Recent Articles

A lot of keyboards have been strained over the furious typing surrounding the future of the iPad recently. All of these posts seem to be all over the place. Some calling for doom, some (most?) confused, and others saying ‘pshaw, all is good’. I think it would be helpful to look at what the iPad is actually good at doing — but do note that by using the word ‘good’ I don’t necessarily mean ‘better’ — what’s it’s not so good at, and then see if we can suss out this confusion.

Best Uses

Here’s what I find to be the best use cases for the iPad, as it currently functions:

• Web browsing. Sorry, even with limited access to some sites you just won’t find a better way to browse the web.
• Gaming. Yes console games are great, PC games are epic, and iPhone games are handy. To me the iPad strikes a great balance and I always find myself fully immersed in a game when I play it on my iPad.
• Hand written notes. Paper is better, but Paper is pretty sweet. That, and apps like Notability make things a lot easier than taking notes on any other device.
• Short bursts of computing. If I have to watch my kids I’m not bringing in my laptop out while they are playing. It’s too many interruptions for my laptop to hold up well, but the iPad lives for this type of usage. Grab it for 5 minutes, or 10 seconds, or 10 hours — doesn’t matter — you can easily pick it up and put it down and do what you need, or want, to do.
• Reading. Your Kindle is great and all, and you can read on the Mac or iPhone, but the iPad is very good for reading too. It’s certainly better than your laptop, possibly your phone depending on where you are.
• Outlining. I find outlining on a computer to feel silly, after all it doesn’t take much more to write it out since I am already on the computer. But the iPad is well suited for outlining as it’s onscreen keyboard helps to keep outlines short and to the point.
• Media. You may think the iPad is too heavy to hold to watch a movie, but have you tried holding a laptop or TV to watch a movie? And your iPhone is super light, but also tiny.

With the exception of maybe two of the above ((Outlining and web browsing.)) , people have historically bought specially made tools to do just one of the things on the lists above. The iPad packages them all up, and cumulatively at a cheaper price. It’s no slouch.

I’m reminded of this from Ricardo Mori:

That what the iPad does better is exactly the fact that it can do many things well. The iPad, for me, shines exactly because of the staggering amount of things it does well — there is no other tablet capable of doing something like this. You may say that this or that other tablet are better than the iPad at performing certain tasks, but they lack the iPad’s overall versatility.

Worst Uses

Now, it’s not all good. There are a great many things that iPad does not (yet) do very well:

• Spreadsheets. I don’t even bother. It’s fine to view them, but shit to make a high quality spreadsheet on the iPad.
• Writing is unless you attach a real keyboard. I love the onscreen keyboard, but even I don’t love to write long form on it.
• Page layout. lol
• Coding. LOL
• Sharing files. I loathe having to send something to someone from my iPad. “Send me that PDF.” Trying 5 apps later I found it and sent it, what a pain.
• Working with reference material is too big a chore on a single app display device.

There are a lot more options you can add to either list, but those are the rudimentary things which people like to note about the iPad.

So is it a failure?

The truth is no one knows yet, but moreover you must define failure. Failure to make money for Apple? Surely not. Failure to rid the world of PCs? Absolutely. Failure to cure world hunger? Miserable failure.

I counter such notions of the iPad being a failure with a series of questions:

• Does a Camry fail because it is not a Ferrari?
• Does a Ferrari fail because it is not a Jeep?
• Does a MacBook Air fail because it is not a Mac Pro?

Of course not.

The only people truly disappointed with the iPad right now is Wall Street, because Wall Street is stupid. Wall Street lives and breathes on bullet points and future potential. How well is the iPad fighting the bullet point war? Not well, but only because Apple doesn’t care to fight that war.

And because the iPad doesn’t fair well when compared on bullet points alone — and doesn’t care to fair well — Wall Street just doesn’t get iPads. And when you think you are the smartest people in the room (the room being Wall Street and the people being ‘analysts’) and you come across something you don’t understand, you naturally believe it is because there is nothing to understand — and therefore it will soon die. ((Also there’s the very plausible argument that iPad upgrade cycles are far longer than that of iPhones. Which, come to think of it, is all I should have written for this post.))

I’ve always felt that my best images come from my best camera(s). Yet as it turns out, the images that are my favorite are always shitty ((Shitty is to mean, blurry, poorly composed, poorly exposed, etc.)) snapshots that tell the story of my daily life and are captured with whatever is on hand — sometimes that is my best camera, but mostly these days it is my iPhone.

But it doesn’t really matter, well the camera that is, as 51% of photographers will tell you: “the best camera is the one you have with you”. I’m constantly reminded of this as I dig through my archives of images. Like this shot snapped on a rainy, misty, and relatively boring hike that my buddy and I took quite a while back now.

Literally everything we saw that day was some shade of green with flat light from the rain/mist. It was an average hike with wasted energy mostly spent on carrying camera gear we didn’t want to use for fear of it getting too wet. But that image turned out really well and I didn’t even realize it was there until just recently. And it was shot not with my best camera just a camera. Slightly off center, probably shot full auto, eye level, on a wet miserable hike and I love it.

The camera doesn’t matter to me in hindsight , and I doubt I would have grabbed a much better image with a better camera. Just a different image, ever so slightly different, taken in more or less the same sloppy fashion.

I hate the mantra that the best camera is the one with you, but in hindsight it does seem to hold true — well, kind of. You see in hindsight, and even now, we don’t really know what images we are missing, or missed. I don’t know what other images I could have had on that hike if I had tripods, lenses, dSLRs, ND filters, and patience. I don’t know, and I don’t care to try and think back on it.

What I do know, is that I don’t give a shit what camera I took and image with after I’ve taken the image. I only care about the camera when I am taking the picture, and more often then not I can’t stand not having my ‘best’ camera to take the image.

‘The best camera’ doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, instead I sit back and greatly enjoy the simple images like this, instead of admiring the ‘better’ images like this.

I will always find it more enjoyable to take a picture with my best camera, but I find that no matter what camera I use to make the picture, my enjoyment of the picture is never diminished by which camera I used at the time.

It is, then, only in the process of making the image that I care about the camera. Once the image is there, I tend to only care about the image itself.

Back in December I wrote about how I had switched from OmniFocus to Flow (getflow.com) as my task management system. I don’t think one can really get a sense as to how good a task management tool like this is until they’ve use it for a year, but I wanted to update you on a few things I have been finding now that I have close to six months of usage under my belt.

These are random thoughts in no particular order.

Lists, Workspaces, And Sub-Lists

The organization of Flow is much different than many other task management apps I have used. For starters Flow allows you to have many different sections where you can have different collaborators — Flow calls these ‘workspaces’ and they make a lot of sense. Flow is giving a nod to today’s work environment where people are often working with others who are not necessarily a part of their company, but an important piece of the overall project.

Workspaces in that sense work really well, and I have four setup:
– Personal
– Day Job
– Project 1
– Project 2

What’s odd is that Flow won’t allow you to set one workspace as your personal workspace. Instead Flow is always showing you your personal workspace as if it was a 15 person team’s workspace. That’s a bit annoying because there could be simple changes made to a fully private space to make it more useful. Things like changing ‘comments’ to ‘notes’, and turning off the rather useless dashboard (useless that is only if you are the only person in the workspace).

Lists

Flow further breaks down your task storage with lists, residing inside workspaces. Each list can have sub-lists, and all of that gives you a very GTD/OmniFocus ‘project’ based planning tool. I’ve been playing around with these lists and have come to realize a few things:

• Lists should absolutely be project based when in a workspace with more people than just you. Having just one master ‘to-do’ list simply doesn’t work once you start working in a team setting.
• In your personal workspace lists work really well for categorizing your tasks. (e.g. Costco, Office, Home, Bills, etc)
• Sub-lists are great for showing small projects inside of categories in both team and personal settings. So you can have a master list of ‘Design’ and then break that down into the different designs you need (e.g. Tutorial, Icon, etc).

It’d be fine if Flow stopped there, but it also allows adding sub-tasks to a main task. So if my task is “buy groceries for party” then I can add sub tasks within that task that is my actual shopping list, which is useful if said task doesn’t just fit into my ‘Costco’ list, or if I want to take a trip to Costco just for that set of items.

At first I thought sub-tasks solely added another layer of obfuscation to my task management, but I have come to find that it is actually very handy. While I don’t use it for my shopping lists (as I cited in the above example) — I have found it to be killer when a task suddenly becomes so much more than just another task. These are like mini-projects in a way. Not always useful, but indispensable when you come across the need for sub-tasks.

One issue with sub-tasks is that the main task is only ever shown and complete or incomplete, no matter how many sub tasks have been completed. Therefore you could have a task with 19 of 20 sub tasks done, but it still looks just as incomplete as it did when it was originally created. I’d love for there to be more indication of status in Flow (for sub-tasks and in general).

iOS is buggy

I’ve found that the iOS apps are rather buggy (which is odd since they mostly feel like web views). By this I mean that often I have to quit the app out of the tray, or log back in, to get the app working. Recent updates have improved this, but it is very annoying.

The iPad app is really annoying because it is portrait only, I just don’t get this move.

Overall I am downgrading my initial ratings of the iOS apps to average at best.

Fluid is great

Since there is no full-fledged Mac app I run Flow in a Fluid instance. That’s not always ideal, but for this app it actually works really well. The biggest annoyance is the lack of native keyboard shortcuts, but I haven’t been bothered by this enough to consider it a deal breaker.

Menubar is perfect

The official menubar app for Mac works perfectly for quick entry, but it is annoying that a workspace is pre-defined instead of easily being typed in. To change workspaces requires touching the mouse, and I really try to avoid that if I want to do anything “quick”. Also the lack of repeating options in the entry panel is limiting if you regularly create repeating tasks. You actually have to jump into another Flow app to make a task repeating.

Random Annoyances

Right now here are some of the main annoyances I am facing:

• Repeating tasks need some work. You have to create a task before you can repeat it, as I stated above, and that’s rather annoying. I’d also like to be able to set repeat dates like ‘first monday each month’ and ‘the 5th, or the closest day to it not on the weekend, each month’, but so far I don’t know of any app that does such “sophisticated” of repeat patterns.
• Lack of start dates is killing me. I think OmniFocus spoiled me here as I constantly am deferring tasks as a way to have a defacto start date mechanism. This is the only thing making me want to go back to OmniFocus.
• Need real iOS apps, not just web views and not a portrait only iPad app. It’s just crazy. I reiterate this because of how imperative it is.
• Quicker way to defer tasks is needed badly. Often something comes up and I know I won’t get to any of today’s tasks until tomorrow. In OmniFocus I could use a script to defer everything, or key through the due fields to enter new times, in Flow I have several clicks on each task to defer them. This is as close to a deal breaker as I have come with Flow.

Overall

I am still sticking with Flow, but only for now, as it is only better than OmniFocus in some ways and not all. The real question is whether the areas that Flow is better in are worth some of the reduced functionality and only more time will tell on that front.