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. I’ve 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. It’s great for most of what I want, which is for writing with interspersed sketches and annotations.
Though I haven’t used it much yet, Concepts seems to do well at both. My favorite feature is its infinite canvas, where I can...
The new iPad Pro’s 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 Microsoft’s core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was “missing.”
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...
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 This post proposes a “Dependency Drift” metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:
- Create a numeric metric that incorporates...
I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11” model instead of the previous generation 12.9” one that I’ve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a week’s 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 it’s so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like I’m about to...
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...
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 “specialization” of iOS in the new iPadOS.
Running down the best features:
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...
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.
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...
For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9” iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in “work mode” 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...