The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • 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)

  • iPad vs Surface

    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.

  • iPad Productivity Report – 11/14/16

    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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  • What’s Wrong With Apple TV?

    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.

  • Social Media and Elections

    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.

  • Revising the Membership and Paywall

    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.

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  • Strongbody Apparel

    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:

    • This is a very comfortable shirt. It has a vented mesh channel down the back of it and overall I found the shirt to breathe very well and retain comfort all day long.
    • After a full day wearing the shirt as an undershirt and doing yard work in it, it didn’t stink. I smelled it myself and nothing, smelled clean. I was a bit amazed by that.

    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.

  • 2Do is Free

    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.

  • A New Waxy.org

    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.

  • Convince Me iPad Pro is Better

    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.

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  • The Apple of Your Eye

    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.

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  • Microsoft Surface Studio

    My god, that’s a pretty PC. Like with Xiaomi products and Android, it’s too bad it runs Windows.

    Some good other thoughts on it: here, here, and here.

  • Xiaomi Mi Mix

    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.

  • Power of iMessage

    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.

  • KODAK EKTRA Smartphone

    This looks like it may be compelling enough to buy just for the camera itself.