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Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

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Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#341

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bemusedthrow75 wrote: post #320
mvdtnz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's an American thing but I don't think I know a single person who owns or uses an ipad, with the exception of rich parents who use them exclusively to distract children. I certainly don't notice a lot of ipad users in airports or trains.

I’m in the UK. Yesterday I watched an eighty-plus year old woman settle her similarly elderly, physically-impaired husband into his seat on the train then get out her iPad to write an email. On my journey home in a more crowded train I saw half a dozen iPads just from where I was sitting. They are extremely useful devices for train journeys.

Only Apple iPads or are you using the term generically? I'm guessing you're in London or another major city?

Similar to the parent I only ever see iPads in two places, the hands of rich kids in restaurants, and in primary schools.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#342

Post by nottorp »

mr_tombuben wrote: post #332
mvdtnz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's an American thing but I don't think I know a single person who owns or uses an ipad, with the exception of rich parents who use them exclusively to distract children. I certainly don't notice a lot of ipad users in airports or trains.

I use an iPad exclusively at home on a couch/in bed. It's really great for low effort media consumption/web browsing, but I couldn't imagine bringing it with me somewhere instead of just taking a laptop. Even for media consumption on a train or airplane, I prefer a laptop because of it being easier to prop up in a cramped space.

Yep. I have an iPad (cheap, not pro) on my nightstand.

I take the laptop when traveling because who knows what I'll need it for.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#343

Post by vetinari »

callalex wrote: post #303
dntrkv wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most laptops don't have GPS or accelerometer / gyroscope. Would be useless for turn-by-turn without those.

Bluetooth and USB positioning radios are dirt cheap and run on ancient stable standards.

If your laptop has 3G (or better) radio, it has also positioning bundled in.

However, although the devices might run on ancient stable standard, but that does not mean, that operating system is not playing silly games there. If you had an app that talked to them via serial port, you could throw it away once Microsoft introduced GNSS subsystem.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#344

Post by gizajob »

devnullbrain wrote: post #321
gizajob wrote: post #80

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape…

I haven't used an iPad keyboard but 160,000 words is about 159,000 more than I could stomach writing on a Macbook keyboard - which is the best laptop keyboard I've tried. Perhaps I'm spoiled.

I really don’t see much wrong with it. It’s fabric-y and squidgy and kind of only alright, but at the same time, it works fine and my typing speed on it is about the same as anything else.

Don’t forget that people coded whole programmes on the Sinclair ZX80 and rubber-membrane-keyed ZX Spectrum, which were both abominable, nightmare fuel in fact to those desirous of Cherry keycaps and clicky tactility. The Smart Keyboard is a functional middle ground.

I also wrote the book in Google Docs, and pecked out some of it on my Android smartphone if inspiration struck. The fact that changes instantly sync so seamlessly and unthinkingly between platforms and devices I think is also really brilliant. It’s easy to forget in our quest for computing perfection that ‘good enough’ really is good enough if inspiration strikes. I wrote huge chunks of the book on transport and in public – literally on aeroplanes, trams, sitting on benches outside the library or by the beach. Creating where for the most part people are just consuming or scrolling content in those environments. The iPad and its day-long battery is amazing for this, and I’m not sure that a laptop would have been the same.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#345

Post by gizajob »

throw0101c wrote: post #138
gizajob wrote: post #80

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape…

> I think I'm going to try laying out my next book using Affinity Publisher - I used the Mac version to lay out the last one so hope I can do the same while finding benefits for doing so with my little paddy. Side note: I wonder if Adobe ever regrets discontinuing Framemaker for Mac given the resurgence of Apple in the intervening years. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker

Adobe doesn’t seem to regret very much.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#346

Post by gizajob »

38 wrote: post #195
gizajob wrote: post #80

I wrote a 160,000 word book this year on an iPad Air with smart keyboard (I find how the pro keyboard doesn't fold all the way back to allow holding the iPad landscape too big of an annoyance to buy one). I think it's a brilliant device, and while limited, does do some things better than the Mac - annotating PDFs and ebooks with the Pencil being one of them. Also nice to hold a document one is working on in landscape…

> with my little paddy gross.

Really just an in joke to myself because I have a friend who calls his paddy. I’ve also got a laptop called ‘urgh’ and a MacBook Pro 13 from about 2016 - the first one with the Touch Bar/strip (given as a freebie) that is called ‘shite’ because its still the worst Mac I’ve ever owned. It’s clunky, riddled with latency, and unresponsive to quite an extreme degree, and I think it’s because of some kind of hardware deficiency with the touch strip being introduced. I’d work on Paddy over Shite any day of the week.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#348

Post by tzhenghao »

mvdtnz wrote: post #264
pavel_lishin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think depending on the person, they'd travel with EITHER their phone OR their iPad OR their laptop, depending on whether they are private people, non-technical "creatives" or IT/technical/dev folks, but instead, everybody appears to be travelling with ALL THREE devices instead I can't answer a call or text my family with my laptop while I'm on the go. I can't plug my macbook into a car to use maps or play mus…

Maybe it's an American thing but I don't think I know a single person who owns or uses an ipad, with the exception of rich parents who use them exclusively to distract children. I certainly don't notice a lot of ipad users in airports or trains.

These days my parents based in Asia use the two iPads I gifted them almost exclusively. They watch YouTube videos, Netflix, Facetime the kids and browse the web on them. The only time my dad boots up my old college MacBook is when he has to do important document editing - never more than once every month. To my surprise, he's even using the iPadOS Files app extensively. We're just not the target market.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#349

Post by gizajob »

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #333
gizajob wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of music and recording, often times better and more creative records were made by people having to devise complicated solutions to having technology with huge limitations - a famous example being that Sgt Pepper by the Beatles was made using tape machines that were limited to four tracks. Hence those involved had to think deeply and be inspired to find solutions to “defeat the machine” (in the words of Pa…

Did Beethoven make his best stuff after he went deaf (genuinely curious; I'm inherently Beethskeptical after being Toccata-Fugue-D-minor-pilled)? Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori were technologically well-resourced as far as I can tell. Why did nujabes pioneer lo-fi? I don't think there's anything fundamentally limiting about the iPad or iPhone computationally. The only limiting factor is the interface. Which i…

“iPhones and iPads are not simpler or less distracting than a typewriter”

Yeah, my point. Please read my comment before negating it as matter of course.

Beethoven’s ears breaking is a slightly different issue than technological limitations - his technology of ink on paper was still the same. He wasn’t playing each orchestral part one by one when he wrote his symphonies, he just couldn’t hear his main composing instrument any more, but had obviously internalised the skill of hearing it all in his head long before he lost the ability to hear it outside of his head upon playback, sadly.

Nujabes didn’t pioneer lo-fi.

Re: Giving up the iPad-only travel dream

#350

Post by parallaxapps »

We're building a web development environment for iPadOS/iOS that hopes to address some of the shortcomings developing iPad-only (and iPhone, but...)

Free to download, developer-tools browser built-in (Inspect Browser), Git and PHP available as an in-app purchase. Glad to answer any questions!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/webforge-ide/id6450872424

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