00:00.60 James Welcome back, everyone, to Merge Conflict, your weekly developer podcast about all things in the wide, wide, wide, wide-ranging, amazing world of software development. I'm one of your co-hosts. James Montemagno and the man with plenty of sunlight coming through those beautiful, beautiful windows, Mr. 00:14.08 Frank thank 00:14.98 James Frank Krueger. How's it going, buddy? 00:16.53 Frank Oh, it's going very well. I'm a little thrown off because we're side by side now. I'm used to being below you. That's that's where I'm accustomed in my life. James is above, I'm below. But in our new podcasting software. onto the side. I don't know how I feel about that 00:30.67 James Well, you know what you can use you can right-click on me and then do picture and picture and then it'll pop out and you can put me wherever you want. You can put me out on another monitor. 00:37.61 Frank Oh. 00:37.88 James I got you on my teleprompter right now. 00:39.98 Frank Oh, that's a good place for me. But I'm just going to put you right back where you were because that was actually fine. ah Yeah, it's they changed our software, James. why Why did they change software? Shouldn't software, like, if it's working... just keep it working because people bought the thing that's working So you should just, you know. 00:58.83 Frank Give them that. not something different. Because if you give them something different, they didn't buy that different thing. They bought the first thing. 01:05.87 James The first thing. 01:05.91 Frank It's a little bit tricksy, isn't it? like this whole updating software thing. I don't like it, to be honest. 01:12.14 James Yeah, I think the issue with. i don't have a problem with updating software to be honest with you the problem that i have with it because 01:16.81 Frank okay 01:19.12 James Imagine you're a brand new person going into Zencaster. for the very first time. The software is new to you. It's brand new. 01:26.47 Frank Sure. 01:27.75 James unattained world. The problem that we actually have. is the lack And this is for both new users and existing users is the, is the lack of onboarding. 01:38.35 James For new users, and also the lack of onboarding which is different by the way For existing users that just came into your software and like. 01:45.06 Frank Yeah. 01:46.41 James What's going on here? So the problem I had, I did get an email from Zencastr. They're like, ah, new version. Here it is. I was like, cool. That sounds great. I'm like, I better log on 10 minutes early because I can't figure anything out. I used to go this. yeah url I used to log in. 01:58.59 James Maybe like merge conflict. Enter recording studio. 02:01.57 Frank Hmm. 02:02.25 James Nope. Nope. It just shows me all the episodes. There's no button. You know where I got to go? 02:06.83 Frank ah 02:08.18 James to I have to go to the AI chat for our podcast. 02:11.27 Frank Oh. Do you? 02:12.58 James And then enter. 02:12.64 Frank Request a new chat. 02:14.19 James I have to request a new chat. and the new chat is the podcast episode i don't know what's going on anymore i'm so confused so but 02:16.46 Frank ah 02:21.13 Frank This is like when I... Sorry, yeah go ahead. 02:23.11 James But if they if they just had an arrow that said, hey, welcome back. You know, you've only been using the software for 10 years, you know. 02:28.98 Frank Mm hmm. 02:29.86 James Welcome back. Here's where you need to go to get to the recording studio. Boom. Good to go. 02:36.41 Frank you know i do hate uh making every episode about ai it feels like that's all we do all day but maybe that is what we do all day but nowadays like you have no excuse like i think i keep talking about documentation on the podcast because i'm like that's been the great innovation for me with um the ai stuff it's just like hey uh go look at the old version go look at the new version and can you write an onboarding doc it would take it like 02:59.22 James Yeah. 02:59.89 Frank 30 minutes less probably and it would just write a doc um doc might not be good enough for you maybe you want a video or something but it is kind of cool that It's good and bad. 03:11.26 Frank We don't have an excuse anymore for bad documentation. 03:13.92 James Oh. 03:14.03 Frank All our stuff should be well documented now. 03:16.65 James It's kind of crazy and you can just kind of do anything so configurator, which is for Oh My Posh. 03:21.75 Frank Mm hmm. 03:22.97 James So I was talking to Jan. who creates, oh, my posh. And he created for his documentation. A WebAssembly version. of Oh My Posh. So that emulates the terminal. 03:33.39 Frank Yeah. 03:34.58 James that shows you one-to-one mapping. 03:34.67 Frank Super cool. 03:36.09 James And I was like, bro. That's so sick. Because... Like I've been basically trying to redraw. 03:43.21 Frank Yeah. 03:43.92 James Everything. 03:44.13 Frank Re-implement. 03:45.56 James So I know we just got pretty close, but I can get one-to-one. So. 03:49.43 Frank Mm hmm. 03:49.89 James he was like bro i just like told they i was like you know what I bet I could just tell AI to do it. And then he's like, I just told AI to do it. And then it did it. 03:56.06 Frank Yeah. 03:56.13 James I was like, dude, that's awesome. So then. What I did is I was like. Dude, I gotta get that. Interop. into the configurator. Cause I own. 04:04.29 Frank Mm hmm. 04:04.96 James with him now, configurator .onmyposh .dev. So like I got to maintain that puppy, right? 04:09.19 Frank Hehehehe. 04:08.78 James It's like official source. 04:09.78 Frank Yeah. 04:09.62 James And I wanted to have a link to it from the docs, which he now does, which is really cool. So you can like open. from the docs anything in configurator and then customize it 04:17.15 Frank cool 04:18.56 James So now. You have the studio beta, which is what he calls it. When you initialize studio, it downloads. A web assembly version. And it's like a one-to-one. mapping that's running this puppy. 04:29.74 Frank Hmm. 04:29.62 James And again, I just told they had to do it and it did it, but even better. 04:32.29 Frank Yeah. 04:33.39 James This used to have like a funky theme. It was like a dark blue neon theme. And I was like, no, no, no. Go look at the Oh My Posh website, which is open source, and match the color scheme. 04:43.99 James One to one. 04:45.53 Frank Yeah. 04:45.70 James One time one, baby. And then I want it to be exactly as I went through and like had it retheme everything light mode, dark mode. All the things on it. And yeah, this puppy is great. And it's just like, you can just. Tell it to do it. 04:57.52 James And boom, it's doing it. and I love it. 05:00.51 Frank uh side topic it is funny how every time you tell these things to generate a website it's like how about blue to purple gradients. Have you tried a blue to purple gradient? I'm an AI. I do everything in a blue to purple gradient. 05:12.63 James Mmm. 05:12.88 Frank It's it's just kind of funny. Every single one of them, it seems to be the default mode. 05:17.22 James You gotta use... 05:17.43 Frank This looks great. 05:18.95 James You gotta to use... Um, Impeccable. the impeccable design. 05:23.87 Frank Right. 05:25.61 James Now. 05:25.68 Frank which I believe has a blue to purple gradient. 05:28.01 James ah I don't know. Well, you can see local morph Localmorph, localmorph .com. 05:32.36 Frank Okay. 05:32.42 James Which I would say has a... I don't know 05:36.77 Frank Yeah. 05:37.58 James Let's go. Well, I don't know if you have the old version or the new version, but it'll update. 05:38.90 Frank Yeah. 05:40.87 James It's ah it's a static web app. Um... Yeah, localmorph .com. So I threw up impeccable at it. and i was like go for it 05:49.13 Frank Mm hmm. 05:50.45 James And then it made like a very beautiful design. I don't know. It's the light blue. It's got. lots of whites it's got cool fonts. It's got like these cool drop shadow things. I don't know. 05:59.81 Frank Okay. Cool. 06:01.13 James It's pretty decent. I mean, comparatively to the. the blue and purple that it was before. So. yeah 06:08.08 Frank It's just a funny default. I just like how, you know, scraping every website in the world, it's decided that that's what 2026 looks like. Blue to purple gradients. 06:18.19 James ludicr but Yeah, well, I will say. The caption stack. which is another one. I don't know if impeccable did this one. It might have caption stack .app. which allows you to convert. Subtitle files because I love that. 06:29.59 James I gotta do this. 06:29.90 Frank Oh yeah. 06:29.97 James I gotta do 06:30.18 Frank I... I knew I knew the name. i just Out of your 8 ,000 URLs or domains you own, I couldn't remember which one that was. 06:38.21 James Well, so, okay. So I did this. So local, so recently local morph. 06:42.03 Frank Yes. 06:42.58 James is really unique. So local morph, I wanted to harness the power of. FFmpeg WebAssembly version to do file conversions in your browser. 06:50.43 Frank Rad. Superbrand. 06:52.35 James It's super rad, but like is not good 06:55.03 Frank Oh, why not? Why not good? 06:56.74 James It's... 06:56.81 Frank I haven't used it to be honest. 06:57.41 James it 06:58.04 Frank I like the idea. 06:59.68 James I love the idea. It's inconsistent. It's slow. 07:03.67 Frank Yeah. 07:03.92 James I don't know It doesn't. 07:05.23 Frank Yeah. 07:05.89 James necessarily always work. 07:07.59 Frank Oh. 07:07.68 James Like I did a move to MP4 and then all of a sudden like there was no audio and I was like, what happened here? You know? so 07:14.13 Frank ah they didn't pay the apple uh codec licensing fee that's what happened you'd be surprised how much that's why the ffm peg uh is always a little weird to set up sometimes it turns out a lot of that av stuff is licensed james i'm not sure you know that no one pays for the license so it's always kind of funny any of it works to be honest 07:19.60 James Maybe. 07:30.15 James It definitely is. Oh yeah. 07:35.20 James Well, so what I recently did so there's two things i recently did i said Dude, what if I could... Use. your local FFmpeg? What if I created a bridge? from the browser. 07:46.15 Frank no No. Don't do it. 07:48.89 James So I did. 07:48.90 Frank that you're You're breaking every every security model ever developed for the web. How are you working around those? 07:53.39 James No, there's... There's a bridge URL and a pairing token. And it's like, boom. 07:58.38 Frank wow 07:58.83 James It's just automatic. And it's a .NET 10. glo It's ah done a it. You DNX. 08:04.63 Frank Okay. 08:05.37 James Local morph dot bridge. You can copy that command in. 08:07.97 Frank It opens up a proxy so anyone can log into your machine. 08:11.25 James No. 08:11.85 Frank Everyone's granted SSH into your machine. 08:13.40 James There's parrot. Pairing tokens is a whole thing. All this stuff randomly generated every time you boot it up. 08:17.89 Frank Okay. Okay. 08:20.20 James ah It's kind of like how Aspire works where it's like. Boots up a randomly generated token. 08:23.41 Frank Yeah. 08:25.69 James So as it boosts us up. 08:27.13 Frank Mm-hmm 08:26.88 James The first time I asked it to do it, I just like wrote it in Rust for some reason. I was like, no, no, no. 08:30.38 Frank Uh huh. 08:30.72 James I was like. na No no no no oh went no. 08:32.50 Frank Not at all. 08:33.11 James theav it that I was like. 08:34.77 Frank ah 08:35.34 James Dot. and I was like. Go look at my. Like other DNX tool, my podcast, metadata generator. 08:40.91 Frank Yeah. 08:42.15 James Go see how I did it. Cause that's really nice. You can just DNX local morph top bridge. 08:45.07 Frank Mhm. 08:45.52 James Boom. 08:45.36 Frank Mm hmm. 08:45.68 James You got have to have the Donna SDK, but boom, good to go. And it totally works great. It literally like will. 08:49.65 Frank Okay, cool, cool. 08:50.09 James do it on your machine, super one-on-ones. If you're doing file conversions, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, you get a beautiful GUI for FFmpeg. 08:55.03 Frank Yeah. 08:56.66 James And then today I was like. Dude, you know I should just build? 09:00.25 Frank Hmm. 09:00.29 James just like a maui app like i just build build an app dude 09:02.47 Frank I know. 09:03.40 James I'm at this point 09:03.69 Frank I know. 09:04.74 James Like just build the app. So then I did, I was like, bro. 09:06.48 Frank Do you think? 09:08.00 James I was like, bro, go over here I shot over Kimmy K3 to it. I said, bro, go do this. Break it down. 09:14.96 Frank Yeah. 09:15.09 James And then I used. MAI Code One Flash, Code 1 .1 Flash, which just came out today. 09:20.44 Frank Ooh. 09:21.29 James which is 09:21.83 Frank 30 % discount. 09:22.13 James 70... 09:22.60 Frank 25%. 09:23.75 James It's 73 % cheaper. while being 25%. more token efficient and faster than the previous code one flash. 09:29.70 Frank right Yeah. 09:31.92 James So I threw that at it and I was like, dude, implement this plan. And then it did it. And then literally within 30 minutes, I had like a native app on my desktop. with .maui for Windows and Mac. 09:41.68 Frank Okay. 09:42.24 James I was like boom. done. 09:44.17 Frank Boom. 09:44.76 James Which is crazy. You know, it was. 09:46.24 Frank I have. 09:46.89 James Ridiculous. 09:48.21 Frank I have a few points. Point number one. Cool. I actually do appreciate it. i was I was just joking with all the security stuff. Who cares about security? 09:55.51 James Cool. 09:55.89 Frank It's actually, yeah. 09:59.04 James Cool. 10:00.00 Frank Cool. It is, because like... And that my second point is, do you think every developer out there? maybe once a year, thinks about writing a front end to FFmpeg. 10:10.93 Frank Because like, I feel like, like just last week, I was thinking, you know what FFmpeg needs is a front end. And I'm like, hmm, I wonder if I'm the first developer in the world to ever think of that idea. And then you realize FFmpeg is, it's not an app. it's 50 different apps with. 10:28.03 Frank whatever 50 years of history behind it so it's impossible to write like a front end for ffmpeg you have to like pick a slice of its features and build a front end for that But i just I just thought it hilarious. 10:40.33 Frank I had that terrible thought of, I should write a front end for FFmpeg. No, you should not, Frank. And neither should you, listener. No one should be writing front ends for FFmpeg, except for James, because he has like infinite credits or something. 10:52.07 James but You know what? your your ah So your front end for FFmpeg is... and AI. Like you. 10:57.80 Frank It is. 10:58.11 James You, yeah I literally... 10:58.81 Frank 100. Yes. 10:59.86 James So. but John Gallo and I talk about this all the time. I'm like, Hey dude, I got a bunch of files. What do I do with these? I got to convert them. 11:05.30 Frank Yeah. 11:05.39 James He's like. okay open that full open that folder in copilot type in copilot open the cli and say Hey bro, I need you to convert these from this and that using FFmpeg. Oh, yeah, I could do that. 11:15.28 James And what's even crazier is like I was doing this and on a new machine. 11:16.16 Frank I do. 11:18.99 James It was like. Hey. You don't have FFM pay. You want me to install that for you? 11:23.70 Frank yeah 11:23.84 James and look I'll just brew it. I'll just wing at it. and you're like ah Okay. 11:26.97 Frank but 11:27.81 James And like... Cool. We're good. We're good here. I installed it for you. like all right, you know, but. It's kind of crazy because. Um, Yeah, I mean, there's... 11:39.06 James You can build anything. I mean, to your to your point. uh mark racinovich and the and the crew ported zoom at one of my favorite tools for presentations on windows over to Mac, which I have installed now. 11:46.06 Frank Oh yeah. 11:49.73 James So I can zoom, I can draw, I can do all this stuff. And he talked about in his video, how he just basically pointed. The windows. appointed the AI, the co-pilot at the the... 11:58.29 Frank Mm hmm. 11:59.30 James the the windows version i was like hey dude make this a um ah mac app And then do all the research, the planning and all this stuff. 12:03.57 Frank Yeah. 12:05.32 James And then boom. Yeah, I'm not going to say it's the most beautiful setting screen I've ever seen in my life, but it's a good V1. For a vibe and like. It works. pretty good. I was like, Oh, it's pretty decent out of the box, then 12:16.03 Frank Yeah. 12:18.27 James Other people were like, hey, I'd like. you know, I did this. And I had some people like reach out to her. Like I bid, I did this like seven months ago. 12:23.76 Frank Mm hmm. 12:24.05 James I did this a year ago. Like, that's cool. Like. Show me the repo. And then the repo is like. 12:27.84 Frank Yeah. 12:28.43 James you know, untouched for seven months. you know there's a dmg just like checked in you know it's like 12:31.46 Frank Yeah. 12:34.64 James one feature is implemented. It's like, well, that's that's great. I'm like, you made it. 12:38.05 Frank Yeah. 12:37.93 James That's awesome. Like one, that's awesome. 12:39.37 Frank Mm hmm. 12:40.20 James Because you did it. 12:40.27 Frank Mhm, mhm. 12:41.29 James The actual hard part. is productizing it. shipping it. 12:45.04 Frank Yeah. 12:45.58 James getting it into the app store. getting your CI CD for brew or wind getter, all these other things set up. 12:47.46 Frank Yes. 12:50.38 James And I should know because I spent the weekend. holiday hacking. ah My fire number. which as you know, is my fire number. but My fire number. 12:58.97 Frank I can't keep up with all your apps. Which one is this one? 13:00.67 James yes What? 13:01.50 Frank I've forgotten already. 13:02.73 James You know, my fire number .com, which is all fire. calculators for financial independence and retiring early. 13:08.34 Frank Oh, that's right. 13:08.64 James and 13:08.91 Frank Now I remember this one. This is like a year ago. Okay. 13:11.82 James Yep. 13:11.97 Frank Yes. Financial. 13:13.15 James It's back, baby. 13:14.38 Frank fires got it you're creating fires with people's money 13:15.34 James Fires, yeah Well, I created this retirement cashflow because let's say I retire at 60. 13:21.90 Frank Mm hmm. 13:21.97 James I'm going to need to know like how much. do i have every year right like based on 13:25.73 Frank Do you? 13:27.87 James Yeah, I do need to know, Frank. 13:28.75 Frank You could wing it. You could wing it, man. Just just go for it. You're going to turn 60 one way or the other. 13:32.14 James Okay. 13:33.09 Frank Does it really matter? 13:35.54 James I would like to know if I'm well prepared or not, Frank Krueger. 13:39.23 Frank Okay. 13:38.98 James So. So. 13:40.75 Frank a forethought. 13:40.89 James I was vibing out some stuff. I was vibing out some stuff. stuff and i was like So I was like, hey, I made this new. cashflow calculator to new. Because there's a few things that are kind of unique to my situation that I wanted to incorporate that other calculators didn't have. 13:54.11 James So I was like, I'm going to make my calculator. Because that's what I do, Frank. 13:56.43 Frank Sure. 13:57.89 James And then Mr. Tim Heuer. It was like. Yeah, like I like your calculators a lot, but... Made my own iOS app. I was like, bro. 14:04.93 Frank yeah 14:05.09 James You built an iOS app before me? How rude. 14:07.35 Frank Yes. 14:07.25 James How rude of you! How dare you! So I spent the entire weekend. This. 14:11.48 Frank Oh no. 14:12.12 James spent the entire weekend. I spent like three hours. But I put it into, did I send this to you? I must've sent it to you. I put it on. 14:18.33 Frank I don't think so. 14:18.85 James I put it. I put it on the Twitter X. 14:20.57 Frank I try to keep up with all your apps. Did it make it to test flight? that's That's how I judge weekend projects now. 14:24.37 James Bro. 14:26.14 Frank Do they actually get to external beta testers in test flight? 14:31.12 James Bro. 14:30.85 Frank That's that's the test. Anyone can get to internal testing, James. That doesn't count. That doesn't count. 14:36.40 James Bro, is it a public. Beta test flight approved for public beta testing. 14:41.61 Frank Wow. 14:41.87 James It is only on iPhone, not on Mac. So you gotta install it. 14:43.96 Frank You got approved? That's the harder part these days, to be honest. 14:45.36 James Of course I did. Dude, I used Maui Sherpa to set up my entire. 14:50.12 Frank Yeah. 14:51.83 James certs provisioning profile, set up the CI CD. environment variables for me. and boom the whole production pipeline was done that fast It was wild. 15:02.40 Frank That's pretty great. 15:02.64 James you know And it did it. It all got it set up. It's good to go. and Dude. The icon's pretty good. Pretty good. It's got a little fire in the middle. 15:11.78 Frank Yeah. 15:12.09 James Roll fire. Fire number, get it. 15:14.22 Frank did you Is it a new icon? I can't tell because Apple refuses to turn on any parallax. Or is that a baked icon? 15:20.85 James i don't know 15:22.03 Frank Whatever. Doesn't matter. 15:22.73 James Oh, this one's... 15:22.79 Frank You vibed it. 15:24.25 James This one's baked. This one's baked. I need to update it. 15:25.79 Frank Okay. Yeah. 15:26.58 James so Big butt. You know, I don't know how to do that. 15:28.41 Frank No, you really don't. I got all excited. Wow, we we are all all over the place today. I got really excited for the new icon format because like they were going to finally add some 3D effects to everything. I just installed iOS 27 on all my devices. 15:38.70 James ah 15:41.66 Frank Not all my devices, most of my devices. And you still can't tell the new icons versus the old icons. like They have really nerfed that feature. 15:48.03 James What? 15:49.70 Frank like You can barely tell. like I squint at it and maybe it shifts by one pixel. 15:55.13 James man They could be they could do some cool stuff with it like you'd like ideally like that could be like a little glowy little shimmer. 16:03.13 Frank I am running your app using... Well, this is an ARM Mac, so all Macs are ARM now. So I guess this isn't even the Mac Catalyst one. This is probably the iOS one, isn't it? 16:13.86 James it's the ios one yes 16:15.24 Frank Yeah. Cool. ah It's working. your Your tiny educational informational purposes only font is very small, appropriate for a financial app. I have no disclaimers here. Make that text as tiny as possible at the bottom. 16:29.65 Frank But it's green like money. Or at least green like US money used to be. 16:33.87 James Yeah. 16:33.80 Frank So ah pretty cool. 16:35.75 James Pretty good. Yep. 16:36.63 Frank I'm moving sliders I have no idea what they mean. Can't wait. i think ah I think I'm going to survive 60. Oh, current age? Bump that up. Oh, wow. the The older I get in the current age, the closer the retirement age gets to the left. 16:51.78 Frank That's a little bit scary. james 16:52.79 James You like that? 16:55.43 Frank Save defaults. Take the fire quiz. 16:57.93 James Ooh, fire quiz. 16:58.21 Frank I'm minimal and frugal. 16:58.40 James Let's see what you get. Yep. 17:00.81 Frank I have no idea what I put those sliders to, but I am minimal and frugal. i'm goingnna I'm going to. leave paid work. I'm not sure what that means. The font's too small to read. I'm going to, Hudson, would you like to read? 17:13.99 Frank Financial independence. Well, that's never going to happen. So I'm saying not sure yet. ah What matters most in your fire plan? Build. F-I, financial independence, I assume. 17:26.08 Frank as soon as practical. Build financial security. Not sure what the difference is between those two. Maintain my lifestyle. to That's not going to happen. Create more flexibility. I need to buy at least three Apple Vision Pros per month. when I turn 60. That's just a requirement. 17:41.20 Frank Create more flexibility. No, I already have too much flexibility. I can put like my foot all the way behind my head. So build financial security. I'm gonna go with that. Because security is good. 17:53.12 James It's good. curious's good 17:55.00 Frank Standard fire. ah ill i'll Take the standard. I don't like to pay for pro. Um... I don't know what any of this stuff means. 18:02.76 James No paper, no paper. Nope. It's okay. 18:06.01 Frank What does it mean? Okay, there's a graph here. And then the graph at the bottom goes up. the green goes up i don't know if that's good or not the yellow does not go up much and then there's a less Ah, that's a pretty one. 18:18.73 James Yeah. 18:19.75 Frank My fire number is 16. 1 .6 million dollars. Well, I guess I'm gonna die when I turn 60. 18:26.01 James Okay. 18:26.02 Frank That'll be fun. 18:27.00 James Frank, Frank, Frank. Okay. It's really. it's really not this It's really not this difficult. People, okay. So when you go in, frank Frank is currently in the standard fire calculator. and You put in your current age. 18:37.82 James You put in when you want to retire. 18:39.97 Frank Okay. 18:39.98 James Okay. 18:41.09 Frank Uh huh. 18:40.93 James You put in your current savings. how much you're putting in, what your net income is. and what your you know, what expense, what you think your expenses will be when you retire. 18:51.15 Frank Mm hmm. 18:51.27 James And it'll basically just like create it. I'll tell you what you need. Your FIRE number is how much money you need to have currently. to retire with your fire number. 18:59.94 Frank To retire today. or to retire when I turn 60. 19:01.23 James Through time. 19:04.29 James To retire. today. 19:07.16 Frank Oh. Fascinating. So years to fire. 30 years. So I believe that says I'm going to be working until I die. 19:12.93 James Yeah. 19:15.94 Frank That'll be good. uh if anyone needs uh an artisanal app developer please let me know because according to this um I'm going to have a few rough years ahead, so please let me know. 19:17.50 James Yeah. 19:28.11 James There you go. I mean... It kind of makes sense. So let's say I'm 40. And let's say my my current saving is $50 ,000, right? And then I put in, let's say $2 ,000 into there. Let's say my net income. 19:44.42 James It's 72 grand. making pretty decent money. Let's say my. Let's say my expenses right now are like $50 ,000, right? a year. Okay. 19:54.54 Frank Sure. 19:54.48 James expected stuff, all good. So that would tell me that. That my fire number. is $1 .25 million to like retire fully. 20:03.34 Frank Okay. 20:05.02 James And I wouldn't be able to do it. I would need 67 years to be able to do that, right? 20:08.78 Frank Oh yeah. Oh, you're worse off than me. 20:09.63 James This is... Too much. 20:10.46 Frank Good, good, good. 20:11.58 James No. 20:11.42 Frank I lived through schadenfreude. Good. 20:13.84 James but if i was But I'm 40, right? So let's say I didn't have $50 ,000. Let's say... Current. savings, investments, the total their dollar amount. 20:19.71 Frank Mm hmm. 20:21.28 James Well, let's say I've been saving up. And I got. Half a million dollars. 20:25.74 Frank wo Okay, sir. 20:26.56 James Yeah, sure 20:27.41 Frank Sure. 20:27.68 James I've been. 20 years contributing to my 401k, grinding away. 20:31.01 Frank Look at you 20:31.41 James Boom, boom, boom. And it says I could retire in 22 .5 years. 20:36.79 Frank o You're going to be old too. 20:37.87 James Basically. Right. But that's ah if I'm only if that's if I'm only putting in $2 ,000 in contributions, but. 20:39.59 Frank You're gonna be old, buddy. 20:44.50 James I'm a fire person. I'm not just saving $2 ,000. I would be saving maybe like. Let's see. $30 ,000 if I'm making $70 ,000? 20:51.75 Frank wow 20:53.02 James Yeah, I'm frugal, man. 20:54.27 Frank Well, 22. 20:54.50 James Boom, I can retire. 20:55.35 Frank But yeah. 20:55.26 James I can retire in 12 years. 20:57.83 Frank Okay. Okay. 20:58.60 James So that' that's the difference is like what your. You're trying to get to that number. So what you're trying to do is say, here's my annual contributions. Here's my net income. And then. It's really just a calculation of. 21:09.78 James Here's how much I need. when I retire. 21:11.40 Frank Mm-mm. 21:11.99 James Like, to live. How much do you have? 21:13.59 Frank Yeah. 21:14.86 James And then there's just calculations, right? So like right now I'm at 40%. So it's like every month I'm putting an X amount on, these are just fictitious numbers, but then you see the chart and graph and it'll show you. 21:25.77 James when you hit certain numbers and when it will grow and when you'll hit those specific things. And then you can just withdraw. 4 % every single year. So boom. This is fire. Just fire. 21:36.02 James sper 21:37.19 Frank Okay. it seems like a very, very complicated way to worry about the future. 21:42.58 James Ha ha. 21:42.35 Frank I'm able to worry about the future without complication. it's it's innate to me. 21:46.47 James Hmm. 21:47.61 Frank So I don't really need numbers to help me worry. But this is ah if you're not worried about your future, this seems like a good way to create worries like that. 21:56.26 James Well, if you don't want to worry about fire stuff, there's also just like... You know. normal like debt payoff and you have like savings and retirement rates. 22:03.22 Frank Yeah. 22:04.20 James But then my favorite one is my new one, which is the retirement. Cashflow. So what you can do is you can. 22:08.62 Frank Mm hmm. 22:09.82 James Say, hey, listen. You're like, here's my current age. Here's where I think I'm going to retire to say 65. 22:16.71 Frank Mm hmm. 22:16.93 James And then. You just say, what's your current annual expenses? And then you just put in your accounts here, your much is in your savings, your 401k and whatever. And it'd be like. Cool, this is how much you're gonna have. 22:28.17 James Like, you know. based on the different things. 22:29.23 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 22:30.47 James So then you can say, oh, if I'm going to retire at 65, I'll have this amount of money, right? Every month. basically to live on. 22:35.96 Frank Well, now that we're a financial podcast, I'll just say like some of this is just too hard to figure out. 22:38.10 James you 22:41.06 Frank I believe in the. um goldfish principle, not in the memory forgetting goldfish, but a goldfish grows to the size of the pond. So if you have $50 ,000 to spend in a year, guess what? 22:48.91 James Yeah. 22:51.35 Frank You're going to spend $50 ,000. If you have $100 ,000 to spend in a year, guess what? You're going to spend $100 ,000. So I think this doesn't take into account the adaptability of the fee. future. and how you'd be willing to change your lifestyle depending on different circumstances. 23:04.45 James Oh, totally. Totally. No, a hundred percent. I mean, that's just like, these are just normal fire things. However, it does bring up a good point. 23:10.55 Frank Mm hmm. 23:11.17 James Like, I do wonder if I can simplify the number input. you know, and like really. Like there's just a lot of number entries, but maybe really I can be like, oh, let's simplify this down. 23:18.73 Frank Yeah. 23:21.04 James I suppose I'm going to do this. I'm going to make it even so I can even simplify it even more. You know what I mean? 23:25.49 Frank Yeah. Get me down to like three sliders. How much do I make? 23:28.47 James Three sliders. 23:29.86 Frank How much do I spend in a year? And what are my outstanding debts? 23:33.75 James Yeah. 23:34.03 Frank When can I retire? 23:35.50 James Yeah. 23:36.61 Frank Because ideally, the debts will go away at some point. I don't know. 23:40.16 James Yeah. 23:40.21 Frank Maybe you should just die with debt, you know. that That's an option too. 23:43.60 James It's an option too. 23:43.68 Frank I have a book called ah Die With Zero. I think that that's ah a very ambitious goal to get to. 23:47.29 James I bought it for you. 23:50.76 James I bought it. Yeah. Got it. Got it. I bought that for you. It's actually in the recommended books. If you go to the homes tab and you scroll to the bottom, it's in there. 23:55.90 Frank Is it? 23:57.38 James Yeah. 23:57.72 Frank Is that a fire thing? 23:59.27 James Yeah. 23:59.33 Frank I still haven't read it. 23:59.51 James Wow. What? Oh, my God. 24:01.99 Frank i'll I'll get to it. I'll get to it. i'll get to I understand the principle. It's an excellent title. so 24:06.92 James If you click on that link. Amazon affiliate. It even has a disclosure on the bottom. 24:10.19 Frank Oh, look at you. 24:10.43 James Wow. Good citizen. 24:11.61 Frank You're such a good businessman. 24:13.32 James I'm a good businessman. Thank you. Anyways, way too many apps way too much time. Um... to do that. Okay, let's talk really quick about... Franks. rantoftheweek .com. 24:28.12 James Frank says. 24:28.26 Frank James, AIs are bad. 24:29.88 James Nope. 24:30.29 Frank that's my rant the end no 24:30.40 James so That's not it. frank says Frank says, and I quote, Every app should be on the App Store. If it's not on the App Store, it doesn't exist. 24:37.02 Frank Oh. 24:37.12 James I hate homebrew. Quote, unquote, Frank Kruger. 24:41.23 Frank Well, that last part I actually have said several times. I believe in public, so that's fine. Look, and i you can hate homebrew without... applauding the effort of all the people who work very hard at homebrew homebrew is the package manager for mac Great developers. We like package managers. Everyone hates tar balls. No one wants to run compilers from the command line and running configure and installing CMake. No one wants to do any of that stuff. 25:10.83 Frank You can I can say all of that and still say I hate homebrew. I think it is some of the worst software out there. It's it's ridiculous. You know, you install some pizza software on it. It installs six different versions of Python. None of those Python versions are actually available in your environment. The moment you try to install a package into those, this is like, it's a managed environment. You can't even install a package into this Python. so like 25:36.38 Frank It is a very quick way to put a lot of software on your machine that you'll never use ever again. And every time you execute it, it downloads half of the internet. That's fine though. i'm a very patient developer i'm willing to go through all this nonsense so i can get yet another version version of gcc that is compatible with yet another version of rust also i can compile some Python code that has like a CUDA extension. 26:02.47 Frank Fine. i'm I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to bloat my hard drive. But what I don't understand is when people write consumer-facing software that is obviously meant for non-developers who don't want to deal with all that nonsense. 26:16.91 Frank why they would choose that as a deployment. path. And I get it if you're a developer writing developer software, because developers, we have thick skins. They don't go on podcasts and complain about how terrible package managers are. 26:30.89 Frank they run the command line blindly from the internet and they just hope their computer doesn't get fried in the meantime 26:30.74 James Yeah. um 26:37.09 James Or your AI agent does it for you. 26:37.75 Frank but Right. But that's not nice to do to. what I like to call real people. non-developers Real people. should be protected from malicious software through Um, 26:51.02 Frank sandboxes and through security settings on their computer. They should be warned when the microphone... I actually do believe this. You should be warned if something's using the microphone on your computer. And it should go through a whole bunch of security stuff. I think I can argue about how... uh good or bad the user interfaces for that security stuff but it's there for a reason 27:12.91 Frank I think comments and star ratings, although they are the bane of my existence and will cause me to. have to wait until I'm 80 years old to retire. They're important to knowing what software is good, what software is popular, all that kind of stuff. 27:27.98 Frank And brew pie. Brew? bypasses all of that. distributing consumer-facing software. through a developer package manager. bypasses all of that stuff and so uh when you were talking about um zoomit being released for mac I made a semi-snide and I apologize. I shouldn't have been quite so snide. I'm like, we should stop normalizing distributing software. through Peru. 27:56.48 Frank Roo is a good package manager. It's good for dev tools. If you need 12 versions of GCC on your machine, that's the way to do it. But if you write a user-facing app, just put it on the App Store. It's not that big a deal. If your app isn't like. a Bitcoin miner, it'll probably get approved. 28:12.30 Frank just Get it on the App Store. 28:15.27 James I'm a big fan of apps. 28:15.70 Frank That's over. 28:16.69 James I'm a big i'm a big fan of app stores. 28:16.97 Frank Yeah. 28:19.84 James I gotta admit, you know. Uh, you know, I think developer tools that yeah, are doing certain things and need updates and or whatever. I think it's totally fine. It's very fascinating. Like I do think that. 28:32.08 James Um. I do think like the Copilot CLI, they get a Copilot app. I even think Visual Studio and VS Code are on like the... the marketplace that you can just get i'm pretty sure that on the app store and on winget and on brew i'm pretty sure you can get them everywhere 28:45.29 Frank Yeah. 28:46.45 James And those are developer tools. I think it just takes a little bit more time And that that means you need to... 28:50.63 Frank Like that. 28:52.66 James Bake it into your... release plan, right? Like I need to get this thing out, but I need to wait. And and how far do I wait or how? How much am I going to support or get this through the system? I do think that. 29:05.02 James My general flow. So like tiny clips, for example, is a great example that. Started on brew. And it grew to. Test flight. And then it grew to... 29:15.22 Frank Mm hmm. 29:17.27 James The App Store. Now on Windows, it's only Winget. but I do plan on putting it onto the app store. I'm actually. 29:22.16 Frank Good. 29:22.92 James Not. happy with it. Yet. Where I don't. 29:25.58 Frank Okay. 29:26.40 James I'm not, it's not in the state that I think it's app store worthy. So I think this is where. 29:29.61 Frank The Windows one. 29:30.71 James the The Windows one, the Mac one, totally. 29:31.08 Frank Okay. Yeah. 29:32.60 James It's on there. It's good to go. And it's on there. 29:34.43 Frank Mm hmm. 29:34.74 James No, it just means that it gets updates not as frequent because I got to do extra work. to do it like all of the all the brew stuff and even to some extent the test flight stuff is automated 29:39.16 Frank Yeah. 29:44.93 James because whenever i do a push it just does it and when i tag a release it goes 29:47.14 Frank Yeah. 29:48.60 James Granted, I could automate that too. But normally in my cadence is. about a month worth of updates to get into a really good place lots of testing and then Do a very healthy release to the app store where I might do like a. 30:01.55 Frank Good. 30:02.78 James a a month or weekly or every other day released to homebrew for example but on windows It's on Winget. ah Which is just like. You know, homebrew, basically. it's a Windows. 30:14.29 James your package management. system when get Windows get, get it. And. 30:19.07 Frank you 30:19.81 James I would say that. It's not on the app store yet because I don't think it's ready to be consumer facing. 30:24.25 Frank Mm hmm. 30:24.21 James It's almost like. Beta like I want my dev friends to test it and people that are willing to go through the effort Because I would say I'm not ready to put it up to a place that I can get a... 30:31.64 Frank Yeah. 30:34.80 James one-star review. 30:37.02 Frank Ah. and there's the crux because you know it'll get that one star review at some point right or i mean ah 30:43.45 James Yep. 30:46.01 Frank Honestly, ah you should be thankful for one star reviews sometimes because like the worst review is no reviews. 30:52.16 James Yeah. 30:52.08 Frank um like your product doesn't make any indent in the world. So I think we're kind of in agreement, but we're coming at it from different perspectives because we both kind of said the same thing. it's it's I don't know. 31:05.40 Frank You said you have to wait a month and batch a bunch of updates because you want to test them and make sure it's good. Yeah, that's what we should all be doing with real software versus, you know, VS Code. Every other hour I open it, it says, like, you want to update me? And then I switch to ChatGPT. It's like, do you want to update me? I'm like, yeah, sure, fine. Switch to this app. Do you want to update me? Yeah, sure, fine. I i feel like, you know. 31:28.24 Frank Fewer high quality releases is a good thing. maybe maybe it's a good thing that you have to take a step back and plan through and think through your releases and increase the quality to a point where you don't think you'll get those one-star reviews. 31:40.91 Frank Um, That's sad. if you're releasing to the dev community we all have thick skins we're all ah accustomed to being abused and software making a trash heap of our machines. 31:51.66 Frank and there is no review system. So you don't get that negative feedback. All you get is a little issue in GitHub that's very easy to ignore. It doesn't affect you financially. It doesn't affect your reputation. Every repo has a thousand unclosed issues. 32:04.36 James Yeah. 32:05.70 Frank And on GitHub, the stars only increase. it's it's You don't get one star reviews. The stars just go up and up and up. It's a genius move. I mean, some people have millions of stars. How's that even possible? 32:18.50 Frank So it's just... I guess. It's just... If it's good software, then stand behind it. you know, make it good, polish it, and release it. If it's Beta garbage? 32:31.12 Frank put a big beta garbage label on it and say that too i mean there's nothing stopping you from putting on the windows store and putting the giant word beta on here and putting in the description 32:39.87 James That's true. 32:41.31 Frank Y 'all use at your own risk. I don't know if it'll actually get through review. I don't know if anyone's even reviewing anything on the Windows Store anymore. um microsoft store i believe it's called um But I still feel like... 32:54.95 Frank Well, my argument online and I'm switching topics a little bit here is I can't recommend the software to anyone who's not a developer. right now because i'm not going to ask them to go install brew and go through that madness on their own machine i will tell them go to the microsoft store and download it that's a very plausible thing to do 33:01.84 James Yep. 33:06.89 James Yep. 33:09.69 James No, totally. Yep. 33:11.20 Frank Or go to Steam and download it. Go to go to some app store. 33:13.12 James Yep. 33:13.82 Frank and download it. That's valid. i think And that's the world we live in now. 33:18.06 James Yep. 33:18.32 Frank We used to live in the world where you download a zip and install it. We don't live in that world anymore. So I just think if you write something, if you put the effort into making it. What the? 33:28.83 Frank Two hours it takes to polish it enough to put it on an app store. It's really not rocket science. It's it's literally a couple hours of work. It's not the worst. Just do it. 33:39.35 James I think just do it. No, I totally agree. And I think that it's just that extra little polish that's over there and and I'm guilty of it too. Obviously a lot of my apps aren't on there. But they need to be. And I do think that. ah That it's it's frustrating, especially when they don't get approved, you know, on there. 33:54.23 Frank Yeah. 33:54.75 James But you're like, OK, cool. But. I really like that. I have tiny clips because I feel like that is my app. That's like kind of worthy out there to do this thing. And I feel like it's a nice consumer app that's out there. And there's a lot of other folks that have. 34:07.77 James screenshot tools. but they're not on the app store. They're all on homebrew, right? 34:11.37 Frank Yeah. 34:11.57 James So I feel like that is ah actually advantage for me. to put it out there because it does. It's it's ah an additional layer of commitment. at the end of the day. 34:19.67 Frank Yeah, it's commitment on your part and it's... security and reassurance on the user's part. 34:26.10 James Yep. 34:26.14 Frank We as developers hate app review. because they kind of control our fate But from a consumer standpoint, That's a good thing. That means we're not putting absolute garbage on their machines. 34:33.91 James Yeah. 34:36.32 Frank Now that said, there's absolute garbage on the app stores. Don't worry about that. Garbage still makes it through. Um, But I think from the consumer perspective, it's... treat customers with dignity and their dignity is I'm going to put a little bit of effort into making sure the software is good on your computer. That said, if your software actually does, for whatever reason, use a feature of the operating system that does not work in the sandbox, A, go read the docs, because it probably can be, and you just don't have the right entitlement. But B... 35:05.18 Frank then it's okay to say, hey, my software is super sophisticated and it can totally burn your machine down. 35:10.100 James Yeah. 35:11.22 Frank Therefore, I'm only releasing it. through brew. that's fine too and then what you mentioned on x was How about both? And I'm honestly fine with that. also. But I think that if you write user-facing software, put it on an app store. Don't expect people. And it doesn't even have to be the um Apple one. like um i had I have an app, AppStat, which... um shows you your so sales statistics for all your software you're selling on the app stores. 35:40.82 Frank And. Apple wouldn't approve it. and we've talked about that on here, so I put that on Gumroad. I didn't put it on my own website. I still decided it should be on an app store. Okay, fine. Apple won't allow it on their app store, but I still feel like. 35:56.61 Frank putting it on a really A real app store that. has at least some decent reputation is a good thing. See also Steam. And. um and I'm trying to think what's Hanselman's called? 36:07.64 James Yeah. 36:10.64 Frank Tiny, tiny tool town. 36:12.27 James Tiny tool town. 36:13.47 Frank Yeah, TinyTool .com. I mean, that's an app store. It doesn't have as long a reputation as all the others, but it's an app store. 36:16.57 James That's an app store. 36:20.80 Frank There's there's someone paying attention to what's on there. 36:21.13 James Yeah. 36:23.27 Frank It's not. all viruses yet. 36:27.20 Frank it's It's just a countdown until something becomes viruses if someone's not maintaining it. 36:32.19 James i'm sure yeah i mean i think that's the other The other security part that you're talking about is it's like out there, it's doing things, it's got the review. and Yeah. 36:41.72 Frank Yeah. 36:42.43 James Yeah. 36:43.15 Frank I think the things that we hate as... developers are the things that consumers like. And you gotta, you gotta to come to terms with that. 36:48.80 James Yeah. 36:51.65 Frank And it's really just a few hours worth. 36:51.87 James Yeah. 36:53.21 Frank Anyway. Was that a rant worth having? I don't know. I think I just hate brew. You can ignore everything I just said and just replace it with Frank hates brew. That's fine. 37:02.85 James I think that the one thing that I find fascinating So. but um'm I... So. I never really used homebrew a lot. Nor did I ever really use WinGet a lot. However, I have found recently. 37:15.11 James That. uh win get and i'm not sure if I don't think brew works this way and and it can't possibly work this way. 37:21.25 Frank Hmm. 37:21.61 James I don't think. uh I guess I don't know. But let's say I install Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio through an installer. or even through the App Store. 37:29.47 Frank Mm hmm. 37:29.98 James It has an identifier, and then WinGet can still update it. 37:33.97 Frank Yeah. 37:34.88 James Like... i guess if you know when i installed visual studio 2026 today i went win get Update. All. And it was like. cool i'm updating visual studio i'm gonna get that thing so i did find like for batch 37:44.90 Frank Crazy. 37:47.10 James for batch updating. I found that really nifty to say, Hey, I have a bunch of software on machine. I want to update it instead of like updating a bunch of uploaders and things. 37:54.23 Frank Yeah. 37:55.29 James Boom. 37:55.71 Frank Who has it? 37:55.99 James Getting that. 37:57.19 Frank Yep, Rue has it. 37:58.76 James Yeah. 37:58.57 Frank You know what else has it? The Mac App Store. You can just say update all. 38:01.33 James Yeah, but like... But like. Yeah, that's no that's also true. that Yeah, exactly. 38:07.13 Frank ah 38:07.46 James Yeah. That's true. But I think because like on windows, the majority of software and you know, max the same too. Like, I guess like if I install. Visual Studio Code. 38:17.86 James from Like ah I download the DMG and I have it. 38:21.29 Frank Yeah. 38:21.85 James Can I do brew up? upgrade and then it upgrades vs code no 38:24.67 Frank No. 38:26.67 James Win Get Will. 38:26.58 Frank No, because brew. Yeah. oh Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, there's enough metadata there and it's clever enough to actually do it. That's cool. That is cool. 38:34.23 James Yeah. As far as I know, and so that one is a nice perk where it's not actually. coming from the app store right it's like oh i'm downloading this developer tool You know, and it doesn't matter if I download it originally from Winged or I download it somewhere else. 38:40.33 Frank Mm hmm. 38:45.30 Frank Right. 38:45.40 James And I also think that like. Inside the app store, like power toys, for example, is in the app store, but it just. Launches the installer. 38:55.88 Frank Yeah. ah 38:56.91 James It's not like. it's not like the same like there's there's kind of like this hybrid model on the wind 38:59.76 Frank The sysinternal stuff always had the wackiest ways to distribute their codes. I'm a little hesitant to mark on it because... 39:03.89 James Yeah. 39:07.06 Frank they did They did some crazy ways to distribute their software. So I don't even know what their current setup is, to be honest. 39:10.92 James Internal. 39:13.19 Frank Um... 39:13.88 James i i think i think it's in the app store i think cis internals is in the app store 39:17.61 Frank Fantastic. Good. 39:18.71 James Yeah. 39:18.38 Frank Good for them because they had some wacky ways to install. 39:19.67 James Wow. 39:20.99 Frank Because I'm a big fan of Process Explorer. I still think that's some of the greatest software out there. 39:23.32 James There you go. 39:25.89 James Yeah. 39:26.08 Frank Um, but man, that was always a wacky way to install that puppy and the way he packaged the 64 bit version. 39:29.76 James Yeah. Yeah. 39:32.39 Frank Oh my God. Crazy, crazy times back in those heavy Windows days. 39:37.60 James There you go. Well, there's our rant and rave I don't even know what we talked about. Ah, we talked about something. 39:43.62 Frank Updates I think once a year we talk about updating software. We'll just call it that. And frank Frank hates brew. You can just title it that. 39:51.41 James Frank Gates brew. 39:51.92 Frank and And to anyone, if you're a developer on brew. 39:51.82 James I mean, let's just be honest. It's okay. 39:54.40 Frank um Hmm. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Cause we all use you. So it's not like I'm saying like, don't use brew. 40:00.87 James Necessary. 40:02.41 Frank We use brew. 40:02.94 James Yeah. 40:02.91 Frank We rely on brew. Thank you. Thank you. 40:05.35 James Thank you. 40:05.99 Frank Just don't distribute. 40:06.22 James Yep. 40:07.18 Frank out. user-facing apps that way please 40:09.79 James Yeah. There you go. Alright, everyone. That's going to do it for this week's. You can... well that's the best way to it's probably the best way to get ffm paid probably just saying anyways this is gonna do for this week's bring it full circle uh this week's merch complex until next time I'm James Montemagno. 40:25.15 Frank And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. 40:28.41 James Peace.