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.
I just installed this iPad app for sketching, which intrigued me for a few of its features. Iāve tried dozens of apps, but they tend to fall too far into the art camp or the note-taking camp, without very many that serve both categories well.
My go-to for the last few years has been Notability. Itās great for most of what I want, which is for writing with interspersed sketches and annotations.
Though I havenāt used it much yet, Concepts seems to do well at both. My favorite feature is its infinite canvas, where I can continue sprawling out a sketch in any direction, versus a vertical or constrained sketch space. I guess my main use case tends to be a hybrid of note-taking and brainstorming / mind-mapping, so this one is intriguing so far.
The new iPad Proās LiDAR support presages an interesting direction for Apple to take the sensors on all of their devices. In this post, Halide designer Sebastiaan de With shows some of the cool possibilities with LiDAR for enhancing photography.
A great annotated Twitter thread from Steven Sinofsky, who was leading the launch of Windows 7 coincident with when the iPad was announced.
19/ The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoftās core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was āmissing.ā
20/ The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed by Linux and Open Source.
21/ The kicker for me, though, was that keyboard stand for the iPad. It was such a hack. Such an obvious āobjection handler.ā But it was critically important because it was a clear reminder that the underlying operating system was ārealāā¦it was not a āphone OSā.
Weāve 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 āDependency 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 itās dependencies. Weāll 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 projectsās Continuous Integration status.
A technical write-up on a Google chatbot called āMeena,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, āTowards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbotā.
John Gruber uses the iPadās recent 10th birthday to reflect missed opportunity and how much better a product it could be/could have been:
Ten years later, though, I donāt 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 āpro 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.
I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11ā model instead of the previous generation 12.9ā one that Iāve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a weekās worth of usage:
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 itās so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like Iām 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.
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 itās not too bad. I love the feel of the keys on Appleās 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 ā 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, itās also nice to have a Pencil thatās always at 100% full charge, ready to go. Too often Iād get out the old one after a period of not using it only to find it dead. Itās a quick charge, but taking up the Lightning port to charge it was always annoying.
Since I made the switch, Iāve been doing a lot more work on the iPad versus the MacBook Pro. Even with multitasking, the āmodalā 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, itās hard to end up in the trap of 50 open browser tabs on an iPad than a full laptop. Thereās also the fact that I donāt 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 Iāll give it a shot as the primary device and see how it feels.
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 āgood enoughā response to help keep AWS customers on the reservation.
Because of mappingās criticality to so many other technologies, any player that is likely to compete with Google needs to be a platform ā 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.
With the release of the amazing new Mac Pro and other things announced at WWDC, itās 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.
Iām 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.
Iāve written here before about my enjoyment of working on the iPad Pro. Even with the excitement around Appleās launch of the new Mac Pro this week, my favorite announcement was their āspecializationā of iOS in the new iPadOS.
Running down the best features:
The improvements to Safari and Files arenāt too exciting because I donāt use either right now, but itās 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 itās just the tip of the iceberg with desktop-class optimizations for the larger screen.
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 ā itās 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
Quillette always has good stuff. Iām on the side of the author here in general with respect to climate change: itās a problem to be understood and responded to, but the loudest of the proponents of doing something about it propose massive, sweeping, unrealistic changes āor 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.
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%ā
This makes me want to revive my old gazetteer project and crawl around GeoNames again.
Interesting work by Fordās self-driving team on how robotic vehicles could signal intent to pedestrians. You normally think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber with AV tech. But Fordās investment in Argo and GM with Cruise demonstrates theyāre serious.
Jason Snellās 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 aroundāand theyāre 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, itās amazing how innovative it can seem to add a small flat segment to keep it from rolling off the table.
Bufferās 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.
For the last 7 days Iāve only been using the iPad. Iāve had a 12.9ā iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in āwork modeā occasionally so I donāt have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesnāt require full macOS capability, so Iām 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 Iām trying to do.
Iām really enjoying it now that Iāve gotten a comfort level with navigating around and multitasking features. I find that the āone app at a timeā nature of iOS helps me stay on track and focus on deeper tasks ā things like writing documents, planning, and of course being able to sketch and diagram using the Pencil, which I do a ton of. Iāve liked Notability so far of the drawing apps Iāve 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 hadnāt found a simple solution to manage the git repository and preview posts. Iāll go deeper on that workflow in a future post, because itās a pretty comfortable setup (for me) that others might find useful.
Overall Iām liking working on iPad more and more. It gets easier as I accrue knowledge of tips, tricks, and other workflows.