The other day, on Twitter, my pal Pat tweeted this at me:
@BenjaminBrooks Ultimately, isn’t the method you enjoy the most going to be the one that produced the best results?
This of course made me think: which method of note taking do I enjoy the most? Hand written notes, or typed notes. I’ll be honest, when faced with that question the only thing I could come up with was: UUuuuhhhhhhhhh.
When Apple announced the Pencil alongside the iPad Pro, a lot of people saw it as the killer feature of the device. People wanted it more than anything else Apple announced that day. I wasn’t one of those people. That’s not because I didn’t think it was cool, but strictly because I thought the new iPad Pro, and its accompanying Smart Keyboard, was a far more interesting set of tools.
Still, I got the Pencil when they started shipping and have been using it a lot more than I had planned. Initially, when people would ask me how I liked the Pencil, I would tell them the same thing: “It’s really nice, but I am not sure I have much use for it.”
I still feel that way at times, but honestly it is a much better device than I thought it would be and I think it will become increasingly more useful.
Technically he isn’t my cat, he’s my wife’s cat, but ask anyone (including the damn cat) and he is my cat. You see my wife had a cat when we met, this small, shy, skittish cat named Mojito. Overall, ‘Mo’ was a pretty good cat, but she had one fatal flaw: she liked to spit up.
I don’t mean puke, because most of the time it was just this gross clear liquid, and you see she would shoot this crap all over our place if we left for any substantial period of time. Out all day? Twelve gross as shit piles of clear liquid. It drove us nuts.
The only thing which helped was cat pheromones called Felaway. This stuff worked well, but was expensive and was only good for us being gone for half a day. Progress, but not enough. It was so decided that getting another cat, would solve this problem.
I should clarify, this post is not about whether you can replace a laptop with an iPad Pro — at least not in that I am going to go through scenarios and talk about all that crap. That type of article is far too subjective to be worth your time, and I am guessing you could probably figure this out on your own. Instead, I want to talk about what it has been like for me to use my iPad Pro as a laptop, as a primary computer.
My typical setup for this was the iPad Pro on a small tripod type stand, with a Magic keyboard paired to it via Bluetooth. In short, this setup works far better than I thought it might, but still has a ways to go before it isn’t annoying at times.
Most of my daily activities center around being able to type, and this setup is beyond ideal for this, and my other large activities are Skype and GoToMeeting, both of which work perfectly well on iPad Pro. This leaves a bunch of smaller tasks, which are not deal breakers should they not work well with this setup.
After my iOS content blocker extravaganza, many people wanted to know when and if I would be posting a similar analysis for Mac content blockers. (iOS developers can easily port their iOS content blockers to the Mac and have a nice little plugin.) I initially figured this was something I would tackle, but after playing with Mac content blockers I won’t be looking into these.
Now that I have had some time to dive into the iPad Pro, and make it my primary machine, I wanted to look at the apps which really excel on the iPad Pro. The software, the apps more specifically, are what will really make or break the iPad Pro in the long run, as the hardware is all there and the accessories are all there as well. Whether the device succeeds or not is resting on the shoulders of the software for a change.
This isn’t just about new apps either, this is about any app out there which makes a better experience on the iPad Pro. This could be a stock app, or some new app you have never tried.
When I started work at MartianCraft I decided that I would try to shake up some of the ways I worked. It felt like the right time. And since I knew there was going to be a great deal of things I would be learning, my note taking system seemed like the ideal candidate.
I threw out my entire structure for digital notes, grabbed a few Field Notes and started scribbling notes in them. After a month or so, I had decided the experiment was enough of a success to warrant moving to a better notebook. I looked around and decided on the Leuchtturm1917 journal as it looked nice, had solid reviews, and mostly it was on Prime.
Just one month ago, I turned off analytics on my website and urged others to follow suit. You can read that article for my reasoning, but I felt analytics can unduly influence a writer, so it was best to turn them off. And then a couple weeks later I set off on this crazy writing goal of publishing 50,000 words to my site in just the month of November.
And just a couple weeks into that, I am starting to have pangs of missing those analytics. They were like a really ratty old, but super warm and comfy, blanket that you could snuggle up with. Comforting you, warming you, validating you. That’s what analytics did, and that’s the part I missed.
I sold all of my camera gear a while back and consolidated it down to just the Fujifilm X100T, which is a fixed focal length camera at 23mm — a 35mm equivalent view on a 35mm frame camera. This is also, effectively, the same focal length of your iSight camera on an iPhone. In other words the only two cameras I use, are fixed at 35mm.
While I could add adapters to the X100T to make it wider or longer in focal length, I have yet to do that, and don’t foresee doing this anytime soon. Honestly, I preferred a 50mm focal length before I began this experiment, but when I reviewed all my images it turned out that most were taken closer to 35mm than to 50mm. So I felt like this would be a fine problem to have — shooting closer to what I used, than to what my heart told me I loved.
There’s always that awkward moment when someone tells you they are pregnant, and then some person in the room blurts out something which implies those parents are never going to sleep again. “Better sleep now.” “Hope you work well on very little sleep.”
Assholes.
It’s one thing if you are amongst younger people, who really are not busy in their life and have no clue what sleeping less than a cozy 10 hours feels like, but think they are so busy with their lives — you expect that from them. But I also hear this nonsense spouted from parents too. It just drives me nuts.
One of the things I kept thinking about, after writing about The New York Times website and advertising models post in general, is just how poorly most front pages are designed. I am not meaning that often sites have ugly front pages, but I mean that often sites are showing entirely the wrong things on the front page.
This applies to most websites, across a wide range of categories, but the greatest offenders are the blogs. It feels very much like people choose to show the same content on the front page of their blog, because that is how it has always been done, instead of thinking through what might actually be useful on those pages.
I’ve not found myself in many places in life where people ask me to do something, which I should very much be paid for, for the exposure alone. This is, however, fairly common in the design world, and to a lesser extent for bloggers. While there have only been a handful of times which I was approached and asked to ‘syndicate’ content on this site to another ((Fuck you Business Insider.)) , I still find this a decision I have to make on a regular basis. Writing for another site, at the cost of that writing not being on this site.
This isn’t a subject many people talk about in a permanent form — typically choosing to dole out advice around this on Twitter where it is forgotten 5 minutes later — and that’s safe for everyone. But it has always bugged me that this isn’t a topic talked about more on blogs so others may find the information.
Justin Williams, in The Chicken or the iPad Pro:
The sad reality is there aren’t enough Omnis in the ecosystem right now to make the iPad Pro a viable productivity platform for anyone but those executives, retired folks, and masochist bloggers who jump through more hoops than a circus elephant to use an iPad instead of a Mac.
Williams makes a lot of great points in his post, but the one thing I left his post wondering about the most, was if he was right about the masochism of iOS. It’s been something I have been going back and forth with for most of the day — just eating at me a bit.
There has been a lot said over the years about publishers trying to make money in the changing landscape that is their online world. It is also no secret that I loathe advertising. Where advertising was once an exciting art form, it has now devolved into a creepy data driven model which is unapologetic for its invasive nature. But that is not what we are hear to talk about today.
We are here to talk about the fact that publishers never really took the Internet seriously, and so they made bad decisions which ultimately cornered them into using a foundation which was unstable at best for building their business on. And now publishers only focus on making advertising better, instead of tearing everything back down to its very foundation and starting over.
Which is why they continually struggle.
If there is one thing I absolutely cannot stand, it is wires dangling from my head. They get in the way, they are visible, and they are a terrible annoyance to me. It’s not even so much that they are pulling on your head, it’s that no matter what I do, my arm touches the cord. I cannot stand my arm touching wires on my desk.
You can also see that damned wire running out of the headphone jack and to your head — who wants that?
The thing is, I never got around to buying bluetooth headphones. Each time I looked at some I gravitated towards $500+ headphones and then I would always decide I had better places for that money to go. One day I was fed up enough and decided to order something to get rid of that damned wire.
In college I never had a backup for any of my computers. I knew about backups. I knew I should have one — especially given I was on Windows for the first couple of years. But I never had one. I did constantly reformat my computer (Windows), so I had backups of my working files and pictures, but that was about it.
Which really sucked, because a couple years into college my computer was stolen. Amazingly I didn’t really lose much. I lost some images, and some files, but not a whole ton of stuff.
And yet, when I got a new computer a few days later, I again didn’t backup. It wasn’t until I was out of college and getting heavier into photography when I started to back up. And then I started to get really into the nerdy side of backing things up.
I’ve had my iPad Pro for just over twenty-four hours now, as the title implies, and to stem my emails I wanted to share a few early and rough thoughts about the device.
I set the iPad Pro up from scratch, which took much longer than I expected, and put my laptop away after that. I’ve only been using the iPad Pro as my computer since then, but it’s also only been a day so that’s nothing new or revolutionary. At this point there is no judgments I can make about the iPad Pro as a work device, I can only make guesses, so it’s not worth talking about.
What’s my most used app on my iPhone? Slack. On my iPad? Slack. On my Mac? Slack. Yet this isn’t an article about how good Slack is, or how revolutionary it is. Because for as good as Slack is, there are some really rough spots.
No, This is an article about the fact that a large part of my world exists only in Slack. If you stop and think about this for a moment — wow.
My entire office and most of the work I do is in Slack. I also have a large group of friends from around the world, whom I only communicate with in Slack. I have an entire professional network of people I hardly know (like any good professional network) which is only in Slack. I have Slacks with people I am working on hobby projects with and on and on.
Years ago, when Shawn and I were still podcasting together, we had a few shows where we talked about my insane RSS feed subscriptions. At one point I remember the subscribed count reaching close to 700 feeds for me. Thousands of posts came through every day and I went through them all. Shawn would tell me it was nuts to have that many. He would tell me he had less than 200 or maybe 100 feeds. I would think he was nuts — and that was basically the gist of every episode we recorded.
Recently, I was in a chat with Justin Blanton when he said that he was “completionist” meaning he didn’t want to miss a single thing in whatever thing it was that he did. Whether that was RSS or Twitter, and I chimed in agreeing that this is very much how I work and how I feel.
Back in late May I took delivery of a new 12” Retina MacBook and proceeded to move everything to it — making it the only computer I use outside of my iOS devices. It has been a very long time since I have lived with such a small screen as my only screen, and I know many people think it is just too small of a screen to work with for a daily driver.
Since I’ve had the machine for just over five months I can tell you that there is no turning back for me. Sure, I’ll get an iPad Pro when they launch, but as far as Macs go, this 12” Retina MacBook is all I need. It is my perfect machine.