Macpreneur

Are You Missing These AI-Powered Mac Tools? with Nick Garofalo

• Damien Schreurs • Season 7 • Episode 152

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In this episode, you'll discover how financial planner and Apple enthusiast Nick Garofalo uses his MacBook Pro for running his business.

The conversation also delves into Nick's use of Notion for content management, the benefits of Google Workspace and Gemini, and some handy tips and tricks for Mac users. 

Links & video available at https://macpreneur.com/episode152

Connect with Nick:

Highlights  

  • [00:00] Apology  
  • [00:45] Introducing Nick Garofalo  
  • [01:34] Nick's Tech Setup  
  • [02:25] Favorite Mac Accessories and Tools  
  • [05:07] Top Mac Applications for Business  
  • [08:18] Exploring Notion for Productivity  
  • [12:21] Google Workspace and Gemini AI  
  • [20:01] Google Workspace Integration  
  • [20:40] Exploring NotebookLM  
  • [23:33] AI Audio Overviews and Enhancements  
  • [27:28] Mac Tips and Tricks  
  • [29:49] Improving Mac's Spotlight Search  
  • [36:55] Conclusion and Contact Information  
  • [38:00] Applying to be a guest too  
  • [38:25] Outro  

🎤 Want to be a guest on the show? Fill the application form available at https://macpreneur.com/apply or visit the show profile on Podmatch.

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Are You Missing These AI-Powered Mac Tools? with Nick Garofalo


Damien Schreurs: Hi. Before the episode starts, I just wanted to give you a quick heads up and apologize for the audio quality. My beloved Rode Podcaster microphone had an issue internally with a component, and it must have died around the day of the episode. It's only after exporting the recording and listening to it that I realized there was an issue with the audio. So, again, apologies for the low quality of my audio for this episode.

Nova AI: Welcome to Macpreneur, the show for seasoned solopreneurs looking to streamline their business on a Mac and unlock the secrets to saving time and money with your host and technology mentor, Damien Schreurs.


[00:00:45] Introducing Nick Garofalo

Damien Schreurs: Hello, today I have the pleasure of introducing Nick Garofalo. Nick is a financial planner and CFP candidate, founder of Open-Handed Wealth, where he helps Christian entrepreneurs align their finances with their faith. A longtime Apple enthusiast, Nick runs his entire advisory firm on Mac and iOS tools. From client strategy sessions to building scalable systems in Notion, he is passionate about making financial planning simple, intentional, and values-driven. When he is not working with business owners, you will find him mountain biking with his kids, playing music at church, or exploring productivity hacks on his MacBook Pro. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Garofalo: Hey, I'm thrilled to be here, Damien.


[00:01:34] Nick's Tech Setup

Damien Schreurs: Thank you for coming on the show. Let's dive into your current setup. You have a MacBook Pro— which model do you have?

Nick Garofalo: So, I've been through a few MacBook Pros. My favorite was probably my 15-inch i7 that I had for a few years. It was great, except, of course, with any of the Intel Macs, it always got so hot—you could literally fry an egg on it. If you were doing anything, like opening a Word document and typing, it would get so hot that it would burn your lap. But my current Mac is a MacBook Pro M2 Pro, and it is a workhorse. It's phenomenal. I mainly use it in clamshell mode, sitting right there on my desk for the most part, with a Lenovo 34-inch curved monitor, which is pretty great because I can have three smallish windows or two full-size windows open at the same time. Beyond that, I think there's diminishing returns with screen size. Too much screen size is just overwhelming. This is, to me, a sweet spot, and I've been through probably four or five monitors.


[00:02:25] Favorite Mac Accessories and Tools

Nick Garofalo: I've got a nice Bluetooth keyboard, and I'm a huge fan of the MX Master 3 Mouse—not an Apple product, but really cool. It has lots of buttons, wheels, and built-in hacks that let you leverage the trackpad functionality on a MacBook or a Mac right from the mouse. So if you're a mouse fan but want a lot of that trackpad functionality, like the swipe functions, it is a really great, happy medium. I do have an iPad Pro with the keyboard and pencil. I don't use it as much as I used to, and I thought I would really use it as Sidecar a lot, but I find that the smaller screen is too limiting.

So I'm debating getting a monitor extender—just one of those little portable screens with a desktop screen stand for 10 bucks off Amazon—and then using that as a hybrid. I don't really want to work off my laptop, but I'd need more space without having to switch to my main office setup for coffee shops or something like that. So I can have more screen space, still run it in clamshell mode, but keep it portable.

And then, yeah, my phone is my webcam, and it's a pretty great camera. You already have a super expensive camera in your pocket, so why not find more ways to use it?

Damien Schreurs: I'm using my iPhone 14 Pro Max as the camera to record this episode.

Nick Garofalo: It's such a great little hack.

Damien Schreurs: Even though my iMac has a 1080p built-in webcam, because it's still an Intel processor it doesn't have all the nice features—like Portrait mode or the Bokeh effect. Studio Light helps a little bit for people on YouTube.

Nick Garofalo: Yeah. Studio Light—there you go. So, this is a fun trick: I actually have two softbox lights that I use, and Studio Light is really good. I find that without the light, there's not enough illumination, especially in this room. Adding lights and then turning Studio Light on does a lot to help for video.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, exactly. I have the Elgato Mini light, and I repurposed an iPhone clamp because this Elgato Mini light is so small that I can clamp it. It's slightly larger than a big iPhone, and initially, it was pointing towards me, causing a lot of reflection.

Nick Garofalo: Yeah, I was going to say, your lighting actually looks really good. A lot of people have a hard time with lighting. I mean, I have a background in photography, so I have deep respect for what light can do. Many people don't understand lighting—it’s really hard to nail it. And so, actually, I think you look really good.

Damien Schreurs: If I turn it off, it looks like this.

Nick Garofalo: Check it out.

Damien Schreurs: If you're not watching on YouTube, you're missing out on a few experiments.

Nick Garofalo: That's right—you went into the dark, man.

Damien Schreurs: Okay, very good.


[00:05:07] Top Mac Applications for Business

Damien Schreurs: What are your favorite Mac applications to run your business?

Nick Garofalo: Okay, this is a tough one because most of the apps I need for my business are not Mac-only apps. Most of them are web apps. I use Wealthbox as my CRM, RightCapital is my financial planning software, and I have a variety of other software programs that layer on top of that, like QuickBooks for bookkeeping. I use custody through Altruist, Calendly, and similar tools. So a lot of my apps are not unique Mac-only apps. I do have a couple of those and a few other apps I love.

The other apps I love: Spotify has such a great app for a music person or, you know, and they now have audiobooks included. It's fantastic—I love the little mini player. I think they nailed it. I'm even an Apple Music fan, to be candid, but I love the Spotify app.

I do everything in Chrome using extensions, and it's really good—although the iPhone app is terrible.

The Teleprompter app is phenomenal. It's free if you ever have to record content and need it scripted, but still want to read along. The Teleprompter app for your phone, iPad, or Mac is free for general use (they charge for some of the more advanced features), but it's a great app.

Radio Silence is a Mac-only app where you can individually toggle a particular application's internet access. I'll get to why I have that in a second. I do all of my editing in Descript, and I see we're in SquadCast here, so I know that you also are a Descript user.

For photography, Lightroom is a great photo editing platform. Clockify for time tracking has been really great—they also have screen recording enabled for Mac. It watches your screen and evaluates your productivity; it's a little scary depending on your threshold for access, but it's a really cool feature and they have pretty robust security.

So why do I have Radio Silence? I got this app called RecurseChat, a local, offline LLM chat tool you can download—a language model of your choice comes stock with a handful. I didn't really know how to download an LLM; I tried to figure it out, tripped my way through it, and finally decided I was good with what was already provided. I was curious if it was true—that RecurseChat was really not going out to the internet for anything. So I got Radio Silence and cut off RecurseChat's access to the internet, and sure enough, it was a fully local copy. No data was being sent to or from it; no information was leaving my device. Pretty cool.

Then I forgot to mention my top two. So, all those are just for fun—the top two are Notion, and I have a new favorite: Folk, which is an AI-powered email, CRM, and prospect management tool. But Notion is where I’ve built a whole second brain with pages, articles, clips, content management, Gantt chart workflows, and databases. It's so funny—I got into it and was like, “I don't even know what to do with this app.” It's such a sandbox; I was trying to figure it all out. So I kind of didn't use it much at first, then I made myself watch a couple of videos to see how others used it. And man, it really is an incredible tool—and it's free. They just keep making it better. So yeah, that's my setup for software.


[00:08:18] Exploring Notion for Productivity

Damien Schreurs: In Notion, what do you use it for mainly? Do you keep a record of your activities, or is it your CRM?

Nick Garofalo: Great question. I tried to make it do way more than it really was built to do. I wanted it to be a CRM, but if I geeked out with Zapier, Make, or other automation workflow tools, I think I could have made it work. However, there's so much that needs to be automatically updated. For example, if I email you saying, "Hey Damien, it was great to be on the show. Thanks so much, and I want to follow up with you in a month," I don't want to have to manually check every field in Notion—I need some automation to tell me when I last emailed Damien, and to ensure that field isn’t manually populated.

Notion is mainly for note-taking and content management. I clip articles and resources straight from Chrome and then use it for brainstorming, blog creation, and content creation. I love to just go into Notion, brain dump, and then organize and sort and categorize—I can tag and filter, but it's my go-to for taking notes on pretty much any kind of work.

Damien Schreurs: I'm not using Notion nowadays. A few years ago, I was part of a nonprofit organization teaching kids how to program and code, and we even did some robotics. The founder of that nonprofit really loved Notion. We tracked everything—the training sessions, the attendees, and he had elaborate tables with giant databases. The power of Notion was the different filtered views; for example, as an instructor, I could quickly filter out and have just my pupils for a session, easily marking them as absent or present. That was a few years ago, and I stopped being involved with that. In the meantime, I've heard about Notion AI. Have you played with that?

Nick Garofalo: I’d like it a lot more than I currently do. Where I think Notion has gone wrong is that there's a whole Reddit thread about how Notion's AI is not nearly as good as other AI offerings. So if you're already paying for an AI tool like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you don't really need Notion's AI on top of that. The benefit I see in Notion AI is being able to build the tool in Notion for you to save some time—like, "Hey, I want a database, and here's what I want to track in it." It will just whoosh the magic into existence for you. But realistically, it only saves maybe 30 minutes when I create a complex database, and I don't do that often.

What I really want from AI in my current Notion workflow is to be able to take loads of notes from a client meeting—for example, if you, Damien, were a client of mine—and after each call, I’d like a living summary of the status of our relationship, including current outstanding action items, ongoing projects, and topics discussed. That would be a great use case because it would read everything on the existing page or within the database and give me a really helpful summary per client. I don't really think Notion AI is there yet—and I also can only get about 10 free credits before having to pay for more. So, I'm interested in trying out Notion’s other newly launched tools like Notion Calendar and Notion Mail. I'm really intrigued; I might have to give Notion Mail a try, but it would have to be pretty amazing and easy compared to the Gmail web app for me to consider switching.


[00:12:21] Google Workspace and Gemini AI

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. We talked in the pre-show that we both are Google Workspace users. I would say I’d have a hard time going away from Gmail and just Google Workspace.

Nick Garofalo: Right.

Damien Schreurs: Right. It's essential for managing my domain.

Nick Garofalo: Yeah—the Gmail search is so good. It's hard to imagine leaving it. I could never get used to Outlook, even Apple Mail—I love Apple Mail for being so simple, even though they haven't updated it in 15 years. But the search has always been bad, and Gmail search is just really, really good. So it'd be hard to leave that.

Damien Schreurs: I really like the security features there—anti-malware scanning plus spam detection. It's pretty good. I still check the Spam folder, but nowadays, it's very rare that an important email ends up there.

Nick Garofalo: It's so rare that anything in spam is actually legitimate. And the integration of Gmail with Calendar and Tasks is great. I was thinking about Google Tasks—I don't use it, but they have something new now where, in a calendar event, you can take meeting notes and add tasks to Google Tasks directly from a Google Doc. It makes me think about switching over because it's all connected and native. And then you have Gemini layered on top of that, which we were talking about a little bit pre-show. The built-in Gemini tools are not awesome yet, but give it a year—I’m sure they’ll get better.

Damien Schreurs: I respectfully disagree—and just want to add that I have a new segment on the show: the AI segment. I'm introducing that now. It’s a perfect segue from our conversation about Gemini. I'm using Gemini more and more. For those listening in, if you have Google Workspace for Business, there is a Starter plan that includes limited access to Gemini within the application. Inside Gmail, you have access to Gemini, but not in Google Sheets, Google Docs, and so on. The access is also limited in Google Drive. However, starting with the next plan, you get full access to Gemini, including what's called Gemini apps.

The Gemini app is available at gemini.google.com. Nick, you have to try Gemini 2.5 and Deep Research—I used it just this afternoon as I was thinking of starting to offer remote training services internationally in the US, Canada, and the UK.

From a tax perspective, it's a nightmare. I use Deep Research in both ChatGPT and Gemini, and I can tell you that the document generated by Gemini Deep Research was much better. So what was your prompt? Mine was: "I'm a Luxembourg-based IT service provider and IT training provider. I want to provide services in the US, UK, and Canada. I want to know from a tax perspective, am I liable to pay sales tax? Is the service I'm providing taxable—yes or no? What is the status if I do B2B versus B2C?" Not only did Gemini do much more thorough research than ChatGPT, but when Deep Research finished, there was a button that said "Save to Docs." It created a Google Doc for me. I then asked, "Can you make a table to sort each state by whether it is taxable: Yes or No?" I discovered something called Economic Nexus.

So even though I'm based in Luxembourg...

Nick Garofalo: ...you'll have nexus in all these other places.

Damien Schreurs: Economic nexus in certain states—depending on how much revenue I generate each year, I might or might not need to apply for a tax number, and so on. I asked it to create a table to sort the states by attractiveness from my point of view, with different columns. Not only did it create that, but there was also a "Save to Sheet" button that let me immediately put that into a Google Sheet. I was like, "Wow."

Nick Garofalo: That's really neat. I'm used to copying and pasting from ChatGPT into Notion. ChatGPT can write natively in Markdown really well and handles formatting nicely. Yet, I already start to see some disconnect because once I pull it out of ChatGPT and put it into Notion, it's no longer exposed to an AI—for better or worse, I can’t ask Gemini, "Hey, pull those files from that research project we were doing. Refresh my memory." I’m sure Gemini would do a great job at that, but I can't do that.

Damien Schreurs: I think they have a winning combo now with Gemini fully integrated into Google Workspace. So not only when I'm in Google Sheets or Google Docs can I reference another document using the @ sign, but when I'm in the standalone Gemini app, I can start a prompt and then say "@," and reference an email. I can say, "Based on Google Doc one, Google Doc two, and Google Doc three, can you…?" It's unbelievable. I can reference any kind of document from within Gemini, and I can say, "Can you summarize the latest 10 emails?" And I did that once with emails from school—the output even filtered the emails appropriately.

Nick Garofalo: Now, was "school" a folder? No—was there any context that someone would have known, like, "Hey, this is a school email?"

Damien Schreurs: My daughter is at the European School in Luxembourg. So I said, "Please summarize the last 10 emails from the European School of Luxembourg," but I did not explicitly specify further context.

Nick Garofalo: Yeah, it was just natural language. Wow. So I'm in Gemini right now and I'm seeing options like 2.0 Flash, 2.5 Flash Experimental, and 2.5 Pro Experimental.

Damien Schreurs: 2.5 Pro.

Nick Garofalo: What's the difference between Pro and Flash? Do you know?

Damien Schreurs: 2.5 Pro is more thorough than 2.5 Flash.

Nick Garofalo: Yeah, I see here it says "advanced reasoning" versus "complex."

Damien Schreurs: Pro is, in my mind, much better than o1 Mini—much better than 4o, for sure. But when I compared to o1 Mini, yes, I think it's better than o1 Mini. I haven't tested the latest o3 of ChatGPT, which, at the time of recording, was released very recently. So maybe by the time it airs, that might not be the case anymore. But no, it's a pretty competitive AI.

Nick Garofalo: It's almost a little scary when you think about how quickly this business cycle has evolved. In economics, you have a business cycle of ideation, innovation, and growth; then you approach scale, and businesses start to streamline and consolidate. Then you move from consolidation into decline—the decline being larger companies buying out the smaller ones. There aren't really new startups because everything has been standardized and commoditized, or rather, there’s now a set way of doing things, and these six companies do it better than anyone. And, for example, that's why car manufacturing is not a field you just waltz into as an entrepreneur, but software certainly can be.


[00:20:01] Google Workspace Integration

Nick Garofalo: So it's interesting to see that now we're seeing consolidation under the Google Suite. You now have Tasks, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Mail—and there are probably lots more among the top five or six.

Damien Schreurs: And you can integrate it with Google Forms.

Nick Garofalo: And Forms—all of that is now connected through Gemini. From the prompt box at gemini.google.com, you can reference anything in your Workspace.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, and they're also good for business users. Google Workspace for Business—they claim (and I trust them) that they don't use my data to train the model. For me, that's very important.


[00:20:40] Exploring NotebookLM

Damien Schreurs: At the time of recording, I just released two solo episodes that were also AI audio overviews generated by NotebookLM. NotebookLM is another gem from Google. Have you played with NotebookLM?

Nick Garofalo: It's been a little while. When I was playing around with it, it looked about as official as a garage startup from the early 2000s. It was almost funny—like, "Wait, this is a Google product, right?" I struggled to pick what I wanted to upload because there were some restrictions. I tried to throw in a Harvard Business Review article and, rightfully so, it blocked that. I didn’t really consider the paywall, but it was like, "Yeah, you can't submit that." So I appreciated that. It didn't work for what I was trying to do, but I tried it with a couple of other things—some articles by Michael Kitsis on finance topics. It was interesting.

I was talking with a friend about NotebookLM because he's studying for the CFP exam—the financial planner exam. He's going through a review course and has all these PDFs of the study materials—probably like a thousand pages of textbook reading material—and he has PDFs of them, which is awesome. My review course was all locked into a private eBook platform, which is really not ideal. With the PDFs, he's able to upload them to NotebookLM and then listen to AI bots chatting about the review content. What I told him, based on my limited experience (from months ago), was that it sounded flat. I mean, I have to acknowledge—this is super cool technology, a cool moment to be alive—but I found it difficult to follow the train of thought. I think it's because there isn’t a real train of thought; it’s just regurgitated content. Nonetheless, it was still helpful. I probably need to go back and try it out again.

I've got a Notion database full of articles I want to read, webinars, YouTube videos, or shorts that I save for later. It would be really nice if I could just listen to a five- or 10-minute summary of all those items when I have time—or when I'm driving, working out, or whatever. I get about 30 emails a day of articles, resources, and webinars, and there's not enough time to filter through it all. I would love a tool to layer on top of Notion to take all those clippings and help me prioritize what matters most.

Damien Schreurs: What is also nice is that with a paid Google Workspace for Business account, we have a much higher limit in terms of projects, notebooks, and sources per notebook. So it's much bigger than the free version.


[00:23:33] AI Audio Overviews and Enhancements

Damien Schreurs: And then on top of that, it has improved dramatically. The Audio Overview is much better—but it's still not 100%. Sometimes the first try is okay; other times I have to redo it, delete the audio overview, and try again. But there have been two big improvements. First, before you generate the audio overview, you can actually steer the conversation. I gave it all the episodes of season four—something like 13 or 16 episodes. Before I generated the audio review, I said, "Please extract the key takeaways from episode 80 through 84." They did that. I also instructed it, "Please refer to yourself as the host assistant, and refer to him as Damien." And they did it.

Nick Garofalo: Okay, so a couple of things—you've enlightened me on a few points. First off, I recently upgraded my Google Workspace and didn’t realize I had access to all the Pro features of these other platforms. NotebookLM, when I looked at it a year ago, I was on the Starter Google Business account. It was the free plan of NotebookLM, and it was not very impressive—a year ago, it was impressive, don't get me wrong—but just not awesome. Well, NotebookLM now looks a lot more polished than before. And also, I didn’t realize I already had access to it within my account, which is a great lesson for any listener: if you've recently upgraded memberships with services like Google, Squarespace, or Apple, you might have new features you don't know about. Always worth checking. That's great. I also have access to Gemini Advance—I didn’t realize. So man, Damien, thanks. I appreciate it. I’ll be checking this out later. 

Another question for NotebookLM: When you uploaded the episodes (like 10 to 13 or episode 1 to 13) and then referenced episodes 80 to 84, did you give it those episodes individually or a link to your podcast show? How did it find those?

Damien Schreurs: For each episode, I export the transcript as a text file. I uploaded the transcript for each episode, and NotebookLM had a separate text file for each, with the names like MP080, MP081, etc. They had the episode number in both the file name and potentially inside the content. In the special instructions I gave them before they created the audio overview, I explicitly said, "Please refer to the episode and then include Macpreneur.com/episode." They did that during the audio overview—they would say, "Okay, let's talk about episode 83, which you can find at Macpreneur.com/episode83." I was like, "Wow."

Nick Garofalo: That's really something.

Damien Schreurs: A new feature—I tried it. I wasn’t really impressed at first. But the possibility to interrupt while they are generating the audio is cool. If you give a prompt, it takes a few minutes to generate the audio. You play the audio, but now you have a way to interrupt it, ask a question, and it takes a second or two to answer. It really makes it feel interactive—as if you are a live listener.

Nick Garofalo: Like a live listener.

Damien Schreurs: Exactly—where they're taking calls from a live listener based on the source data and your follow-up questions. They will answer as best as they can.

Nick Garofalo: Wow. I would definitely have to check that out.


[00:27:28] Mac Tips and Tricks

Damien Schreurs: Very good. Apart from NotebookLM, Google Workspace, or Gemini, what other "aha" moments have you had recently—a tip or trick you discovered, whether it's about AI or your Mac?

Nick Garofalo: The first "aha" moment was discovering that on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, I believe it’s F5 or F6—I don't have it open in front of me, but I think F6 has the little moon icon that toggles Do Not Disturb. I had no idea it was literally just one button on the keyboard. I thought it was a sleep button, to put the computer to sleep, which I always thought was kind of silly because you just close the lid or press the finger-scan button to lock it if you open your laptop and are flooded with notifications. You press F6 and they all disappear. It's so nice—you don't have to click through to X out all those notifications. It simply toggles Do Not Disturb, and they're gone. You don't have to go up to the top right corner, click, and then find the Focus mode options. F6 makes them disappear instantly.

The other tip—this is not recent at all, but foundational for me—was customizing the Mac trackpad gestures. The three-finger drag has to be my favorite. It is staggering how many people have no idea that this is even an option. They hide it really deep in the accessibility features, but you can simply go to the settings for clicking and dragging, and enable the three-finger drag on the trackpad. When I do this in real time with people, it's funny how many stop me and ask, "What did you just do? How did you do that so quickly?" It's a fun little feature. But yeah, that's definitely a game changer for me.

Damien Schreurs: Very good. Yes, it's something I do every time I have a new Mac or when I help someone who just installed macOS or set up their first Mac. I always go to the Trackpad settings and activate tap-to-click because being forced to physically click is annoying.

Nick Garofalo: I'm glad I'm not the only person who customizes someone else's Mac to my specifications whenever I'm working on it. I've done it more times than I can count—like, I don't know how you work on this thing with push-to-click versus click-to-drag. There's so much great functionality built into the trackpad. Use it. Thanks for making me feel like I'm not the only one who does that.


[00:29:49] Improving Mac's Spotlight Search

Damien Schreurs: Very good. We are almost at the end of the show. If you were in charge of the Mac division at Apple, what would be your first priority? Whether it's on the hardware side or the software?

Nick Garofalo: I give this one a lot of thought, Damien, just like all of your questions. My sincerest hope is that someone listens to this and thinks, "You know what, Nick is right. We should improve this feature." For years, I have wished that Spotlight were better, and I think it has to do with the file structure of how Macs actually store files—something that just can't be improved with the current system. When I was working on a Windows machine for my previous job, my brother—an avid Mac user and technology geek—taught me everything I know about these things. He sent me a software called Everything by Void Tools. It is the single most amazing program for finding any file, anywhere, anytime. And it is only for Windows. I believe the difference comes down to the file structuring between the two operating systems.

I think Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud Drive should all be searchable, along with external drives, NAS, extra hard drives, or backups. All of your data and files should be searchable within Spotlight. You can search contacts, do math equations, pull up definitions, and so on. There are so many great features baked in. However, if you're trying to find a file that's not neatly stored in the file structure, it's terrible—and I've wasted so much time because of it. Even when you're in the Finder window, being able to copy the path and paste it somewhere else takes way too many keystrokes. These are things I actually loved about Windows Explorer, and on a Mac, I've had to find workarounds that are not nearly as good. So that's what I would say—we need to fix this.

Damien Schreurs: Have you tried Raycast?

Nick Garofalo: No, I've tried several. I tried Alfred—it was okay. I found Alfred somewhat difficult to use.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, Alfred didn't stick with me as well, but Raycast did. Raycast is much better for file search capability than Spotlight—faster than Spotlight. When I press Command-Space and type something, it can take a second or two before Spotlight returns anything. So I use Raycast by pressing Option-Space, then I press F for file search. I press F, hit enter, and then start typing what I'm looking for. It's very fast—much faster than Spotlight, and I find it much better for finding stuff.

Raycast also has a better and faster search for Notes. I know you live in Notion; I live in Apple Notes for most of my documents. It's usually a pain to find something in Apple Notes, but not with Raycast. I think it's because Raycast has a dedicated index, while Spotlight tries to do too many things at the same time—the index includes Contacts, Mail, Notes, Shortcuts, and more, making it a huge index.

Nick Garofalo: It's trying to do so much when you type something—it takes three seconds sometimes. With Raycast, you type F, hit enter, and it knows exactly what to search for.

Damien Schreurs: Exactly. In my experience—with my main partition and my data partition—Spotlight indexes all local partitions, even connected drives, which can slow it down.

Nick Garofalo: Do you use the free plan or the paid one?

Damien Schreurs: With the free plan, you can do a lot. The reason for the paid plan is if you want to synchronize your configuration and your Raycast setup between computers—you have to pay a subscription for that. And if you want to use the built-in AI features, that's also a paid option. But I've been using Raycast for free for a few years, and what it offers for free is already very good.

Nick Garofalo: That's really interesting. I will check that out. Notion has a dedicated keyboard search as well—press Command-Shift-K and it pulls up my Notion search box. The search is phenomenal. I can type in just about anything and it is really fast. I also have Command-Alt-G to pull up my Google Drive search. Now I have three searches depending on what I’m looking for—sometimes I'm trying to figure out if something is in Drive or iCloud Drive. But for work, everything is usually in Google Drive, even though its search is a bit laggy. It's really good though—at least that way I know whether I'm looking for a note in Notion, something in Google Drive, or something else. But yeah, Raycast—I’ll check that out.

Damien Schreurs: Raycast also has built-in window management support. In Raycast, you can define keyboard shortcuts for anything and everything. Every extension can be customized with keyboard shortcuts. I have configured Shift-Control-Up Arrow for top half, Down Arrow to restore the original size, Right Arrow for the right half, and Left Arrow for the left half of the screen. Then I have configured four keys in a kind of window square—a 2x2 matrix: the top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right quadrants. I can have four windows on my iMac, and boom, they are all positioned in a corner.

Nick Garofalo: That's nice. With the new macOS— I think it came out in the version before the current OS—Apple now has window snapping. I used Rectangle for a long time to achieve what you're describing with window snapping using keyboard shortcuts. Rectangle was a window-snapping software that allowed you to throw windows into different corners. I got used to it from the PC world, where Microsoft did it really well. I don't mind clicking and dragging, but if you hold the Option key while dragging a window in Chrome on a Mac, it will quickly snap to the side. If you want it to be instant on a Mac, just hold the Option key, and the window will snap to the left or right perfectly.

Damien Schreurs: Good to know.

Nick Garofalo: That was a fun change—I actually ended up deleting Rectangle because I didn't really need it anymore.


[00:36:55] Conclusion and Contact Information

Damien Schreurs: Very good. Where can people find you online?

Nick Garofalo: It's funny—we didn't really talk about what I do for a moment. But if people want to know more about me or about financial planning, my company Open-Handed Wealth is the place to go. I'm the founder and financial planner there, so visit openhandedwealth.com. I also have some free gifts for your listeners, Damien, if anybody is interested. Head over to openhandedwealth.com/freebies for a handful of resources—my gift to you and to your listeners if you're looking to save money on taxes, streamline your budget, or align your investments. I offer free consultations, and I love meeting new people. So if anyone wants to book a call, it would be a pleasure. Just mention that you came from the Macpreneur show—it’d be fun to connect.

Damien Schreurs: Thank you. I'll put that in the show notes for listeners to check out. Very good—thank you very much, Nick, for being on the show.

Nick Garofalo: It's my pleasure. This has been a great chat—I love geeking out about anything tech or Mac-related. I really like your show, so I'm honored to be here. I've listened to many episodes and find them highly educational and insightful. Thanks for what you're doing and keep up the great work.


[00:38:00] Applying to Be a Guest Too

Damien Schreurs: For the listeners—if, like Nick, you would like to share how you are using your Mac to run your business—just visit macpreneur.com/apply. If you are already on Podmatch, click on the button and you will land on the show profile. Otherwise, you can fill out the application form and I will get back to you within a few days. Once again, that's Macpreneur.com/apply.


[00:38:25] Outro

Damien Schreurs: If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur and tag both Nick and myself on LinkedIn. Until next time, I'm Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.

Nova AI: Thank you for listening to the Macpreneur Podcast. If you've enjoyed the show, please leave a review and share it with a friend right now.