Month: November 2016

Shutting Down and Eating My Own Dog Food

Part of this is epically failing in my 2016 Creative Goals. Part of this is encouraging people to go iOS-primary while still often reaching for the security blanket of a laptop at night. Part of it is admitting I’m far too likely to spend the night fucking off on a virtual world.

Matt Gemmell wrote about social dark. It’s a great piece about limiting distractions while working from home. Matt recently switched to an iOS only lifestyle and I asked him how he handled distractions without the scripts he used to run. He replied:

@crumpy I don’t have notifications on the iPad. With every app being full-screen, that’s enough.

Tonight when I got home I did the following things (outside of dinner and after-work greetings with T.):

  • Admitted to my creative failures in 2016
  • Finished the inking on a sketch
  • Got on the treadmill for 15 min at a brisk walk. Watched half an XOXO Fest talk while I was at it.
  • Caught up on some threads I’m following on MacRumors.1
  • Fucked off online for the rest of the night. Some of it in a video game, some of it on Twitter. Some if it’s just gone.

I came downstairs and thought about another blog post I’m working on. It’s a long post about the Mac, what I still use it for, and if I’ll get another Mac eventually. There’s a line in it that I’m not sure will stay, but I wanted to post it here anyway:

This year when I got the 12.9″ iPad and the Smart Keyboard I made a commitment to iOS. It was a slow process. I got it and the pencil so I can draw. I was out with a friend getting her a Smart Cover for her iPad and she talked me into getting a Smart Keyboard for my iPad. I love the combination. Almost all of my writing happens via this setup. The screen is large, gorgeous and crisp. The Smart keyboard isn’t my favorite keyboard of all time, but it gets the job done.

I can do about 90% of my personal-computing daily tasks on iOS. At dinner last week, someone commented that I’m an iPad Pro pro user.

I’m active in forums and discussions encouraging people to look at the iPad as a serious productivity tool. But, I give myself the fallback position of a Mac too often. This is getting in the way of my productivity at home.

So, I went back upstairs, shut down the two MacBooks and placed them on a shelf in my office. I took the keyboard to my gaming console and put it behind the monitor. That PC is also the media center for the house so I can’t I shut it down.

My goal is to find and the live the pain points of using an iPad as my primary personal device. There are a few outs I’m giving myself:

  • There is a weekly personal task I need a Mac to perform for the next 3 weeks or so. So, the Mac will be turned on to do that task and shut down
  • I might be playing a video game once a week with my friends, so the PC or Mac will be used for that
  • If I work from home, using my 27″ monitor and my PC is the best way to connect to our VDI solution. I will not live like a savage and try to spend 8 hours doing that task on my iPad
  • If I want to work in Xcode, obviously I’ll need a Mac
  • On the nights when I feel like I’ve earned some game time, I’ll treat myself to a night of World of Warcraft

If I hit a wall where I can’t do a task on iOS, but need my Mac to complete the task, I’m not going to bang my head against the wall fruitlessly and not complete it; I’m going to fire up the Mac, do the task, and make a note of it.

I need to get on my surfboard and ride this wave of iOS and iPads Pro as far as it will take me. I need to step over the line and see if I fall over a cliff.

 

This is part of a series on using the iPad Pro as my primary device. For more posts on this series, click here.

  1. Some of the posts I write there are almost blog posts. There’s a lively thread on using the iPad as a main device I’m involved in. Some of my comments have ended up as the basis for a post here. ↩
Advertisement

Creative Goals, 2016: The Accountability Post

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about how I set what I felt were achievable creative goals for 2016. The year isn’t over yet, but it’s not too early to view the results. Nothing that will happen for the rest of the year impact the results, and at this point even if I did cram and meet them, it would be like getting some projects done just in time for your annual review at work.

I wanted to get the following done:

  1. Write 22 blog posts: Fail. Now, it’s possible I could write 22 posts before the end of year. I do have some cooking. If I did, though, it would satisfy the requirement, but not the intent which was to consistently deliver content for the site. Instead, there was a nearly 8-month gap between posts.
  2. Finish one piece of art beyond the sketch phase: Success. I likely won’t show it to anyone, and it’s still rougher than I would like. I did sketch and ink it in Procreate. It’s not an original piece of art, though. I saw a drawing someone did online and thought, hey, that’s in a style close to what you can draw, give it a go. It’s not colored as his is. I’m color blind and don’t feel comfortable working in colors yet.
  3. Write 40,000 words of fiction: Epic Fail. I didn’t write one word of fiction. I’m not disappointed since I thought this was the unlikely one to complete. Fiction writing is the hardest form of writing for me to do. I have the basis of a character. In 1999 I started working on a novel set in London. The main character was a bit of a Lisbeth Salander-type, but before Stieg Larsson’s novels came out. I’m still working on what her story is, though.

Extra Credit:

The year wasn’t a total dumpster fire for creativity, though. I got back into model railroading and rejoined the club I was a member of. I’ve been helping them with some scenery projects. I’m also building a module for the Ntrak organization I belong to.

I also did a photo night with a co-worker and have been getting back into some photography.

Sal Soghoian leaves Apple

Apple has eliminated Sal’s position “for business reasons.”

This sucks. Sal was a leader in macOS automation and scripting. His termination is another area where I feel like the Apple I have known and loved just isn’t the same. What’s the future for automation and scripting in Apple? Who the fuck knows at this point.

Sal has an incredible gift of explaining incredibly technical terms with the casualness of explaining how to throw a chili together.