate files. So you cat and then you choose a bunch of files, and it sticks them all together, one after the other. Zip file being compressed makes it difficult to detect malware, but you can still do it with good anti malware software. But if you can catenate zip files, or even zip a bunch of zip files, it makes it a lot harder. This is a clever technique to hide malware in what looks like a normal zip file. It could just say archive dot zip, for example, right?

Josh Long 20:43
And we’ve seen things like this over the years. And malware makers are always trying to be clever about how they obfuscate malware. So they sort of try to hide it from antivirus tools and and this is yet another method. It’s sort of zip file inception, right? So it’s like a zip file within a zip file, and you go enough layers, and you format it in kind of a different, weirder way, and they’re hoping that they’re going to be able to bypass some anti malware tools. Now, in this particular article that we’ll link to, they’re mostly talking about Windows malware here, but it is something interesting to know that malware makers are always trying to find ways around it’s a cat and mouse game, right? They want to bypass the antivirus tools so they can infect your machine. Antivirus is having to keep up with that to make sure that this malware can’t infect your machine.

What’s the new M4 iMac like?

Kirk McElhearn 21:34
Okay. So I have a new computer on my desk. It is the brand new M4 iMac, and the first thing that I noticed when I took this out of the box is it looks exactly like the M1 iMac that I had previously. It looks so much like the M1 iMac that if I wasn’t careful, I might not know which one was. Which the borders on the edge of the screen are a different color. It’s faster. It’s like, I mean, the M1 was from three and a half years ago, and this is 3m faster. I notice it in some things like web pages render much more quickly, using the cleanup tool in Apple photos, which is an AI tool that definitely works more quickly, but there’s not a whole big difference. So we were mentioning earlier about the M4 being a plateau. The iMac was updated to M3 last year. So it went from an M1 to an M3 to an M4 usually. For a long time, they’ve skipped a generation with whatever processor it was. And the fact that the iMac, which is, I want to say, the base desktop computer, has been updated again, is a bit surprising. Now, arguably, this is a faster computer in many ways. And in fact, I looked at some Geekbench scores for the M1 and the M3 and then I ran Geek Bench on my own Mac. Now, obviously these processor scores aren’t the only way of judging the speed of a computer. The M1 was about 2400 for a single core, and 8200 for multi core. The M3 is about 3000 for single core, and 11,600 for multi core. And my M for iMac, I got 30 656 and 14,404 compared to the M1 that’s about 70% faster, which is what Apple’s saying for everyday tasks. Is what they’re saying. Now it’s really hard to talk about a computer that’s the same as the previous computer, right? If you have an M3 iMac, please don’t upgrade. You don’t need it. You’re going to be fine for a couple of years. It’s really fast enough. If you have an M1 iMac, like I do, you will find some improvements. And honestly, one of the main reasons I bought this is because of the M4 Apocalypse that’s coming in, which you’ll have to have an M4 going forward for features or whatever.

Josh Long 23:45
That’s an assumption that we’re making.

Kirk McElhearn 23:47
Of course, it’s an assumption we’re making, but I think it’s a fair assumption. Also, after three and a half years, it looks like they won’t be updating again for two years. I mean, I think the M3 update was a bit of a blip, and I did say that I wanted to keep my M1 iMac for five years, and I didn’t, and that’s sad, but now I think I’m covered for five years. We’ll find out in five years, so I keep it this long. I think the main differences with this are, let’s see you get I got the four port model, so you get four Thunderbolt ports instead of two Thunderbolt in USB. Doesn’t really matter to me that much. I’m not plugging in external displays. I don’t transfer a lot of data. I have this USB C cable to charge my keyboard, which is wonderful. I can get rid of the lightning cable. That’s good, and it has a center stage camera. Now I haven’t turned the center stage camera on in our chat, and I’m going to do it now to show Josh something, because we were trying this with our producer, to see how this works. So if I go in here,

Josh Long 24:45
This is a little dangerous. Kirk, you’re doing a live demo right now, right in the middle of our podcast…

Kirk McElhearn 24:49
Doing a live demo, and you’re going to like it. So did you see how it started moving? So center stage follows you around as you move, right? But here’s what’s really cool. Watch this. Make sure there’s no cats back there. Ready?

Josh Long 25:01
Ooh. Okay. So Kirk scooted his chair back, and it followed him, and kind of zoomed in to follow him where he was going, right?

Kirk McElhearn 25:10
So if you’ve ever seen Alfred Hitchcock’s rear window Jimmy Stewart, he’s broken his leg, and he’s in a wheelchair, and they have to dolly zoom at one point where he’s really scared about what he sees. And so you can tell that I’m further away from my microphone and I’m moving in. So what happens is the camera zooms out behind me to try and keep my face the same size. It’s really creepy. I wouldn’t recommend doing this on Zoom calls with people. In fact, when when I was chatting with our producer before the show, he said you shouldn’t leave this on during the podcast, because it’s too disturbing. It’s not as bad as what I’ve seen in Apple studio display. I know someone who has one, and every time we’re on a zoom call and he moves a little bit, it gets a little bit weird. The other feature that this has is what’s called desk view. So desk view is this thing where you’re supposed to be able to the camera kind of figures out how to look at what’s on your desk, and using the iMac on the angle at which I look at it, so not totally vertical, but leaning back a little bit. Desk view is basically my stomach. You have to tilt it forward a lot to be able to see the desk, and I mean a lot. So this is totally useless. When I first tried this, when they released it with an iPhone on top of a MacBook Air. It was really excellent. You could see what’s on the desk, but here it’s pretty useless. So I would say my verdict is, if you have an Intel iMac man, you’re going to be blown away by this M4 it’s going to be, like, a million times faster than what you had if you had an M1 you’ll probably be happy if you have an M3 don’t waste your money. Wait for the next one.

Josh Long 26:42
I have seen a lot of people saying the same thing that Kirk was saying, that, you know, they they’ve got an M1 they feel like it’s good enough, but they’re looking at the M4 and they’re kind of going, ooh, maybe it is time for me to upgrade. I really like the speediness of it. It’s a really good machine. And if you’ve kind of been on the fence and, like, not sure if he should upgrade. Maybe this is a good time to do that, because the like, Kirk said, you know, M4 is probably going to be the standard going forward, based on what Mark Gurman is telling us that all of the entire Mac line going to M4 at some point in the nearer future is a pretty good indicator that that’s going to be kind of the new baseline, just like M1 was initially when Apple started rolling out the the M series chips and Macs at the beginning, if I were in the market for an iMac right now, I would absolutely be buying an M4 iMac now at the same time, I also really like the Mac Mini, which has, you know, it has the pro chip, which you can’t get in in the iMac. It’s also got Thunderbolt five, which is, you know, not, not something that everybody’s going to use.

Kirk McElhearn 27:53
Yeah, I don’t even need Thunderbolt four. So Thunderbolt five is good. If you use multiple displays, right? You’re going to get more data throughput for that. I just want to say one more thing about the M4 processor that we might not be thinking of. We’re looking at the raw speed Geek Bench results, etc. There might be something else in the processor that we don’t know about, like the neural engine, might be more optimized, or might be optimized in a future operating system. There could be other modules that we don’t even know about. So you can’t just judge a processor because of what it does in terms of speed. For example, the memory bandwidth on this is faster, a lot faster than the M3 and even at the same processor speed, more memory bandwidth will give you better performance. So a processor is no longer just one unit. It’s all these units on one chip that all work together.

Josh Long 28:43
Right in terms of Apple chips, especially, right? Apple puts everything all together. So instead of having a separate GPU, for example, you’ve got Graphics Processing built into the same M series chip. So this is a major reason why Apple is able to get so much faster with their chips than what Intel and the other competitors have been doing. And also, interestingly enough, this is why the industry is starting to move toward ARM based chips. You’ll notice that on the Windows side of things, you’re starting to see a lot more of these AI enhanced Windows systems that are starting to come out, and they’re typically using ARM based chips, which is what the M series Max are based on that same ARM architecture. Real quick before we wrap up, I just want to mention that Microsoft just released Windows patches, including two actively exploited bugs that have been fixed. So if you know people who use Windows, make sure to tell them to patch.

Kirk McElhearn 29:48
Okay. Next week, we’re going to do a deep dive into Wi Fi routers for Black Friday. And the reason we’re going to look at this is to discuss the issues that you should pay attention to when you’re buying any sort of computing device on Black Friday. Josh is going to explain why he absolutely has to buy a Wi Fi 7 router, and I’m going to, on the other side, explain why that’s way too expensive and it would cost more than my iMac. So until next week, Josh, stay secure.

Josh Long 30:09
All right, stay secure.

Voice Over 30:15
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your host, Kirk McElhearn and Josh long to get every weekly episode. Be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review, links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the [email protected] the Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software intego.com.

About Kirk McElhearn

Kirk McElhearn writes about Apple products and more on his blog Kirkville.

He is co-host of the Intego Mac Podcast, as well as several other podcasts, and is a regular contributor to , TidBITS, and several other websites and publications.

Kirk has written more than two dozen books, including Take Control books about Apple’s media apps, Scrivener, and LaunchBar.

Follow him on Twitter at @mcelhearn.
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