The Brooks Review

Category: Articles

  • The Filson Original Briefcase

    A couple of months ago I picked up a Filson Original Briefcase in otter green — this is a classic briefcase which has been around seemingly forever (along with Filson). My goal was to find a bag which would carry my iPad and a few other things around town — something not a backpack and something not overly techy/tactical/modern.

    I have tons of bags, but they are all of the same breed and almost entirely backpacks at this point. And while I like the Tom Bihn Daylight Briefcase a lot, it didn’t feel right to me. Fantastic bag, but an ill fit for me and my personality on a daily basis.

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  • iPad Productivity Report — 2/13/17

    I spent some time over the weekend paying out the nose for DEVONThink 2 Go, and getting that setup. This is one of those apps where it seems absolutely pointless until it just clicks. It has not, as of yet, *clicked* for me. I honestly have no clue where the benefit of this app lies, so if you use it please chime in for me. (I a, testing several ideas in it, but odd app.)

    In the mean time, let’s talk about my Read Later service struggles and highlight some other apps I do know how to use.

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  • Building a Bug Out Bag

    I posted a link to an article which pokes a little fun at the bug out bag mentality, in doing so I knew I was going to get some questions — specifically whether or not I have a bug out bag. So, yes, of course I have a bug out bag — I’ve had one since 2012. Allow me to explain why I have one, why you should have one, and how to build one without having to read posts by people trying to survive a nuclear zombie apocalypse where everything is also flooded and people are generally trying to kill each other.

    A tall order.

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  • iBooks Author — What Could Have Been

    Daniel Steinberg on passion behind teams at Apple:

    iBooks Author could have been a trojan horse into the personal publishing business. It would have been classic Apple. Instead of small authors going to Amazon’s platform, they would have started with iBooks Author. Apple should have made it easy for them to push to Amazon as well. Why? Because these people wanted to publish on Amazon but they weren’t considering publishing with Apple. Thousands of authors would have come to Apple to create content and stayed with Apple after publishing content there.

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  • Todoist

    The first time I tried Todoist, I was enamored by one feature: the daily emails. I love those, as they are a great way to make sure I see my list for the day, at the top of the day when I can really do something about it. I quickly brushed Todoist aside for 2Do, as I didn’t trust the sync system and the unencrypted nature of Todoist.

    Truthfully, in many ways 2Do is the better app. But when I found out Todoist was now encrypting sync data properly, I felt it warranted a full look. I switched everything over and found an app with less power, but which is actually more powerful for me.

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  • iPad Productivity Report — 02/05/17

    When I posted that old iPads don’t work well, I received a slew of feedback with people telling me how many people they know using an iPad 3 era device. I truly feel sorry for these people, even when that device was launched it was underpowered. My oldest daughter still uses that, and it’s a pile shit — you stand no chance of convincing me otherwise.

    ## Reliance on Third Parties

    One of the most overlooked advantages of the macOS platform is the lessened reliance on third party software. That’s not to say you don’t need third party software on macOS, but that you can do *a lot* of stuff in something as basic as Terminal. A Mac, straight out of the box has a lot more ability than *any* iOS device straight out of the box. Where the playing field starts to level is when you add in third party apps on iOS (and macOS for that matter).

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  • Ulysses Does it Too

    In my quick review of Textastic I noted that I snagged it for the feature where you can grab an external file, edit it, and “save” it back to the external location without editing (I really need a better term for this). Turns out Ulysses can do that too, I mean of course it can, it’s amazing.

    If you back all the way out of your library and tap the manage view you will find an option to “Enable External Files” (maybe that’s a better name?). Once you do that there is a Library Source called External Files and within that you can grab files from iCloud Drive, OS X Server machines, and any other app which allows this kind of access (Transmit, Documents, Sync, etc). This all works incredibly well if what you are editing is raw text and not code, for my uses this will likely be better than Textastic.

    Thanks to all those who dropped me a note about this.

  • This Here iPad Sales Thing

    Look, I don’t know why iPad sales are trending down, you don’t know why they are, and actually no one knows why they are. You know how I know that? Because even Apple doesn’t know why, and they have the biggest motivation of anyone to figure out why.

    Let’s play a simple game:

    • What’s the best tablet you can buy? iPad.
    • What’s the computer best suited for the average American? iPad.

    Those two questions are so easy to answer that even the most staunch Mac believer will agree: most people probably are best off with a tablet and the iPad is easily the best tablet. That’s not me making an argument for the iPad, or against the Mac — it’s just that most Americans want something to buy things and look at Facebook while at home and, hey, it turns out the iPad is pretty fucking good at that.

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  • iPad Productivity Report — 1/30/17

    I wrote this one a few weeks ago, and this is the first week I didn’t have anything else to write about, enjoy it.

    ## Executive iPad

    This is one of those posts I have had on my list to write from the moment I decided to write weekly iPad Pro articles. My idea has always been that if you are an executive, or a manager in general, the only level of computer you need is an iPad (or [for some](https://anxiousrobot.net/the-iphone-7-plus-is-my-only-computer-489947cc126c#.q9aqjwre6), an iPhone).

    I allude to this idea often in my posts, and it rubs a certain subset of people the wrong way. It’s the same group who thinks that “people like me” only write for a blog, or only administer a simple website. There are a couple of things I can say here: I *am* a writer for a blog, but that’s a hobby more than it is a job. Day to day, I’m the COO of MartianCraft — which is how I know the iPad Pro works fantastically well for managers, because it is all *I* use.

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  • Textastic 6

    It has been quite some time since I last tested Textastic, but it popped back up on my radar this past week as I needed a specific feature I had heard the app possessed. Specifically the ability of Textastic to open a document from another app, edit and save back to that location without actually having to import it to the app.

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  • Improving OmniOutliner on iOS

    Yesterday I read The Omni Group’s look back at 2016 and look forward at 2017 plans. OmniOutliner is well featured in that post, much to my delight. OmniOutliner is one of my favorite apps for the Mac and something I truly love.

    OmniOutliner on iOS, though, has always been hit and miss for me. It’s easily — and I have been looking — the best outlining app you can get for iOS right now, but it feels like it is stuck in the past. The entire document picker is tedious at best to use. With thumbnails for each file, and what good does that do when it is an outline, and no way to search it feels old and doesn’t scale well for someone like me who has hundreds of files.

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  • It Was Not A Great Start to the Week for My iPad

    Here’s how my Monday went at “the office”:

    The post to Slack was after a trying for an hour to print a sheet of labels from a CSV file I had. No joke, I couldn’t do it. I downloaded a ton of apps, I even tried web services. I went to Screens to try and create a PDF file on the remote Mac mini, but would have had to install way too much software.

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  • DU/ER 5 Pocket A/C Pants

    These pants were launched on Kickstarter as “the best hot weather travel pants” you can wear and they have all sorts of “travel features” to boot. I wanted them for the look, I have a pair of light gray jeans that I love to wear in the summer, so I thought I would pick these up to replace those pants.

    The pants are a blend with a cotton and a bunch of other things with a goal of making them durable, comfortable, breathable and all the other things you hear about travel focused pants. I’ve had these pants long enough now that I can speak a little more to how they feel to wear.

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  • iPad Productivity Report — 01/23/17 🔒

    ## Some F/U

    In the [last iPad Report](https://brooksreview.net/2017/01/ipad-report-011617/), I talked about building a small app within [Workflow](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow-powerful-automation/id915249334?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d). One of the issues I cited was the inability to pull from something like a `csv` for my lists, and instead needing to build the list again inside Workflow. As I feared, I was wrong and this can be done, it’s just that — like with most things Workflow — it’s rather opaque. (Workflow needs someone working there full time explaining how to build things, they would double their sales.)

    Ari Weinstein (co-founder of Workflow) reached out to me on Twitter to tell me just how to do it. He provided [this sample Workflow](https://twitter.com/AriX/status/821074770141642752). The Workflow pulls from iCloud Drive and then parses the text file as a list (with new items being on their own line). This should be able to work with a `csv` too, but I’ve modded my `csv` too much to test, but I did try with a text file and it was magic.

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  • Full Time VPN

    I watched the Snowden movie a little while back now, and after watching it I had that paranoid itch. Being iOS only there is very little I can do to make my systems more private and it seemed that the one gaping hole was my web connection itself. Which spurred me to think about getting a VPN service to run full time while I used my devices, even when I am on my home network. Both to encrypt my data streams, but also to better anonymize the web traffic.

    So for the past few weeks I have been testing through three different setups:

    1. My self-owned VPN through my Mac mini server
    2. Private Internet Access (PIA)
    3. Cloak

    PIA was the only one new to me, but it gets very high marks for quality, speed, and privacy — so I figured I better test it. My server encrypts the traffic, but does nothing about anonymizing it — in other words instead of coming from my device, it’s coming from a server I clearly own. Cloak is one of the easiest systems to use, works well, and while not being privacy minded, does what I label a “solid job” with it.

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  • My Morning News Routine

    A large part of my morning routine, as it likely is for most of you, is to catch up on the news I might have missed the night before. A few years ago this felt like a much simpler task: some RSS, some Twitter, done. I felt well informed using just a few tools and getting news which was highly tailored to me, or what I thought mattered to me.

    Fast forward to 2017, and my routine has changed greatly. I can’t use Twitter for news — hell I can hardly stand to read it. Twitter is a cesspool of bullshit, attention grabbing links, and it’s not where you get quality news — rather Twitter is where you get the same bullshit you would see on cable news.

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  • iPad Productivity Report — 01/16/17 🔒

    ## Building an iOS Workflow App

    One thing I used to do a lot on my Mac was to build small apps inside Keyboard Maestro which would help me accomplish really tedious shit. That’s something which is considerably harder to do on iOS — requiring you either use [Pythonista](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pythonista-3/id1085978097?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d), and thus learn Python, or use [Workflow](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workflow-powerful-automation/id915249334?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d) and deal with a clunky UI and a limited tool set.

    *I’m not bitter, I’m just disappointed.*

    Still, I wanted to build one of these little apps this past week — both to see if I could actually build it, and secondly to help me out with a fun little idea I had. The idea was very simple: I have three different lists of things and I want to be given a random items off of the specified list. Nothing earth shattering, and something I could easily do on my Mac.

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  • The MiniVan Keyboard

    When writing about the Pok3r, I left out a rather embarrassing thought I had running around my head which goes something like this: I should really find another keyboard, even smaller, that I can take with me on trips. Insane, I know, but they do make them. They are called 40% keyboards (or 45% or a variety of other names, which makes them hard to find) and they are kind of insane themselves.

    They do not have a number row for starters, and they cram all sorts of other things away in modifier keys, but since they are all custom, you never know what is where until you memorize it all. Or you can reprogram the entire board, which means you learn your layout and not someone else’s.

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  • iPad Productivity Report – 1/9/17 🔒

    ## Drawing Apps

    For a couple of months there has been one post I have been putting off writing, this post, about drawing/writing/note apps for the iPad Pro. One of my key uses of the smaller 9.7″ iPad Pro is as a writing tablet during meetings/calls/research — using it as stand in for my trusty Baron Fig.

    I’ve tried many, but certainly not all, of the apps which could fit the bill as a sheet of paper for my Apple Pencil. To answer the immediate question as to which is best, all I can say is that it very much depends on what you want and need to do with these apps. Instead let me share thoughts on the apps I currently have on my iPad Pro:

    – [Inkflow](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/inkflow-visual-notebook/id519524685?mt=8&uo=4&at=1l3v36d): this app has some of the more compelling screenshots in the App Store, but it falls short of them in practice. The UI is clean and simple, and the icon is solid. The choices of writing tools is minimal, but still useful. I love how quickly the app launches and is ready to go, how I can easily add pages to any of the “books” the app uses to organize things. There is also not a lot of pressure sensitivity in the app, which is good if you don’t want to pay much attention, but bad if you want things to look nice. I look at Inkflow the same as I do a Field Notes: it’s not the greatest, but it’s really handy and holds a lot of random shit. Inkflow stays on my home screen as a tool to capture the random things you might find in my Field Notes.

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  • iPad Productivity Report – 1/2/17

    ## I Can’t Use an iPad, But Thanks

    Last week, I published [this article](https://brooksreview.net/2016/12/evovling-ipad-desktop-usage/) on the overall state of desktop iPad usage. The best part about publishing articles like this is fielding the myriad of questions which inevitably hit my inbox — while I can’t get to them all, I do try to read them all. Here’s the most common email/DM/tweet response I got:

    > I do XYZ thing every day, and because of that it’s rather obvious I can’t use an iPad. I think iPads are amazing and I love to screw around on my iPad, but my Mac is essential. I wish I could use an iPad, but it’s just not an option for me/most people who aren’t writers.

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