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iPad Journal: A mess of stuff getting in my way

I’m a geek and so I tend to enjoy tinkering. Back in the day I used (or tried to use) speakable items on my Mac. It never stuck because it just didn’t work very well. But it was fun to play with. Something that did stick was Quicksilver. And Launchbar. And then Spotlight. I switched back and forth between the first two but as Apple’s Spotlight got better I eventually just settled on that. Which is to say I went from the more powerful third party tools to Apple’s simpler option.  Maybe I’m just less of a tinkerer than I used to be because as time goes on I seem to prefer simplicity.

As I’ve experimented with some of Federico’s favorite iOS productivity apps such as Workflow and recently Copied I’ve begun to think that my needs (or my methods) just are not suited to so much complexity. For example, in his recent post about clipboard workflows using the Copied app or his powerful clipboard manager using Workflow, Federico offers many of the details that make him more productive. But I spent the better part of two hours with Copied and just came away frustrated. It may be that it’s just not suited to the way I work or maybe I need to spend more time learning it. Or, just as likely, it may be that I don’t write the kind of content or perform the kinds of tasks that benefit from that kind of app.

One lesson learned from the experience: when evaluating the tools and workflows of others for my purposes, be open but be critical. Will they really enable me to get things done in a better way or will they just end up slowing me down? Are they the right tools for the jobs I need to get done? These are obvious questions to ask but I think often it’s easy to get caught up in the tools and techniques of others. New and shiny is better right? So, my new goal is to find a balance of being open to new tools but not to spend too much time dwelling on it all.

All this cruft can get in the way. I live and work in a tiny house which requires being very deliberate in the choices I make about owning stuff. As often as stuff is useful it is just as likely a burden that gets in my way. Stuff has a way of accumulating and is often kept around even when it’s not all that useful. One reason I love the iPad is that it strikes a beautiful balance of simplicity and power. I don’t want to ruin it with lots of apps and utilities, many of which overlap in what they offer.

Why was I interested in using Copied? I like the idea of gathering links to posts with titles and relevant quotes and having them ready to put into a blog post just as Federico seems to do. But what I’ve discovered is that I find it much easier to just use the share extension to send items to their own sheet in Ulysses. If some of these are meant to be shared together in the same post I can easily use the merge sheets function of Ulysses to consolidate them all into one. Problem solved without the help of any extra utilities and quite possibly with less effort from me.

Another area in which I thought Copied might be useful was in saving groups of text for websites I manage. But here’s the thing. Again, my tool of choice, Coda, already has that covered with the text snippets or clips function. With a tap I get a dropdown list of my snippets and another tap I get the text I want pasted right into my document. Or I can assign a tab trigger for any snippet. These seems a better option than using Copied.

Another third party utility that I recently purchased that seems like it may be more work for less benefit is Launch Center Pro. As with Copied it may well be that I’ve not spent enough time with it to learn the benefits. I get the gist of it. But so much of what it seems to offer I would file as solutions in search of problems. Much of what it offers I can just as easily accomplish with Siri. Shortcuts to apps end up being just as many taps as clicking on the app or asking Siri to open it or using Command-Space to open via spotlight. On the iPhone with 3D Touch most of my regular apps have short cuts built in. It also seems to duplicate Workflow in many ways and I’m still trying to get a handle on Workflow.

My plan going forward is to focus on using each app as it is provided. This isn’t to say I’m not interested in utilities that might add benefit to my workflows. But I will cast a more skeptical eye towards utilities and workflows that seem overly complex in the name of saving me time. If my use of an app or combination of apps results in obvious friction then I’ll see what I can do to reduce it but step one is to ensure that I’m using all of the features of the app as intended.

iPad Journal: Creating with iMovie

I don’t use the iPad and iMovie for professional work. My iMovie creations are all for fun, personal projects that I generally share with friends and family. But I will say that over the years I’ve created quite a few videos on Macs, iPads and even iPhones using everything from iMovie to Final Cut Pro. My earliest video projects were done with the very first versions of iMovie back around 2000. I advanced to Final Cut Pro which I used for a couple of years but have not used since sometime around 2003 when I used it for a documentary I did about community projects in Memphis. Since then everything has been done using iMovie on the Mac and most recently, iMovie on the iPad. All of that to simply say that while I’m not a pro or expert I have logged hundreds of hours editing many projects using quite a few computing devices and quite a few versions of two editing apps.

A great benefit of iMovie on iPad is ease of use. Adding media, editing or moving clips in the timeline and most other tasks are very easy to learn and perform.

A great benefit of iMovie on iPad is ease of use. Adding media, editing or moving clips in the timeline and most other tasks are very easy to learn and perform.

When I first tried iMovie on the iPad using my iPad 3 I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. I used the iPad to record and then iMovie to edit a quick little mini-documentary about my permaculture homestead. As it turns out that video has gotten more views than any other I’ve put on YouTube, almost 89,000 as of this writing. Not too bad for 30 minutes of work and far more views than my 90 minute Memphis documentary ever got! And as I recall it was only the third or fourth time I’d opened the app which is to say, it was very easy to use. Certainly that is in part because I was familiar with the concept of a timeline, transitions, fades, titling, etc. But I think it is also true that Apple has done a great job creating something fairly easy to use. In fact, I’d say that with iMovie for iOS, especially on the iPad, Apple has achieved the perfect balance of ease of use and power. It’s the sort of app that anyone with an interest in making a “movie” and willingness to put forth just a bit of effort, is likely to enjoy and benefit from.

In the five years since I started using iMovie on iPad I’ve put together quite a few videos, the most recent of which was a mini-documentary about my grandmother. It consisted of a couple hours of interview footage shot with an iPhone interspersed with scanned photos. The final result was an hour long and something the entire extended family watched over the holidays. While the kids, grandkids and great-grandkids all enjoyed it I think it was my granny that enjoyed it most. She talked about it for days. I think she enjoyed seeing her family get to know her better as they watched it. I know I certainly got to know her better as a result of making it.

In the end, the iPad is at it’s best when it enables us to create because it’s often in such creation that we build bridges between ourselves and others. Whether it is a silly or informative post on YouTube or a video shared at a family gathering, iMovie is an excellent example of an app that enables such creation.

iPad Journal: Flexible form factor leads to increased productivity

Appreciating (and greatly enjoying) the tablet form factor of the iPad and an external keyboard this morning.

Fact 1: I live in a rural area and expected a package via the USPS. If I wanted this package in my hands I needed to be at the mailbox by the road when the delivery person arrived. If I missed her I’d only have a note letting me know my package was waiting for me in the post office in town.

Fact 2: I normally walk the one mile to the mailbox as a part of my 4 miles a day walking routine. Today we had rain in the forecast.

Fact 3: I am not even a little fancy and do not own a Tesla. But we do have a golf cart for getting around our property. It runs off of batteries. I pretend it is a Tesla.

Fact 4: I knew I might have a wait because I only knew that our postal delivery person normally arrives before 11 am. I went at 8 and took my iPad and keyboard.

Fact 5: With little effort I managed to arrange a comfortable writing situation and got stuff done.

iPad Journal: Weekly iPad links

I'm planning to do a post each Friday that will cover the interesting "getting things done with iPad" articles of the week. Currently Federico Viticci, Serenity Caldwell and Matt Gemmel are consistently posting about using the iPad for getting work done. There are others of course and I'll post those as I find them.

This week Federico had another in his iPad Diaries series: Clipboard Management with Copied and Workflow. I'm still reading that as I was busy most of yesterday. Will finish it and digest today. That's the beauty of Federico's posts, the require digesting. Which is to say, they are never easy. He works and writes on a level that usually means the reader is actually going to learn something. For someone who writes about working on a device known for it's simplicity and ease of use, Federico does a damn fine job of complicating it- but in a good way. A really good way.

I've tried using Clips a bit and found it useful. I'm curious to read about what Copied does that might make it a better choice.

Also worth a bookmark, Federico's archive of iPad articles on MacStories. Wowza.

Matt Gemmell has been working on his own series about going iPad-only and has another great post this week on taking notes with GoodNotes. That's an app I recently picked up on sale for .99 cents. I use Apple notes on a regular basis and I'm not sure GoodNotes is something I'll use but for 99 cents it's silly not to try it. Much of the appeal of the app is handwriting. Actually, that's much of the point. I've often joked that I don't do pens and pencils, I do keyboards. My handwriting is atrocious and I've never taken the time to work on that. That said, I do appreciate and love the idea of sketchnotes. As I've been painting with Procreate in recent moths I've become a bit more interested in seeing what I can sketch and thinking about lettering as art rather than writing is appealing.

iPad Journal: On the road with a truck driver and iPad

I’ve got a client that emailed me back in September. After years of working for other people as a truck driver he had bought his own truck and was going into business for himself. He’d purchased an iPad and needed to know more about using it. Of course I was happy to help him out.

His prior computer experience to that point was primarily a Windows laptop. It was an older and heavier laptop and he didn’t want to lug that around. He called me a couple weeks after getting his iPad because he had a list of tasks he’d not yet discovered an app for. We ended up meeting three or four times. He often receives emails with pdf attachments that need to be filled out and signed and returned. He also gets documents on paper that need to be archived and/or replied to. So, the first thing we did was get him set-up with a scanning and pdf workflow. He followed my advice and purchased Scanner Pro and PDF expert. We discussed iCloud, data-use and the benefits of keeping everything synced up. We went through the process for sharing a pdf from Mail to PDF Expert and then the reverse. We did the same for using Scanner Pro to PDF Expert to Mail. We also downloaded a faxing app for the rare occasion when he needs to fax instead of email.

I helped him set-up an invoice template in Pages. We discussed sharing that out as a pdf via Mail. He’d also purchased a printer for wireless printing which we set-up. He rarely prints but wanted it “just in case”. We’ve not yet gotten into spreadsheets yet though I suspect that might be an interest and we’ve discussed it briefly. Last, he’d downloaded a series of apps specifically for truckers for routing, mileage tracking, fuel purchases and scheduling. He didn’t need my help with those as he’d already been using them on his iPhone for many months. Same thing goes with email which he’d been using on his iPhone. The only new trick there was learning to use the share menu and to effectively move/save/share attachments. Last but not least, when he’s not driving he uses the iPad with the DirectTV app to watch movies and tv shows and FaceTime to chat with his at-home spouse.

He’s now been carrying loads since early November. Nearly five months on the road and he’s very satisfied with his iPad as his primary on-the-road computer. Maybe I should have told him that the iPad is only good for Facebook and watching movies?

Apple Park: Coming in April 2017

Apple’s new “spaceship” headquarters and the surrounding landscape have been officially named Apple Park and will be ready for move in soon.

“Steve’s vision for Apple stretched far beyond his time with us. He intended Apple Park to be the home of innovation for generations to come,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The workspaces and parklands are designed to inspire our team as well as benefit the environment. We’ve achieved the most energy-efficient building of its kind in the world and the campus will run entirely on renewable energy.

Source: Apple

It really is an amazing building and when the landscaping is finished I have no doubt that the entire park will be fantastic. It’s great that Apple has used native and drought-resistant trees instead of the usual landscaping often used. I think I’d like to visit one day. This is exactly the kind of forward thinking, sustainable building and landscaping that we need. Apple has set a fine example we can only hope that others will follow their lead:

Designed in collaboration with Foster + Partners, Apple Park replaces 5 million-square-feet of asphalt and concrete with grassy fields and over 9,000 native and drought-resistant trees, and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy. With 17 megawatts of rooftop solar, Apple Park will run one of the largest on-site solar energy installations in the world. It is also the site of the world’s largest naturally ventilated building, projected to require no heating or air conditioning for nine months of the year.

Source: Apple

Steve would have turned 62 this Friday, February 24. To honor his memory and his enduring influence on Apple and the world, the theater at Apple Park will be named the Steve Jobs Theater. Opening later this year, the entrance to the 1,000-seat auditorium is a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder, 165 feet in diameter, supporting a metallic carbon-fiber roof. The Steve Jobs Theater is situated atop a hill — one of the highest points within Apple Park — overlooking meadows and the main building.

Read move via Apple’s news release.

iPad Journal: Coordinating family projects

Our extended family has some shared land with a small lake left to us by my grandparents. Sometimes that means we have to coordinate projects together. From road and dam maintenance to creating trails or any number of small things. In the past this was done via phone calls, sometimes email. Lately it’s been texting. But it can be a bit chaotic with anywhere from 3-7 people (sometimes more) chiming in with ideas or criticisms of the process involved in more complicated projects.

A good example would be a recent project clearing the area behind the lake dam which had become too densely overgrown. As we evaluated the project we took the opportunity to look at related tasks such as dredging out parts of the lake that had accumulated silt over the years. Also, there’s always the issue of repairing damage by beavers and muskrats and spillway maintenance. I’ve been helping coordinate with my dad, aunt and two uncles as well as someone we hired to help with some of the work. If my dad and uncle were a bit more technologically savvy I might try hooking them up on Slack. I may do that yet.

Due to repeated confusion (when texting and phone calls are primary it’s easy to loose track of who knows what!), the other day I decided to put together a project plan of sorts. Just a simple Pages document with a map and diagram. I emailed it out and suggested folks add in details, make changes, etc. But then I realized as I was suggesting they either reply via text in email or use pdf editing built into Apple Mail that at least two of them would likely be confused with the pdf editing. One of them is using an iPhone that he barely knows how to operate. So, it occurred to me that a shared Note which they can all access via iPhone, iPad or Mac might be simple enough and yet allow for the communication to happen all in one document that anyone can edit. It was a trivial task to copy/paste the material from the Pages document into the note. Time will tell if the shared note will prove effective.

Something that I’ve realized with this project is that the iPhone and iPad are a nearly perfect compliment to one another. I suppose I knew that going into it but it’s just working out so well that it seems worth mentioning. I use the iPhone to take notes, measurements and photos. Then from the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard I can elaborate on the basics and create diagrams and maps with Graphic and Apple Maps. I’m using Numbers (mostly on the iPad) to keep an ongoing record of expenses and dates on which significant work is done.

I’ve not recently been in a position where I needed to do any sort of complicated project management but I’m guessing it could be done fairly well with these two devices and the right apps. In many ways they seem to be the perfect fit for project management taking place “in the field”.

iPad Journal: Website Management with Coda, Transmit, Messages and Mail

Of the various services I offer, web design and content updates are probably 60% of my work. On the Mac I’ve been using Panic’s Coda since it was released many years ago so, when it was released for iOS, I was excited. But I mostly found it lacking (along with iOS at that time) and continued using my Mac. I used it a bit but only minimally. That changed in 2016 as I transitioned to the iPad for website related work. I wrote about my website update workflow back in May and then again in July as things shifted. I’m still not certain things have settled in for good (do they ever?) but I’m more satisfied now then I’ve been in the past with this revised workflow.

As it turns out I have settled in with Coda and Transmit as my primary toolset. I initially resisted Coda because I wanted my “local” files to be synced to DropBox as is possible with the Mac version of Coda. But the convenience and power of Coda was too much to resist. All content updating is now done in Coda on the iPad. Because Coda and Transmit share the same local file store on the iPad I can then use Transmit once a week to push the changed files to my local MacMini’s Dropbox folder and everything get’s synced to DropBox. Not ideal but very close.

What I’ve grown to appreciate about Coda as I’ve used it more is that it is so fully featured and so close to the Mac version. The familiar two pane interface is very easy to use. I can select multiple files to copy back and forth from local files to the server or the other way around. I can drag and drop single files to do the same. I can quickly filter for a file by name or sort by size, name, date modified. The one power tool missing is find/replace for in-file content across multiple files from the file browser. But that’s not something I use all the time so I’ve gotten along okay without it.

When editing, of course Coda provides for syntax highlighting as well as find and replace of text within a file. I can have multiple files open and switch between them via the tabs. Of course there is code auto-complete as well as suggestion for files such as images that have been indexed. When I’m adding code for an image I get a pop-up with a list of images that reside in the images folder for that site. Very handy. Snippets for specific sites as well as app-wide are occasionally useful. And, of course, preview of a page. Lastly, when using with an external keyboard the app behaves exactly as I expect with the same (or mostly the same) shortcuts that are available on the Mac version. I can save, close, switch tabs, find, preview and more with keyboard shortcuts.

Once I settled on Coda on iPad as the primary tool for website related work I learned far more of the features and became more comfortable with the app. It actually mirrors the process I experienced with the iPad itself. The more I used it the more comfortable I became with it and with that comfort comes increased productivity.

A great example of this is using Coda in split screen with Mail or Messages. My clients use email or Messages to send text, PDF and image files for website updates. Having split view makes all the difference. One of my most regular clients sends the text in the body of emails or Messages or as Pages files. Being able to quickly shift back and forth from Coda to one of those other apps via split screen made all the difference. In fact, if it were not for split screen I would not be using the iPad as I do.

I’ll illustrate with a fun moment that happened a couple weeks ago as I was working with the above mentioned client. He was sending new content and I was updating his site as we chatted back and forth. He commented that it was interesting watching the changes pop up live as we chatted. He was impressed and I was too. Without even thinking about it I’d been switching between Coda, Messages, Mail and Pages, updating html pages, creating new pages and carrying on a conversation in Messages. It wasn’t that I’d accomplished any great feat. This was just the normal process of a pretty typical task. But I was using iOS on an iPad with the same speed and fluidity with which I use a Mac. Very satisfying.

iPad Journal: iCloud and DropBox as iPad File Systems

A consistent criticism of iOS and the iPad is the lack of an easily assessable file system but this is only partially true. When the iPad first shipped in 2010 it certainly was much more limited. But eventually Apple added iCloud which has evolved into Apple’s version of an cloud-based file system and it works fairly well at this point. It’s not perfect but it has been rock solid in my use of it. But, still, time and again, some continue to say the iPad has no file system and no access to a file system. Well, it’s certainly not the full featured Finder that the Mac has and it’s true that it accumulates folders for apps (Mac or iOS) that use iCloud for saving files. But, it IS a file system.

There are different methods to access iCloud files. From within an app is probably the most common way. By default when I open an iWork app I see that app’s documents as they reside in iCloud. But it is also possible to view iCloud folders via the iCloud Drive app or from the file picker. So, for example, if I want to attach a file to an email I can browse through my iCloud folders. It works pretty well. But in many ways the iCloud Drive app is clumsy and somewhat limited. For example, creating new folders in iCloud Drive app is not obvious. I must first select an existing folder or file and then I am then given an option to create a new folder. Also, customizing the iCloud Drive app is very limited. I can choose to view in a grid of icons or as a column/list view hybrid. It is possible to sort by date, tags or name but not possible to add new tags. There is no way to “Get Info” for a file.

I interact with the iCloud file system (usually from within apps such as Pages or Numbers) on a daily basis and it does work very well in that regard. But it is no Finder replacement. Rather, it presents a simplified, iOS version of the Finder. It’s the sort of thing that will frustrate power users coming from the Mac but be perfectly fine for less technically experienced users such as my granny.

By comparison, the DropBox app feels like a step towards being a Finder replacement. Well, it’s clumsy in its own way but it feels a bit more like the Finder. It does not offer a list or icon view but the column view it presents works fairly well. I can pretty easily navigate through a hierarchy of folders and when I land on a file I get a preview of the file. Even better I can create new folders, add files, etc. Just as I might on the Mac I can browse files and open in their native apps or import into another app. So, I can click on a Word document and open into Word or into Pages. Or I can share it using the normal DropBox method which creates a link which can be shared via email or Messages or any other way I might send text. Or I can export the file and share it as an attachment. If it is a file in a folder shared with a client it’s also possible to have a conversation via comments on the file right in DropBox.

I use DropBox everyday and consider it an indispensable part of my iPad workflow especially when it comes to collaboration. In fact, when it comes to collaboration DropBox on iOS even surpasses the experience on the Mac. For example, commenting on shared files which cannot be done from the Finder. Also, Inviting others to a shared folder or managing the share settings for a folder are all easy to manage from within the DropBox app. All of these things require using a web browser if you’re working on a Mac.

The DropBox app is updated on a regular basis and recently was updated to add support for Split View which is a great addition and very helpful.

The DropBox app is updated on a regular basis and recently was updated to add support for Split View which is a great addition and very helpful.

And of course anything in DropBox is available on any device connected to the internet. I’m not using my Mac as much as I used to but when I do I know that any files I’ve got in DropBox will always be up-to-date regardless of which device was last used to edit the file. This leads me to one last bit that is very specific to my website management workflow. At the moment I have nearly 20 client sites1 that I manage. Before switching to my iPad as my primary device I used to use Coda on the Mac and configured each site to have it’s “local” files in a folder on DropBox. It worked very well as I could switch between my MacMini and my MBP and know that the local files were always in sync. With iOS, Coda does not offer DropBox as a choice for the local files. Instead they are truly local files on the iPad but luckily they are shared with Transmit on the iPad. My super easy solution to back-up these files to DropBox? I open up Transmit on the iPad and connect to my MacMini which is always on as my media server. I can very easily sync multiple folders, files, etc. to the DropBox “Websites” folder on the Mac and it all goes to the cloud automatically. It’s not as easy as it would be if the iOS version of Coda offered DropBox as a “local” file option in the first place but it’s relatively painless and a good example of how a local Mac can serve as both a local back-up and a gateway to DropBox.

  1. Usually only 5 or so are “active” in any given month. ↩