The Brooks Review

Year: 2016

  • The Pok3r

    When I was using a Mac full time, I almost always used a CODE keyboard for all my typing. That lead me to find something better to use with my iPad, and I snagged a Poker II with MX Clear switches. It was a good keyboard for occasional iPad use, but it had a few fatal flaws: it was ugly, and the CMD key was unchangeably in the wrong location.

    I had given up on a mechanical keyboard for the iPad when I switched to it full time — I just hated the way all of them looked. However, over the last few weeks I have come back to wanting a better typing experience. I hooked up the CODE and remembered why I loved it so much, but the same problem with the CODE + iPad Pro remains: scale. The keyboard is just too large compared to the iPad Pro.

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  • My ‘he will keep telling other people about this stuff’ Gift List

    For whatever reason, this year I have been looking through a lot of gift lists, and overall I have been really disappointed with them. Because of this I thought I’d make a gift list for a change — the idea behind this list is: if I didn’t have any of the stuff I currently have, what could someone give me where I would end up being so happy with it, I would tell other people they need to get it.

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  • United Airlines will charge extra fee for use of overhead bins

    United has a new ticket fare, where no luggage is included in the price (except what fits at your feet). If you want overhead bin space, or to check, you pay. I actually love this, though I would much rather checked luggage be free and overhead charged for everyone.

    If you have been on a flight recently (say last 3-4 years) then you likely know how big of a shit show it is when you board a plane. There’s so many people with bags that are clearly too large to carry on, or people with clearly too many bags. Tons of gate checking — in all I think people not following rules, add tremendously to the overall boarding time.

    In the past couple of trips I have taken with United I have noticed something I never saw before: gate agents caring about luggage. I’ve seen them using both luggage sizers at the gate and forcing people to check — and I’ve seen them simply telling people they have too many bags. I know this likely annoys a lot of people, but as someone who packs small and light, I commend United for this.

    It’s been far to long where people don’t follow very clear rules. And honestly, if you can’t fit all of your stuff in a properly sized carryon, then why wouldn’t you want to check it? It’s so much easier at that point to not drag it all around.

    Again it would be great if they flipped things, where checked is free (for one bag) and carryon is charged for anything more than a personal item. You pay for the convenience of not waiting to get your bags back — seems to make sense to me.

  • Basic Privacy

    Quincy Larson:

    To be clear, everything I recommend here is 100% free and 100% legal. If you bother locking your doors at night, you should bother using encryption.

    It’s a good set of first steps to take. I am curious how many people use Signal over iMessage… even I don’t use Signal for any messages (though I do have it setup). I am going to see if my wife will move to it with me though and test it out.

  • Analyzing How People Type

    Pretty neat research looking into how people type, and how that impacts typing speed. I’d love to see more done with this research — and across keyboard types.

  • Twitterrific Gets Better

    John Voorhees:

    Center Stage is great for casual browsing of media in your timeline, but I expect I will use it most at events like WWDC. When I’m in San Francisco for Apple’s developer conference, I don’t want to miss friends’ photos and videos of the event, but I also don’t have time to read every tweet in my timeline. With Center Stage I can go straight to those photos and videos and dip into my timeline later when I have more time.

    Twitterrific really is the best Twitter app you can use. Love it. Neat addition too.

  • iPad Productivity Report – 12/5/2016

    ## A Year iPad Only

    A little over a year ago, [I wrote in a post](https://brooksreview.net/2015/11/the-full-ipad/) about going to the iPad Pro as a full time computer and made this prediction:

    > The iPad Pro right now might not be for you, but come this time next year, I am guessing we will be seeing a lot more people starting to shift their computing to iPads.

    It’s now been that year, and I think you know where I am going with this — there has indeed been a lot more people picking up the iPad as either their primary, or only, computing device. Not the wave I had hoped for, but a far greater amount of people than my most pessimistic parts expected.

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  • Misen

    It’s likely no surprise to readers of this site that my love for knives is not just limited to pocket knives and survival knives, but also to the two kitchen drawers I have stuffed with kitchen knives. I want to talk about the Misen knife, which had a well funded Kickstarter campaign. The sell is this: it has better steel, it has a better edge, superior design, free sharpening for life, and all at a very affordable price of $65.

    It’s a really good pitch, and I backed the campaign because I wanted to see if the knife really lived up to the hype. I know a lot about knifes, but not as much about kitchen knives. I did, however, immediately recognize the steel this knife is made from: AUS-8. Let’s just say that as steels go, it is middle of the road and a steel I would personally stay away from in pocket and survival knives because of its rather run of the mill qualities.

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  • The Compass 1 versus Compass 2

    One of the best products Twelve South has ever made is the Compass. A collapsible stand for iPads which can hold it at two angles, but really you just use it to hold it at an easel like angle. I’ve had one, off and on for years, and swear by them.

    However, at some point Twelve South revised the design and launched the Compass 2. The new design looks very much the same, but is worse in just about every aspect (I’m being generous here, because I honestly can’t think of a way that it is better). I hate it.

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  • iPad-only: Month One

    Matt Gemmell shares another great thought about the iPad as a computer:

    You grab the actual tool itself, and you’re away. It doesn’t care that it’s actually a computer. I’m not sure it even really knows.

    Really well put. When your computer is just a glass slab with insane battery life, it basically becomes whatever it is you are doing. One moment it is a scope of my rifle hunting bad guys, another it is a piece of paper showing doodles, and the next a powerful spreadsheet — a wall of cells for you will. I really love that.

    Shameless plug: if you are a member, you can read quite a lot of thoughts like this every Monday.

  • Clarks Desert Boots

    I’ve never been a boot guy, always sneakers or some type of low cut dressier looking shoe. I didn’t understand boots, unless I was hiking or doing something which specifically required boots. But I needed new shoes and travelers seem to universally hail the Desert Boot as not only a great staple, but as really the only shoe most people need.

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  • iPad Productivity Report – 11/28/2016

    ### The Question

    “So can you actually work from an iPad?” I hear that question a lot from friends and family, and I usually annoy them with my response. I respond with a version of “I only own iPads”. Which is my way of saying: yeah, I work only from an iPad.

    It’s not the answer people want to hear though, what they want to hear is “you probably can’t” or “no”, and sometimes “yes”. Telling most people they can work from an iPad challenges too much of their knowledge about the way the world works, and they can’t easily grasp it. So telling them it’s not something they have to worry about, is the equivalent of the “it’s not you, it’s me” break up line.

    Also it helps get you out of a series of questions if you respond they can work from an iPad: what about X, what about Y, what about Q, what about X but in E way? And on and on they go.

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  • Android Encryption Woes

    Matthew Green:

    On the other hand, you might notice that this is a pretty goddamn low standard. In other words, in 2016 Android is still struggling to deploy encryption that achieves (lock screen) security that Apple figured out six years ago. And they’re not even getting it right. That doesn’t bode well for the long term security of Android users.

    Ouch.

  • Ive at Apple

    John Gruber’s stance on Ive’s role at Apple, which is apparently a thing people are worried about:

    I think if you want to argue that Ive is one step out the door at Apple, you also have to argue that he’s one step out the door of being a designer. That doesn’t sound right to me.

    You should read his whole post on the matter, as I think it offers good perspective on what must be a debate right now. (Maybe I should read more Apple blogs?) Anyways, here’s the one though which always strikes me when this debate comes up: where the fuck else would he go?

    Ive retiring from Apple is not just Ive no longer being a designer, as Gruber states, but it is him being done with work in general. There’s no other company in the world which would give him the resources, control, financial backing, freedom, all the while not having him worry about any of the minutia which comes from running a business. It’s a sweet gig for him, and you’d have to be foolish to leave that to do anything but sit on a beach drunk all day long.

  • The Wrist

    I stopped wearing my Apple Watch on November 6th, 2016. It wasn’t an eventful day, a planned day, or even something which I put much thought into. But on that day, or perhaps the evening before, I was handed a gift — as some of you may have picked up on, my grandfather passed away recently — and my grandmother handed me my grandfather’s watch and said “I’d like you to have this.” It wasn’t expected, or something I had thought about. The watch isn’t particularly old, but it is the only watch he owned where I actually remember him wearing it all the time.

    When you receive a gift like this, you take off that Apple Watch and you put on the watch you were gifted — it’s the polite thing to do — hell my grandmother probably would have hit me if I hadn’t. So I started wearing the watch all night, then the next morning I found a safe spot to keep the watch and dutifully put back on the Apple Watch.

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  • iPad Productivity Report – 11/21/2016

    This past Saturday I received the Pok3r mechanical keyboard for my iPad setup. My initial impressions of this keyboard are very high — I *think* this maybe the keyboard for my iOS setup. I’ll have more to report on this in the coming weeks, but I will say that my shift away from the Smart Keyboard to a mechanical keyboard seems to have been the right move on the surface of it. But also a costly one, as I am now trying to find out how to get one of [these keyboards](https://thevankeyboards.com/products/minivan-keyboard-kit?variant=23068593411).

    On thing I do need to point about about the Pok3r is that it can be powered (with backlight) from of the non-powered USB Camera Connection kit. This greatly simplifies the setup and overall aesthetics of having a mechanical keyboard and iPad Pro.

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  • Outlier Strongworks

    A few weeks after I received my Outlier Futureworks, I knew they would be the pants I wear the most, and the pants I like wearing the most. They certainly are the most comfortable pants I own, but they are also the most versatile. I love them.

    I have been looking to get a second pair of pants which I could split the wear with for a little more variety. I was set to buy many different brands — as the other pants I have just aren’t as comfortable as the Futureworks. Luckily for me Outlier released the Strongworks. Styled similarly to the Futureworks, but made out of a decidedly heavier material — much closer to the thickness of denim.

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  • Feeling Hamstrung

    John Gruber on preferring a Mac to iPad:

    I think I’m more productive on a Mac than I am on an iPad. I can’t prove it, but even if I’m wrong, the fact that I feel like it’s true matters. I always feel slightly hamstrung working on an iPad. I never do on a Mac (at least once I’ve got it configured with all the apps and little shortcuts, scripts, and utilities I use).

    The word you are looking for is “familiarity”. That feeling of being hamstrung on an iPad is not because of the device, but because it requires a mental shift to working in a way you are unfamiliar. Millions of people get a lot of shit done on Windows everyday, but I bet Gruber (or any other dedicated Mac user) would feel hamstrung on Windows. That’s not to say Windows and iOS are similar, but that they both differ from macOS in a way that causes you to have to think, erm, differently about how you compute.

  • The iPhone 7 Plus is my only computer

    Justin Blanton:

    Much of what makes this possible is that I can delegate in one way or another most of what I think of, and can get away with being extremely terse in my emails. At this stage of my career my day-to-day job requires minimal work-product; if I was coding all day, designing websites, or researching, I probably wouldn’t be able to leverage my pocket computer the way I do, but I wouldn’t want to either.

    The more people you manage, in general, the less computing power you need. That’s not to say the iPhone 7 isn’t powerful — it is — but to point out that you don’t need all the niche tools on Macs in order to run entire parts of companies, hell to run entire companies even.

  • When traveling, my iPad is essential and my Mac is the add-on

    As a follow-up to my member’s post this week, here’s an article where Jason Snell better articulates what he still needs a Mac for:

    It’s all gotten a lot better, and for maybe 90 percent of what I need to do, my iPad Pro can do it–in many cases as good or better than my Mac. But when I ran into something in the other 10 percent, this week I was happy that a Mac was nearby.

    He didn’t layout anything which is impossible to do on iOS, but I get why those things are easier on the Mac — because they still are easier on the Mac. However, even as a power user of computing tools, he could still be iPad only if he wanted to.

    Snell does bring up one thought which sits badly with me:

    And when the iPad can match the functionality of the Mac, sometimes it comes only via a bunch of weird third-party apps, workflows, and workarounds.

    Really? Most Mac apps are from weird third-party developers, with odd workflows, and workarounds. I wish he’d edited out this thought, because it’s absurd. Perhaps he’s never heard of some of the people making the current power iOS apps, but that’s only because they haven’t yet been around as long as Mac developers. And the terminal/Automator stuff he talks fondly of are far more cumbersome and weird than something like Workflow on iOS.

    (hat tip to: Mark Crump)