Category: Articles

I’ve become a bit of a notebook person, whereby I mean I write in a notebook everyday to keep track of important things at work. I am not, however, obsessed with finding the right notebook — I quite like the one I have.

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I tend to kill my iPad Pro (12.9″) battery daily — right around 6pm it is nearly exhausted. I assume this is due to the amount of video calls and Skype calls I do on a daily basis. Nevertheless, I use the piss out of my iPad Pro.

I won’t lie and say I never use my MacBook. Sometimes I need to take a video call and look something up at the same time, and if I were to leave the call app on iOS, my video awkwardly stops, so I use the MacBook. Likewise there are still a few things I can’t do, or can’t do well on iOS, like manage Medium Submissions ((Or post to Medium in general unless through Ulysses. The Medium app is a joke for creating content with.)) , News Publisher stuff on iCloud, and a handful of random Pages documents which contain fonts I have yet to install on iOS.

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I test a lot of tools all the time. And if there is one thing this has taught me — more than anything else — it is that it is most certainly not about the tools. That’s odd to hear from someone who spends a lot of time telling you which tools are the best — whether it be apps, knives, bags, etc — but it is true. It’s just not about the tools.

First and foremost it is about having just enough in your tools to do the work.

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My enthusiasm for the iPad Pro lineup is well documented on this site, so naturally I have been fielding the question of which iPad Pro people should get, and if I am moving to the “smaller” model myself. I am very happy to see the addition of the 9.7″ iPad Pro — if for nothing else than signally Apple’s continued commitment to the iPad lineup.

The 9.7″ model, however, does not appeal to me. Yes, the better camera I guess is nice (not the bump though) and yes the smaller size might be nice at times — sure even the color shifting display seems great. But it is a lesser device.

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I’ve been experimenting going with all GORUCK gear and nothing else. The kit I have to work with is:

• Bullet Ruck 10L
• GR1
• GR2
• Field Pockets (padded and shadow)
• Wire Dopp(s)

Is that enough for all my bag needs? I’ve been trying to see if it was, but after a couple months I can tell you that it is not enough. The Field Pockets are too small for how I pack, the GR1 is too big for daily carry of my iPad Pro, while the Bullet Ruck is too small to carry the iPad Pro (despite being perfect for my MacBook).

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If you can’t tell, I’ve recently become obsessed with finding the perfect travel bag for me. Something that fits my style — both visual style and my packing and traveling style. This search has brought me across a wide array of bags, the latest of which is the GORUCK GR2.

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Manton Reece on Ulysses Mobile:

Ulysses for iOS falls into this trap. Its use of iCloud is private to the app, unlike iCloud Drive or Dropbox which are accessible from other apps.

Manton is frustrated about the lack of Dropbox support in Ulysses Mobile and he is expressing a common complaint and concern I hear from people about the app. The question I am asked is how I handle this, how I am ok with it, how I use my text in other apps…

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I was upset when I got my iPad Pro and Ulysses didn’t scale correctly on it, as that was the thing holding me back from a great iPad Pro experience. But then I got my hands on a beta of Ulysses Mobile, and since then it’s easily become my favorite app on iOS.

I’m in love with this app.

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Medium the most important service operating right now.

I know that, for most people, this will be a rather hard thing to swallow, however Medium is very important right now. This doesn’t mean that it will always be, or that I have any want to move to Medium in any significant way, but you can’t deny what is going on with Medium.

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Twitter is dying. Again.

Or so I’ve been told, or seen, or heard — someone else said it, not me.

But I’ve been thinking about this lately as I watch more than half the tweets roll by my Twitter stream, muted and never to be seen. What I’ve come to realize is there is a discoverability and interest problem on Twitter — with Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram you can fairly easily find niches that conform to what you enjoy, what you are looking for, or what you are interested in.

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I am a huge fan of rss and subscribe to hundreds of feeds through the system. And as any rss user will tell you, there’s a lot of crap you have to dig through to find the good stuff. That’s the nature of the beast — what you curate in your rss feed is subject to being filled with a mixed bag of bad and good content.

There’s piles of shit every where you look, which you have to sift through item by item in order to find something decent — it’s even more work to find something good because you can’t judge good until you finish reading it.

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I had the need to pick up a new printer a little over a month ago — while I have a nice photo printer, I needed a new laser printer. Most people don’t need printers anymore, but I had become so tired of fighting with my old one that I broke down and picked up a new one.

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I’m tired of overwrought “reviews”. I am just as guilty as everyone else — so I know it is painful to hear, but this is out of hand and it needs to stop.

Just as I don’t have time for podcasts, I don’t have time to read about a new app for 30 minutes when I could try it for myself in 5 minutes. It makes no sense to read these beastly posts when I could do the work the reviewer was supposed to do — but in less time than I would spend reading the review.

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We’ve all seen them. Notes about a fictional engineer who was hired and then fired. A cute story about something completely irrelevant to the matter at hand. Recipe for ‘squash bug soup’ or something along those lines.

With disturbingly increasing frequency, companies are deciding to let their marketing departments handle their release notes instead of the engineering team or product manager.

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Putting together a newsletter on my Mac is a piece of cake. Even building a list of links with commentary is easy with the Keyboard Maestro macros I have on hand, but on the iPad Pro, or even the iPhone, these tasks were a new challenge to figure out.

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Much like with 2Do, an astonishing amount of people right now are moving — in one way or another — to iOS as a full time computing platform. Perhaps not ditching the Mac completely, but at the very least declaring iOS ready for most of their work. And it’s not just writers, I’ve been seeing some people who do seriously heavy duty work moving to the likes of the iPad Pro and other iOS devices. Justin Blanton just penned his post on how he is mostly iPhone only:

With that in mind, nearly all of my professional (and personal) consumption can be done enjoyably from my iPhone or iPad; and almost all of my professional output is channeled through either email or Messenger, also easily handled by my iOS devices.

Wow.

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A couple of days after Viticci posted his MacStories review of 2Do, I moved everything I had over to the app from OmniFocus. It was a big move for me as I have been a staunch OmniFocus supporter for close to 5 years now. I also wasn’t alone in the move, as a rather large group of nerds I know made the same move.

For some reason, something clicked for all of us. We all were mostly satisfied by OmniFocus, and yet not happy with OmniFocus. Within moments of using 2Do, things felt right — what was once missing was found.

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Note: This bag is a pre-production unit, which was provided to me for the purpose of this review.

One of my favorite things to do when I am traveling is to stand next to, or near, someone who is going the same place I am going (and roughly for the same length of time) — typically a co-worker, friend, or family member. I stand near them, look at what they are carrying for luggage, and then smirk as I wait for them to say something like “is that really your only bag?”

I typically respond by asking: “Are both of your bags full?”

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