Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Ipad'

Sketching and Logo Creation

August 3, 2020 • #

This was a livestream from a while back with Maggie Appleton (her work referenced in this past Weekend Reading) going step by step through her illustration process.

She uses a few straightforward but useful techniques, an iPad, ProCreate, and iteration to make some really great creations.

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Weekend Reading: Software Dependencies, Conversational AI, and the iPad at 10

February 8, 2020 • #

šŸ›  Dependency Drift: A Metric for Software Aging

We’ve been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro packages that exists now through tools like npm and yarn, no single person can track all the versions and relationships between modules. This post proposes a ā€œDependency Driftā€ metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:

  • Create a numeric metric that incorporates the volume of dependencies and the recency of each of them.
  • Devise a simple high level A-F grading system from that number to communicate how current a project is with it’s dependencies. We’ll call this a drift score.
  • Regularly recalculate and publish for open source projects.
  • Publish a command line tool to use in any continuous integration pipeline. In CI, policies can be set to fail CI if drift is too high. Your drift can be tracked and reported to help motivate the team and inform stakeholders.
  • Use badges in source control README files to show drift, right alongside the projects’s Continuous Integration status.

šŸ’¬ Towards a Conversational Agent that Can Chat About Anything

A technical write-up on a Google chatbot called ā€œMeena,ā€ which they propose has a much more realistic back-and-forth response technique:

Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity.

Read more in their paper, ā€œTowards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbotā€.

šŸ“± The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

John Gruber uses the iPad’s recent 10th birthday to reflect missed opportunity and how much better a product it could be/could have been:

Ten years later, though, I don’t think the iPad has come close to living up to its potential. By the time the Mac turned 10, it had redefined multiple industries. In 1984 almost no graphic designers or illustrators were using computers for work. By 1994 almost all graphic designers and illustrators were using computers for work. The Mac was a revolution. The iPhone was a revolution. The iPad has been a spectacular success, and to tens of millions it is a beloved part of their daily lives, but it has, to date, fallen short of revolutionary.

I would agree with most of his criticisms, especially on the multitasking UI and the general impenetrability of the gesturing interfaces. As a very ā€œpro iPadā€ user, I would love to see a movement toward the device coming into its own as a distinctly different platform than macOS and desktop computers. It has amazing promise even outside of creativity (music, art) and consumption. With the right focus on business model support, business productivity applications could be so much better.

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iPad Pro 11" Impressions

October 20, 2019 • #

I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11ā€ model instead of the previous generation 12.9ā€ one that I’ve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a week’s worth of usage:

The iPad

So far the smaller form factor takes a little bit of getting used to, but the weight and size is a huge improvement in portability. When this iPad is the only thing in my bag, it almost feels empty it’s so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like I’m about to drop it. One of the downsides of the 12.9ā€ size is that using it sans-keyboard as a reading device (especially in portrait mode) is unwieldy. The 11ā€ size can be comfortably used in one hand for reading. You also still get all of the iPadOS multitasking features for split screen productivity apps, which was one of the biggest drivers for originally going with the Pro model.

Keyboard Folio & Pencil

I got the Smart Keyboard Folio and the new Pencil to go with it, and both are pretty major improvements over those two products from a generation ago. The smaller size keyboard is taking a little adjustment, but it’s not too bad. I love the feel of the keys on Apple’s iPad keyboards, and this one is an incremental improvement in tactile feeling from the last generation. The new version of the Pencil seems to have less latency in sketching, which makes writing and drawing feel more natural than it did — even though the Pencil even since version 1 has been leaps and bounds better than any other stylus hardware ever made. With the magnetic docking inductive charging, it’s also nice to have a Pencil that’s always at 100% full charge, ready to go. Too often I’d get out the old one after a period of not using it only to find it dead. It’s a quick charge, but taking up the Lightning port to charge it was always annoying.

Since I made the switch, I’ve been doing a lot more work on the iPad versus the MacBook Pro. Even with multitasking, the ā€œmodalā€ nature of app usage on an iPad seems to keep my mind more focused and less alt-tabbing between various windows. While not impossible to do, it’s hard to end up in the trap of 50 open browser tabs on an iPad than a full laptop. There’s also the fact that I don’t have a heating element on the lap while using it, like the superheated aluminum case on a MBP when Chrome, Slack, and other memory-heavy apps are churning hard.

So far, so good. This week with some travel abroad I’ll give it a shot as the primary device and see how it feels.

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Weekend Reading: The Next Mapping Company, Apple on Pros, and iPadOS Workflow

June 15, 2019 • #

šŸ—ŗ (Who will be) America’s Next Big Mapping Company?

Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company:

Someone is going to take another run at Google, they have to. My prediction is that it will be AWS, either through acquisition (Esri? Mapbox?) or just building from scratch. There is no doubt Amazon already has some spatial smarts, since they have to solve huge logistical problems in moving goods around for the retail side, problems that require spatial quality data to solve. And there is no doubt that they do not want to let Google continue to leverage Maps against them in Cloud sales. They need a ā€œgood enoughā€ response to help keep AWS customers on the reservation.

Because of mapping’s criticality to so many other technologies, any player that is likely to compete with Google needs to be a platform — something that undergirds and powers technology as a business model. Apple is kinda like that, but nowhere near as similar to an electric utility as AWS is.

šŸ‘ØšŸ½ā€šŸ’» Apple is Listening

With the release of the amazing new Mac Pro and other things announced at WWDC, it’s clear that Apple recognizes its failings in delivering for their historically-important professional customers. Marco Arment addresses this well here across the Mac Pro, updates to macOS, iPadOS, and the changes that could be around the corner for the MacBook Pro.

šŸ“± iPadOS: Initial Thoughts, Observations, and Ideas on the Future of Working on an iPad

I’m excited to get iPadOS installed and back to my iPad workflow. This is a good comprehensive overview from Shawn Blanc, someone who has done most of his work on an iPad for a long time.

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iPadOS

June 5, 2019 • #

I’ve written here before about my enjoyment of working on the iPad Pro. Even with the excitement around Apple’s launch of the new Mac Pro this week, my favorite announcement was their ā€œspecializationā€ of iOS in the new iPadOS.

Running down the best features:

  • Denser screen real estate — Anyone that uses an iPad for work lots of different apps is familiar with this gripe. The giant screen with a sparse scattering of tiny icons looks sort of ridiculous. That plus the addition of the anchorable Today Widget view on the left will both be massive improvements in speed.
  • Multitasking improvements — I haven’t been a huge user of the Slide Over app capability, but the extension of that to support multiple app switching with a swipe looks awesome. And Split View with multiple documents in a single app is something I’ve always wanted.
  • Pencil — Reducing latency and adding a slick Markup toolset as part of PencilKit for other apps. I use the Pencil every day, so this is just icing.
  • More keyboard shortcuts — I’m a keyboarder; I hunt down and get to know the shortcuts for any apps I use. Already on iPad I use cmd-tab to switch apps, cmd-space (Spotlight) to launch apps, cmd-tab and cmd-W to open and close browser tabs, and probably more I don’t even realize. I hope what they’ve added to Safari leads to more conventions being adopted across other apps.
  • Mouse support? — This looks like it might be weird, but I’m real curious to try it out.

The improvements to Safari and Files aren’t too exciting because I don’t use either right now, but it’s still positive to see Apple put energy into iPad as a platform for real work. MacStories has a good roundup of details with everything included in the first version.

Calling it a completely different OS is inappropriate, at least at this stage. I hope that it’s just the tip of the iceberg with desktop-class optimizations for the larger screen.

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Weekend Reading: Typing on iPad Pro, Climate Optimism, Visualizing GeoNames

November 24, 2018 • #

šŸ“±iPad Diaries: Typing on the iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard Folio

I swung through an Apple Store a couple of weeks ago to check out the new hardware. The Smart Keyboard Folio has been hard to imagine the experience with in reviews without handling one. Same with the Pencil. I was particularly impressed with the magnetic hold of the Pencil on the side of the device — it’s darn strong. The current Smart Keyboard has some deficiencies, as pointed out in this article. No instant access to Siri or at least Siri Dictation, no system shortcut keys for things like volume control and playback, and

ā›ˆ In Defense of Climate Optimism

Quillette always has good stuff. I’m on the side of the author here in general with respect to climate change: it’s a problem to be understood and responded to, but the loudest of the proponents of doing something about it propose massive, sweeping, unrealistic changes ā€œor else.ā€ This author and Steven Pinker (quoted in the piece) have the right idea. Take a long, optimistic view and look to history for similar circumstances, and take measured action over time.

šŸ—ŗ Places and Their Names: Observations from 11 Million Place Names

I love analyses like this. Take the open GeoNames database, load it into Postgres, ask questions on patterns using SQL, visualize the distributions.

I wanted to find patterns in the names, so I explored if they started or ended in a certain way or just contained a certain word. With SQL this means that I was using the % wildcard to find prefixes or suffixes. So for instance the following query would return return every word containing the word bad anywhere in the name:

SELECT * FROM geonames WHERE name ILIKE ā€˜%bad%’

This makes me want to revive my old gazetteer project and crawl around GeoNames again.

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Weekend Reading: AV-Human Interaction, iPad Pro, and Buying Out Investors

November 3, 2018 • #

šŸš™ How Self-Driving Cars Could Communicate with You

Interesting work by Ford’s self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But Ford’s investment in Argo and GM with Cruise demonstrates they’re serious.

šŸ“² The iPad Pro is a Computer

Jason Snell’s thoughts on the new iPad Pro release last week:

I love the new design of the iPad Pro models. The flat back with the flat sides, which remind me of the original iPad design and the iPhone 4/5/SE, is a delight. But when you pick one up, the first thing you notice is that the bezels are even all the way around—and they’re almost, but not quite, gone entirely

An improved keyboard case, new revision to the Pencil, reduced bezel width, and Face ID support are all the right updates to make to get me closer to the goal of iPad Pro over laptop. The Folio idea for the case sounds fantastic, and with the Pencil, it’s amazing how innovative it can seem to add a small flat segment to keep it from rolling off the table.

šŸ’µ We Spent $3.3M Buying Out Investors

Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne with an in-depth overview of how they bought out their Series A investors to reset. Their Open blog series is worth a follow. They openly publish all sorts of insider details on running and growing a startup that are insightful for comparison.

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A Week with the iPad

October 11, 2018 • #

For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9ā€ iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in ā€œwork modeā€ occasionally so I don’t have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesn’t require full macOS capability, so I’m experimenting in developing the workflow to go tablet-only.

Slack, G Suite apps, mail, calendar, Zoom, Asana, and 1Password covers about 85% of the needs. There are a few things like testing Fulcrum, Salesforce, any code editing, that can still be challenging, but they partially work depending on what I’m trying to do.

I’m really enjoying it now that I’ve gotten a comfort level with navigating around and multitasking features. I find that the ā€œone app at a timeā€ nature of iOS helps me stay on track and focus on deeper tasks — things like writing documents, planning, and of course being able to sketch and diagram using the Pencil, which I do a ton of. I’ve liked Notability so far of the drawing apps I’ve tested for what I need.

One of the biggest things I had to figure out a solution for was being able to write and publish to this website efficiently. Since I use Jekyll and GitHub Pages under the hood, I hadn’t found a simple solution to manage the git repository and preview posts. I’ll go deeper on that workflow in a future post, because it’s a pretty comfortable setup (for me) that others might find useful.

Overall I’m liking working on iPad more and more. It gets easier as I accrue knowledge of tips, tricks, and other workflows.

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