Piotr Gorecki Jr:
Most people agree that iPad software is not ready for its prime in terms of desk usage (with keyboard). There are still many glitches, bugs and inconveniences — like support for landscape mode, oversimplified clipboard or between-app communication. But it’s just software. That’s not a hardware limitation. Nor kernel/runtime limitation. I can’t see a problem with the iPad Pro that can’t be solved by OS or app update.
This is an older post, but absolutely spot on.
Welcome to the first of many, weekly reports on iPad Productivity — a new bonus for members of the site. First: thank you for being a member. Just the fact that one person, who isn’t my mom, is willing to pay to read my site is amazing.
### You Never Forget Your First Love
I’m afraid though, I have to jump right into the thick of it and address [this comment from Jason Snell](http://www.macworld.com/article/3140144/macs/what-the-touch-bar-tells-us-about-the-macs-future.html) — a comment I see all to often:
> Which is my way of saying, though the Mac will continue to evolve in the future, it may finally become irrelevant only when the iPad is capable of doing all the work people currently use their Macs for. And on that front, iOS still has a long way yet to go.
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Bradley Chambers:
Apple’s model of renting me $5 movies or selling $2 TV shows seems archaic compared to Netflix, Hulu, or Sling TV.
I actually really love the Apple TV — it’s the primary way I watch all TV. However, I agree so much with the above statement. I hate constantly having to rent new release movies for $5 a pop. Just let me pay a monthly fee and be done with it. Same with the TV Shows Apple “sells”. So annoying.
Fantastic post from Sarah Perez:
The social media network has become an outsize player in crafting our understanding of the events that take place around us. We’ve known for some time that its echo chamber could be an issue in terms of exposing us to differing viewpoints. But only today are some realizing how powerful its influence has become.
Read the whole thing.
In July of 2012 I established my site as a paywall with a time delay for all the articles to be free (originally 7 days, revised down to 3 days and then 2 days and moving around randomly since then depending on my mood). It was $4 month, or $40 a year — over the years there’s been odd discounts ($30/year for a couple weeks) and a short lived Quarterly membership ($7 every 3 months). The original paywall cost me $1,500 to have developed and took close to three months to implement. Since then I have hired people to do minor updates to the system, but amazingly it has kept plugging away mostly as it was originally intended.
At the time I implemented this, there was simply no commercial option I could buy, or use, which had all the features I wanted (using Stripe as my payment processor was a major hurdle at the time as most plugins didn’t support Stripe). Had I waited just a couple months more, all the widely used plugins would add most of the support I wanted and needed, but I had made my bed and was already signing up members.
Strongbody Apparel reached out to tell me about their new Gastown Jacket which is already fully funded on Kickstarter. I personally think it looks like a great jacket — especially for the more casual wardrobes.
As a way for me to get to know the brand, Strongbody sent me over their essential workout tank, which is more like a sleeveless t-shirt than a traditional tank. Given the short amount of time I’ve had with the shirt, what I can say is:
If the quality of this shirt is any indication, then I really look forward to seeing the Gastown jacket in person.
Finding one good jacket which will cover 90% of the travel I do, and still stuff down small is something I am still struggling with. Glad to see more and more jackets like this coming out.
I find it terrifying when one of my favorite and most used apps goes Freemium — so I mean it when I say that I really hope this works out for 2Do. What a great app.
Andy Baio on blogging in general:
Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.
While I may cross-post some content to Apple News, Medium, and other services as they spring up — I won’t cross post everything and I certainly don’t trust those sites to ever be more than a passing fad. Having my own site gives me complete control to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. I don’t understand why people ever want it any other way.
Most people are decidedly not developers, by the way.
It’s a statement I hear all the time — people either asking me to convince them the iPad Pro is better, because they want to be convinced, or because they want to prove me wrong. Either way, people either want to get it, or they simply cannot fathom how such a setup would actually work.
Sean Sperte on a common sentiment about no longer feeling like a through and through Apple fan:
There may be other reasons I haven’t thought of, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind. And obviously, I do really prefer the user experiences I get with macOS and iOS, despite their many, many… many (gosh, doesn’t it seem like more than ever?) flaws.
When I was talking about the Surface Studio on Twitter, someone responded “have you guys even used Windows lately”. I chuckled, because I have, and it’s shit. Anyone who thinks the Surface Studio makes up for that, is going to be really fucking sad.
My god, that’s a pretty phone. The other bonus of watching this video is that I finally found out how to pronounce “Xaiomi”. Like Microsoft products though, it’s too bad it runs Android.
John Gruber on iMessage and how it locks people into iPhones, yet it insanely useful:
iMessage is an exception. With iMessage you get to connect both with iPhone users in the Google ecosystem and iPhone users in the Apple ecosystem. For a lot of us here in the U.S., that’s just about everyone we know.
He’s right — it’s almost unsettling to me when I see green bubbles (indicating SMS) instead of the blue iMessage bubbles. It’s also a. clusterfuck anytime someone who was previously an iMessage person switches to Android without jumping through all of Apple’s hoops.
But beyond that, iMessage is easily the best messaging platform I have tried. I get to try a lot of different ones all the time, and every time I am just glad when I can go back to iMessage. It’s such a seamless and perfect tool.
This looks like it may be compelling enough to buy just for the camera itself.
Roughly 9,700 current and retired soldiers have been told by the California Guard to repay some or all of their bonuses and the recoupment effort has recovered more than $22 million so far.
This is really fucked up.
What if the reason Macs are so stale, is because they are about to jump from Intel chips to A-Series chips? For starters, I’d buy one.
I’ve now had the Lanier for some time, and have really put it through its paces, so I thought it was a good moment to stop and talk a little more about this very little bag. In my first post I wrote:
And yet there’s something about a true briefcase like this — a notion that people who carry a bag which is generally more restrictive, have somehow figured something out in their life that most of us have not.
I don’t think I could state it any better than that today. This bag is small, but it is in that smallness where you find a calm with it. It is not just small, but because it only has two handles to carry it with — it demands that what you put in it not weigh too much.
Since I picked up the Outlier Futureworks they have quickly become not only my favorite pants, but my most worn pants. I’ve been yearning to get another pair of Outlier pants, either Slim Dungarees or the OG Classics. But I have been held back for some reason on both. Outlier just launched the Strongworks, which are cut similar to the Futureworks, but in a heavier and more rugged fabric.
I picked them up and have only had them two days, but these are great. I can see wearing these a lot already.
After being in our new house for just over a week, I was getting around to unpacking my office (only the garage left to do) and as I opened box after box, more wires sprung up. I shook my head and kept piling them away in more areas of the new office.
Fast forward to the other morning and I’m reading an article from The Wirecutter posted on The New York Times — a guide to cutting the cord from Cable TV. Another thing I have been working with since moving — for the first time we are going to have two TV areas in the house, should I get two cable boxes? Do I need two cable boxes?
David Chartier on dropping Dropbox:
Others who have made this transition told me there’s a noticeable performance boost to be had by uninstalling Dropbox from a Mac, which I just did yesterday. They weren’t kidding.
Dropbox has gone from an amazing service to a mess of a feature. iCloud Drive is simply a lot better.