The Brooks Review

Year: 2015

  • Content Blocker Update (December 2015)

    Here we go again, another round of iOS content blocker testing. Before I get into the testing, I want to point out why certain apps were tested while others were not tested. I can assure you I downloaded/purchased/unlocked every content blocker I could find on the App Store. I lost count how many there were after they were all installed, but I was starting to worry I may never stop downloading them.

    I was not looking forward to testing these, it takes 10 minutes on average to test each content blocker — and well you can do the math when I had more than 30 installed. That’s a lot of time. So I needed to pare the list down in a way which made sense without testing them first.

    (more…)

  • That Syncing Feeling

    Gabe Weatherhead:

    Data syncing may be the most critical aspect of modern computing and we’ve settled too easily for the most convenient solution.

  • Leaving the Mac App Store

    Sketch Blog writes about their decision to leave the Mac App Store. This is a real shame as Sketch is amazing and having all your apps purchased from the Mac App Store is a way better experience for users setting up new Macs.

    There’s been thousands of words spilled on this topic already, but I want to spill some different ones. Words directed at Sketch and not Apple.

    Sketch,

    Hi, big fan here. You’ve long said you won’t be coming to the iPad because you can’t be convinced it will be profitable. That’s very reasonable, but your life just got a lot harder moving outside the Mac App Store.

    Now you can certainly make it, but you won’t have that sweet — sweet — free banner marketing from Apple. So that’s going to be a little more expensive for you.

    So meet the iPad Pro.

    It’s a hell of a device and maybe if you made a small thing to perhaps even just view Sketch files on the iPad (not the Mirror app) — perhaps that would give you an idea of interest. And then maybe give us some basic tools. See where things go, you don’t need to marry the device, but at least take it on some real dates.

    The iOS App Store is better, not great, but better. I would love to have you on it.

    Love usually,

    Ben

  • The Many, Um, Misstatements of Donald Trump

    S.V. Dáte:

    All of this is read­ily known to even a school­child with a cas­u­al in­terest in air­planes—which raises the ques­tion: Where and why would Trump get the idea his plane was big­ger?

    Great read. But why not call these lies?

  • The Apple Pencil Enhances Note-Taking on the iPad Pro

    Thomas Wong:

    One of the coolest multitasking benefits of the iPad Pro is that there’s enough space to read source material and take handwritten notes, simultaneously. I write with my right hand (even though I’m normally left-handed), so I usually keep my note app in Split View along the right hand side.

    I feel like an idiot, but it never even occurred to me to do this. Man is this going to be a great tool for students and meetings.

  • The Wrap Up Post

    I was pretty sure I would only get to 25,000 — maybe 30,000 — words for the month. But as I write this, I am already safely past the 50,000 word benchmark. I had always planned on writing a wrap up for the last day, as sort of an easy way to get in the last however many words I needed to, but I never considered I wouldn’t need any words.

    This was way easier than I thought. I wrote every night when the kids went to bed until 9pm, and then edited posts and published whatever was done. This really only worked because my wife was stuck in bed for the majority of the month healing from foot surgery — so there was little else for me to do.

    The first night it took almost 2 hours to get 1,300 words, but by the end of it I could crank out 2,000 or more words in just a couple of hours.

    It felt really good.

    I had always assumed I went through lulls with writing, but I think I just get lazy and fall out of the habit. I am going to be sure to set aside time everyday for writing from here on out, but taking my time more with the posts.

    As it turned out the hardest part was editing. I didn’t account for how much time editing would take, and because my goal was just not writing the words, but also publishing them, this became a big struggle. As I write this I have two posts waiting to be edited before the end of the day to hit my word goal.

    I need a better way to edit, so that’s next up on my list to tackle.

    Topics were pretty easy, but a large part of that is thanks to the iPad Pro having showed up at my house. Without a new device to write about — especially one as important as the iPad Pro — I think I would have been a little thin on topics.

    My biggest concern, more than the word count, was quality. I wanted to be sure to keep quality up, but since I typically take a week or more on each post, I was worried I might not be able to do this. I am not the one to judge the quality, but there are only a few articles which I look back on and cringe a bit.

    Overall I am pretty damn happy with what I produced this month.

    It was a fun month, and while I am not likely to do it again, I hope to keep my writing up and to be writing a lot more.

    Thanks for those of you who encouraged me, and who actually read the massive amount of words I published this month.

    Final stats:

    • 50,856 total words
    • 41 articles posted (including this one)

    Thanks!

  • Can the MacBook Pro Replace Your iPad?

    Fraser Speirs:

    If you have certain very specifically-defined workflows, and a work environment where you can guarantee yourself a chair and desk, you can probably get your work done on a MacBook Pro. For the rest of the world, there’s iPad.

    A must read.

  • Full Time iPad Pro

    Back in April I wrote about my internal conflicts between the rumored MacBook 12″ Retina, and the rumored iPad Pro. In that post I think my thoughts were best summed up as:

    (more…)

  • iPad Pro Bags

    Depending on how you look at things, one of the best or worst things about switching computers is finding the perfect bag once again. I had found it with the MacBook, but the iPad Pro has sent me down the rabbit hole once again. Here’s a couple sentences on how the iPad Pro fits in each of the bags I have kicking around my closet.

    (more…)

  • iOS Shortcomings

    A lot of people have been using iOS as a full time OS for far longer than I have, but this is new to me (mostly) and so I felt it worth noting some of the odd hang ups I ran into over the past few weeks. Obviously, these are not deal breakers for me, but I could see how some mix of them might be for other people.

    (more…)

  • The Ever Resilient WordPress

    Fair warning: I am going to talk about CMS systems here and you likely should not read this, because there is nothing more detrimental to writing than playing with your CMS instead of actually writing. So don’t read this if you are prone to think there are better tools out there.

    As the title suggests, this is another installment of: WordPress is better than your CMS.

    No, really, it is.

    (more…)

  • Needing Another iPad

    I’ll admit right off the bat to having no inkling as to which way this will ultimately fall, and I have also asked a few other iPad Pro users who gave me little more than a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The question at hand is: if the iPad Pro is staying in your life, is there room for other iPads and if so, which size? Most of the people I asked are iPhone 6 Plus users like I am, so we have a big phone and a big iPad — do we need a device between these two? It doesn’t even matter if the iPad Pro is your main computing device or not, it really only matters if the iPad Pro is something you plan on actively using a lot.

    This is a question I have been struggling with a lot myself — I know the iPad Pro is going to be my main computer going forward, so would it make sense to get an upgraded iPad to be a companion to this? I currently have both an original iPad mini and an iPad Air, so I know what the general sizes feel like. And if you are wondering why I would want to upgrade either: once you go split-view there is no going back and neither of those devices support split view.

    (more…)

  • On Appropriating Gender Identity

    Good read, but this last bit from Kerri Hicks is what worries me the most:

    Will men be comfortable including me anymore?

    Yes.

  • Drowning in Information Overload

    Bradley Chambers:

    All of this is aimed at helping free up RAM in my brain to focus on what I want to focus on and eliminate various amounts of negativity. Like I said, I am not jumping off the Twitter train, but only engaging there in a window of time each day/week. I’ve also realized that I can get 90% as much enjoyment/benefit from social media with about 20% of the effort I was previously giving it.

    My most productive days are the ones where I don’t check Twitter. I’ve set it up so the fastest thing I can do on Twitter is tweet — I try to avoid the rest of it as much as I can.

  • The Smart Keyboard

    The one accessory I was eagerly anticipating using was the new Smart Keyboard, and it was also the last of the accessories I received. Having said this, let’s look at it.

    For the Smart Keyboard, Apple has taken the Smart Cover and added a keyboard on to the end of it, the keyboard can also fold away and create a noticeable bump in the cover — still it folds away in a relatively thin package. It requires no batteries, as it powers off the iPad itself using the new connector on the edge of the iPad Pro.

    It is quite an excellent keyboard.

    (more…)

  • The iPad Pro as an iPad

    When I wrote about the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement the other day, I talked about it in a very specific sense: propped up like a laptop screen with some sort of keyboard attached to it — as you would a typical laptop. This time around though I want to talk about using the device as just an iPad, which means no keyboards connected to it.

    Looking at it this way gives us three different setups to talk through: flat on table/desk/lap, propped at an angle on a table/desk/lap, and held in your hands. For the sake of brevity I am just going to talk about these placements in the sense of a desk, but know that I mean any flat surface you sit or stand working at. And for the sake of further brevity you can assume the iPad Pro works the same in your lap, with much less comfort overall. So if say the iPad works great flat on a desk, it would just be OK in your lap like that.

    (more…)

  • Mysteries

    With great search engines and no shortage of expert bloggers out there, we have solved a lot of life’s little mysteries. You want to know about the tax code, there’s probably a couple dozen people on Reddit’s Explain it like I’m 5 threads who can explain it all to you. Or you can look it all up and read it yourself — why would you — but you could.

    There are other little mysteries though, and I think they are better left as mysteries. Better left as mysteries because it is far more fun to speculate as to why they are the way they are, then it is too look up why and know the real answer. In this post, I shall explore some of those mysteries without looking up the real reason — because fun is fun, and people really need to learn to be ok with guessing.

    (more…)

  • Some Important Updates

    Last month a veritable shit storm hit Twitter and many blogs, with the seemingly unwarranted attack on an anonymous blogger going by the name “Samantha Bielefeld”. This week I have been given a lot more information about this person and it makes me angry. Very angry.

    While I still believe gendered, and personal, attacks on anybody for their opinions is fully unwarranted, it has become increasingly clear to me I have misplaced my trust in this person. That misplaced trust was something this person appears to have been depending on and I regret this very much.

    Further, I apologize to you my readers for abusing the trust you have placed in me. And I apologize and thank those who tried to warn me early on, and who I disregarded.

    I have a long standing policy of not deleting posts, and this situation makes me wish that was not true, but I have gone back and edited all posts related to this matter to reflect the current situation.

    I hope to write more on this in time, but that time is not right now.

    To save you searching, and to keep you up to speed, the updated posts are:

    Lastly, I apologize to Marco Arment for calling him out so harshly when it seems far more likely now — he knew something I did not know and was trying to walk a difficult line.

    That is all for now.

  • Which Do You Enjoy More?

    The other day, on Twitter, my pal Pat tweeted this at me:

    @BenjaminBrooks Ultimately, isn’t the method you enjoy the most going to be the one that produced the best results?

    This of course made me think: which method of note taking do I enjoy the most? Hand written notes, or typed notes. I’ll be honest, when faced with that question the only thing I could come up with was: UUuuuhhhhhhhhh.

    (more…)

  • Apple Pencil

    When Apple announced the Pencil alongside the iPad Pro, a lot of people saw it as the killer feature of the device. People wanted it more than anything else Apple announced that day. I wasn’t one of those people. That’s not because I didn’t think it was cool, but strictly because I thought the new iPad Pro, and its accompanying Smart Keyboard, was a far more interesting set of tools.

    Still, I got the Pencil when they started shipping and have been using it a lot more than I had planned. Initially, when people would ask me how I liked the Pencil, I would tell them the same thing: “It’s really nice, but I am not sure I have much use for it.”

    I still feel that way at times, but honestly it is a much better device than I thought it would be and I think it will become increasingly more useful.

    (more…)