Upgrade - 203: I Have Felt the Power of the Snell Zone

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

Federico Viticci and Serenity Caldwell join Jason and Myke to dive deep into how we use our iPads for business as well as creative pursuits, including writing and illustration. Why did Federico transform from a Mac user into one who rarely strays from his iPad? What keyboard and stand does Jason use to write? What apps is Ren using to draw? We break it all down.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 203 being posted in july 2018 but it was recorded june 20th 2018 and it's brought to you by mail route boom 3 Boom 3D, and Anchor. This is the Upgrade Summer of Fun Working on the iPad Special. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Mike Hurley, summer continues to be fun on Upgrade. And it rolls on. And we thought to ourselves, we wanted to do a check-in about what it's like to work on the iPad.

And we thought, if we're going to do this, we need to assemble the team. Like, almost like the A-team of working on the iPad. So we have with us Serenity Caldwell. Hi, Serenity. Hi. I thought you were going to go Avengers there, but I actually like the A-team reference better. Yeah, I thought four people.

You know, and also, having traveled with Federico Vatici, I know it can be pretty difficult to get him on planes hi federico hi this is already so much fun i can feel the fun i can feel the the summer it's summer right everything's more fun in the summer yeah you say to yourself oh is that is that heat radiating out of there no it's fun fun i'm feeling the fun radiating yeah even the hundred degrees is all fun. It's 100 degrees of fun, in fact. We're going to start out with a hashtag Snell Talk question. Oh, boy.

But for the first time, this Snell Talk question will be addressed to three people. What? The question actually comes from me. Oh, boy. And I want to know. Listener Mike. Creator Mike. Who's listening to you wants to know what the first ipad you all owned was so jason what was

your first ipad were you in from the beginning the one you personally owned yeah i mean i bought i bought one i bought one i think because of the the vagaries of it um i think i bought one and got one as a review unit like the day they came out or the day before they came out so i ended up with one that i had bought and I still have. It's actually within a couple of feet of me right now. And I kept that. And so, yeah, I was in from day one or day minus one, I think, maybe technically. What about you, Ren?

I also had the very first iPad because immediately I thought to myself, it's a Wacom tablet replacement, which it wasn't quite yet. No, it was not in 2010. But I wanted to dream and I wanted to dream big. And yeah, I bought the originally I bought the Wi Fi only one. And I started taking it to the work that I was doing at the time, where I was working for a friend's web comics t shirt company. And so I started using it in lieu, we had this like little, little laptop that we were like carting to do inventory and carting down like the rows of things. So I'm like, you know, it might be fun. I'm just gonna bring the iPad, I'm gonna try to do the use the iPad for inventory. And then also make it play Netflix while folding t-shirts.

And my boss liked it so much that he's like, oh man, I think I'm going to get one of those for inventory. And I'm like, at this point, I think, you know, why don't I sell you mine and then I'll use that to get the one with 3G access. So I like, the reason why I tell the story is that I really only had that original iPad for about a month until i realized that it would be much more fun if i had a portable cellular network and so i basically fobbed it off for a slightly nicer one federico now i know because i am a european

that the original ipad it came out in april um in the u.s but i think was kind of like middle of may 2010 um in europe we did you have the original ipad what do you think i did back then i'm gonna say i don't think you did oh really i wanted to say that one of the first things i did i actually bought two ipads because i was instructed by the editors of macworld uk to literally literally just buy them an iPad and reship it to them. And that was what I did on day one when those iPads arrived. One of the very first things I did was get an iPad, take it out of the box, put it in a different box, and send it to Europe because everybody was desperate to see it

and they couldn't buy it yet. I had one of my old writers for Mac Stories buy one in the US and ship it to me. I see. The weekend that it launched. Man, your tendencies, they run far back, right? Yes. Because you still do this now with all of this stuff.

Like with the HomePod, I know you've had a couple smuggled in to you. I had the original one. I ordered it. I was really excited about the original one. I ordered it. I was really excited about the original iPad. And I was pretty lucky in that it was coming out on the Friday or whatever. Mine got delivered to me on the Thursday night. So whilst it may have been late, I had a nice surprise as I was probably one of the first people in the UK to have an iPad. Because for whatever reason, this was back when like,

I don't think Apple were as restrictive on the delivery companies as they are now, that like mistakes like that could get made. I expect now mistakes like that do not get made as much if at all. But I ended up with an original iPad then too. But if we fast forward eight years and I'm sure across this time, we've all, I think, spoken about the fact that our love affair with the iPad has kind of died off in places and come back in other places. I know that's been the way for me up until the iPad Pro was released, which I think changed a lot of the way we all work. So now I kind of wanted to get an idea as to where we all are now with our iPads.

So I know that me and Jason, obviously obviously we have spoken about this a bunch, but what iPads do you use right now? I want to get a little, I want to take an inventory amongst everyone. How many, which ones do they have LTE? What are their storage size? What iPads do you use? So I've got the iPad pro 12.9 first generation i'm still using that's the one i bought when the ipad pro was announced the 12.9 was of course the first ipad pro and i said that's it plus it was it helped that it was at the end of the year and since i run my own business like i do all of my like big expenses at the end of the year that's like the perfect time to do it so i was like yeah and so i maxed it out i think it's 128 is it 256 i is a 512 i

don't even know it is the biggest one so i never have to want for space and it is uh it is lte which was a big i wrote a thing about it and i think we talked about it in an upgrade i i decided to go for that uh because i thought that having that flexibility would be helpful and then for the first year or so i didn't use the lTE basically at all. I had one of those T-Mobile SIMs that had a very small amount of data every month for free. And only about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, did I decide finally to just order a SIM from AT&T, my cell provider, add it to my plan, pay the extra monthly fee, and just have it use the data from my family cellular plan. And best decision I could have possibly made

because I use it all the time now with cellular. And I'm so happy that I did that. T.G., you live in the multi-pad lifestyle? Not anymore. So for the past year, I used two iPads because you convinced me to use the big iPad Pro and the small one. So I had the 10.5 and the 12.9. But a few weeks ago, we had to sell the iPad that Silvia was using because we came to an agreement that we had too many iPads in our house.

Too many iPads? Too many iPads. Oh, no. I was convinced to sell one of them. And because I wasn't using the 10.5 much anymore, I gave the 10.5 to Silvia. So now she's using that. And my main iPad is the 12.9 second generation 256 LTE it's the one that I've been using since June last year I guess it launched yeah it's also the iPad that bent last summer and I got a

replacement unit from me seriously I still don't know how it happened but it happened which iPads are you using right now so I am all in on the 10.5 uh it is beautiful beautiful rose gold uh and it's 512 and it's wi-fi and cellular I basically I went like full full on top of the line fancy pants 10.5 inch. And I was kind of like Jason in that I used the 12.9 for a long time. But I mean, it was my only computer for about a year. But when I decided to get my MacBook Pro, and I went for

that, I decided that I didn't want to give up the iPad lifestyle. But I also didn't want to carry around a 13 inch MacBook pro and a 12 inch iPad. Uh, so the 10.5 inch I swapped to, and I feel like it's the, it's the nice intermediary style. Um, and also, yeah, cellular all the way. I feel like I once after that very first iPad I bought with cellular, I've never gone back. I said this pretty soon on and I stand by, I think that the 10.5 is, is the closest closest to being the perfect iPad that there has ever been. I use a 12.9 at home because I kind of use it like it's my desktop computer, like it's my big computer.

But that 10.5, it's just close enough that whenever I travel, whenever I'm outside of the home, use my 10.5 inch ipad which has cellular but when i'm at home i use my 12.9 which just has wi-fi and i kind of treat them as like my two computers my desktop on my laptop that's that's kind of how i look at them now um but the 12.9 it's currently in its current state it's it's too big and too heavy in my opinion for for easy travel when the 10.5 exists and it's wonderful and it's it's too big and too heavy in my opinion for for easy travel when the 10.5 exists and it's wonderful and it's nice and compact but it gives you just enough of everything you know just a big enough screen and it's powerful enough and all that and i really i really love it

and that's why i continue to use and having constant use to ipads both sizes and i've been very happy with that for me i use the smart keyboard um for both of them when i'm out and about i have a slightly different setup for writing at home which we're all going to talk about this writing at home setup in a minute but i wanted to know if uh like ren do you use any cases do you use like the sleeve or do you use like just a smart cover like do you use any specific cases other than just a smart keyboard for your iPads? Yeah, I am. I am insistent on using a case

mostly because I think I'm rougher with my iPad than I am maybe any other gadget except my iPhone and that it just gets thrown into bags and like generally bumped around. So I have a full back case and front case on it. For a long time, when I was using the 9.7 and the 12.9, I had the Logitech Create, which in my opinion was one of the best keyboard cases out there, although it was a little bit heavy. And now, unfortunately, I have Logitech's 10.5 inch version, which is kind of like a Microsoft Surface wannabe in that it has like

a kickstand and it has a very loose keyboard that kind of snaps in with a ribbon. I hate that thing. Oh, it's so bad. And, you know, so just to give you an example, you know, we were at WWDC and the internet wasn't working. So I was switching to the LTE on my iPad to write. And here's Jason with his beautiful bridge keyboard case. And here's me attempting to try and make this stupid thing balance on my lap.

And I revert to using my 13-inch MacBook Pro as a stand on my lap so that I can have a solid surface to type on for my iPad. And it was just, I'm like, at this point, I'm realizing to myself, as much as I love the smart connector, I think I have to go the bridge lifestyle because the, like, oh, God, it was just so awful. It's so awful. Or just petition Logitech to bring back the Create case. So, yeah, but I still use the darn case because I don't have a bridge and there's nothing else that really protects it as well as the Logitech that I currently own. And yeah, that's kind of where I'm at in my case world. We're doing an episode, you know, as iPad lovers talking about the iPad. So you would expect there to be an element in some places of shade being thrown at the Mac.

From here to there, there will be no greater shade thrown than I used my macbook as a stand to give me a level surface for my ipad i think that's about about as much as you could get and uh jason ran mentioned the bridge keyboard which i know you're a big fan of yeah absolutely that is my most common it's not not the only but it's the most common keyboard that i use because i can put it in my lap and and write writing on a table some other kind of hard surface. There are lots of different options that work pretty well. I, you know, I have a stand, I have, I have other keyboards. I've got the canopy with a magic keyboard in it. I've got, uh, you know, I've used the smart cover in some cases I've done that a smart cover is good too but if i had to pick one

it would probably be the bridge um which they're doing a new version of which they had some um as you know my quality issues with their previous version i got a good one but they had a lot of bad ones uh where their bluetooth connectivity was bad they've got a new version with apparently new bluetooth connectivity that's coming out um this month in fact, in July. And I hope that it's good. I can't wait to try it out. But the one that I've got is great. It basically lets me drop my iPad in and it turns into a laptop. And it doesn't need to be on a table to get stability.

It can just sit in my lap and it works great. And Federico, you use one too, right? Yes. and it works great. And Federico, you use one too, right? Yes, I finally, after two, three attempts maybe, I got a working bridge keyboard for my 12.9. That's the keyboard I've been using for the past five, six months. I used to have all kinds of keyboards before. I used for last summer, I believe I wrote my iOS 11 review using the canopy uh by studio knit with the magic keyboard then i moved to the razor uh keyboard for the ipad pro which i kind of liked but the case was terrible and eventually broke um the keyboard was pretty decent though

and then i discovered the the bridge keyboard and i tried to buy one it didn't work i sent it back i got another one it didn't work i sent it back i got another one it didn't work i sent it back and i got the third one and it worked that was my trick the same thing mike i think gave up after two tries it's that third time was the charm but i hope this is fixed this month with the new version yeah so uh i i really like it because it lets me get work done in a bunch of different places including car seats and planes and coffee tables restaurant tables everywhere uh it's it's good for everywhere kind of like a laptop good figure so yeah imagine imagine such a technology imagine that um so for the rest of this episode we're going to talk about

uh three main subject areas about working on the ipad like running a business from an ipad writing from an ipad and being creative so using art and video and other types of creative means on the ipad and what it what what type of apps we use and kind of the benefits and challenges of each but before we do i believe that the pioneer of ipad productivity mr federico vatici has an opening statement that he would like to share with the group. An opening statement? You make it sound so official. It's just the, I think I've shared this story before

and I think it's useful for context maybe and it's also it's kind of fun to think about now. So, a few years ago I was stuck in a hospital going through cancer treatments and I couldn't use my macbook air at the time i was a mac user i had a 20 it was the 2011 macbook air the 13 inch one uh that was my

main computer back then but i couldn't use it because there was no wi-fi in the hospital and i needed to get work done to distract myself and also to keep running the business so instead i tried to get work done on an ipad and in 2011, so what was the iPad back then? The iPad 2? Yeah, it was before the iPad 3 launched. And from my iPad at the time, I basically spent the first couple of weeks just going crazy, trying to find apps that would allow me to communicate with people

and get work done and publish articles on WordPress. The situation on the iPad at the time was really sad and dire. There was no split view, no multitasking, no drag and drop. It was really complicated. But eventually I kind of got into the rhythm of trying to make the best out of the limitations of iOS and enjoy what iOS offered, which was a rich selection of apps. And so over time, I kept working on the iPad, even when I was done with the hospital stuff and I was back home, I kept using the iPad. And over time, I just realized that I enjoyed working on iOS more than I did on the Mac. And the fact that I sort of had to work on the iPad initially

eventually became I like working on the iPad more than using my MacBook. And so in the past, over the past six years, at this point, I've kept using the iPad. I still have a MacBook because that's where I need to do podcasts every week. But otherwise, the iPad fits my lifestyle and my habits and my routine better than a MacBook.

So I love the fact that there's more innovation happening on iOS, on the iOS App Store. And Apple kind of seems to think the same if iPad apps are coming to the Mac. But I think overall the recurring theme of the iPad is that it has, it has allowed me to work and to get work done and to be in touch with people in places where it wouldn't have been possible otherwise. It's got apps that I cannot find anywhere else.

And it allows me to work faster, better, and with more fun, which is the theme of this episode. It's all about fun and working on the iPad. So there you go. That's my opening statement, Mike. Is that an okay statement? Does it work? Okay.

Awesome. We've got to give you your time. You've got to say your thing. And I appreciate appreciate it because it is a good way of framing it because I think there's a lot of criticism that is levied at people that choose to use iOS for work, right? And we're going to go through, we will definitely address some of this stuff when we're talking about the challenges of these things. But there is an element of the fun side of it, which I think is abundant in iOS, you know, about how it can be more fun to do some of these things in ways that aren't necessarily the fastest you know or they might not be the most

efficient but in places but it adds a level of fun and character and using ios that that can make a lot of these tasks more enjoyable yep so uh in the spirit of the summer of fun we're going to turn everything on its head and we can take our first our first break. And Jason, would you like to tell everyone about our first sponsor today? Well, yes, I would, Mike. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by MailRoute, the leaders in email protection. Do you know who should handle your email security and delivery? People who only do email, and that is MailRoute. In 1997, MailRoute's founder, Thomas Johnson, turned a problem into an industry he was working as an it consultant and giving away free mailboxes with hosted domains

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it better and have been doing it longer than anyone else. I've been using MailRoute for quite a while. Among the many things it does is it sends me a little message in email saying, here's what we filtered. And usually it's a list of spam. Occasionally something good will be in there. And with one click, I can deliver it and whitelist that sender and they'll never be filtered again but it also lets me check up on the hot new subject lines in spam for example this week i would like to tell you about two of my favorite spam subject lines that i received in the last week quick wall in all caps 10 foot advertising wall for your business. I need to convince my wife that on the side of our house, we just need to put a big upgrade logo, 10 feet, 10 feet.

Just why not? It sounds good. I'll have to click through on that one. And also this was a good one winning prize in all caps. Maybe I won something. I didn't't enter but who knows maybe i won anyway stop spam today with a 30-day free trial go to mail route.net and use the promo code upgrade listeners of the show will get 10 off for the lifetime of their account thank you to mail route for supporting this show and all of relay fm okay so let's talk about running a business from an iPad. And this is, I think, one that I think about the most. Most of my work is creative work, but the actual creation, so the recording and editing of podcasts for me, always we'll talk about a little later on. And all of the other stuff is running my business. And I think I want to give a brief outline of some of the applications that I use to do that. And then we can talk some in a bit more detail about some of the practicalities of stuff. So I think that anybody these days that has any kind of collaborative business uses the Google Docs and Sheets ecosystem ecosystem like it just feels like at this

point they are so far and away you know the best for collaboration of this stuff that it's just what everybody uses and even though they can be very frustrating at google in the way that they treat the ipad development in that every time know, they're going to add the new features, but how long is it going to take them? And it feels like that time frame is stretching longer and longer as we go forward. You know, it's like, oh, it'll take three months for this feature. And then the next year later, it's five months for the new features. But by and large, they do get there to as much as they ever will. I we're still at the point i think right now where you can just drag in to google docs you can't drag out of google docs but such is life they work and to be honest the the collaboration the collaborative underpinnings of the google

drive suite of applications cannot be denied and everybody's on it everybody uses it and it always works really well there are other applications that exist you know bless them apple have collaboration features in in sheets and and and in uh in numbers and in pages may work okay but they're just not as fast and not as full featured so that's why i continue to keep using the google stuff although you know some of those google apps are not like having used numbers a bit and excel also on ios like google sheets isn't good no it's not it's not good like i use numbers and excel for local stuff but for anything shared yeah sheets is better it's true right it's not the quality of the application it's the technology that's behind it all. And every time I've tried to do any kind of sharing with basically anything else other than Google Sheets,

some kind of problems arise. And Google Sheets is rock solid, and that's why all of our spreadsheets at Real AFM are shared that way. But if it's local stuff, if I'm working out a proposal for a sponsor or I'm doing stuff for my accountant, I always use either Numbers or Excel for that. But when it comes to collaboration, Google Docs and Google Sheets, they're number one. And I don't see that changing for a long time because it's a good part of Google's business, I think.

For task management, I use Todoist. I've flirted with Federico's beloved things many times um and again like things is a way more ipaddy app you know but todoist has a lot of features which are very specific to it that i really like and i've built my workflows around it you know like i, I am this kind of weird person in a way that I use some of my devices in the sense that I also use Chrome on iOS. Um, because I like the fact that I, well, cause I use Chrome on my Mac because I use Google docs so much and Chrome works way better and I don't like to run multiple web browsers. So then I up using chrome on ios to sync all of my history together so i kind of you know i i love ios but i don't necessarily feel bound by just what apple makes or even what is the most iose of a thing you know like things things three is real it follows so

many interesting conventions and it's such a really really interesting app but there's just some stuff that it doesn't have or some things that it does in peculiar ways that kind of keeps me away from it. Two tools that I use a lot for running the sales side of my business is Spark 2 and an app called PipeDrive. Nobody ever knows about PipeDrive unless they've heard me talk about pipe drive pipe drive is a sales management and contact management database tool um it is the most so professional it is the most professional sounding of any application that i use um but my business is built upon deals being made right like we make deals with companies for sponsorship. And we tried tracking it in Trello for a long time. And Trello just ended up kind of breaking down on us. Or like we could have the deals being tracked in Trello. But when we needed to start

sharing contact information, there wasn't a good way to do that. But a CRM tool like Pipedrive allows us to have all of our deals and we can track how they are in the progress and then also attach contact information for the people that we're working with at the companies and that helps keep that all in one cohesive place which is really important for us when we were looking at a tool and i had our sales assistant look for it i was like the key thing that i care about is a good ios app and it has a very good ios app including one of my favorite little tactic into like interactions on my iphone when when you win a deal you press a little button that says one and it has this nice little tactic like it's like

there's a button going in and out and i love that i love that little feeling because it's a good feeling when you can say you've won a deal and it's even nicer when it's enforced over a little tactic. And we use Spark. We use Spark 2 for its email sharing features. That's really great for us because we can have conversations inside of the email that's just for us to see. And that's really useful if, like, so say, for example, our assistant is doing a deal and she wants my advice on something.

She can share the email with me, ask me a question, I can answer it back and then she can take it on and go with it. Of course we use Slack like every business on the planet does these days, but being able to talk about email inside of the email is really good. Now I can come back into talking about apps that everybody else knows when I talk about Fantasticow. What calendar application do you use federico right now this is a whole conversation i use um on my ipad i have the apple one just because the the i use week calendar yeah on my iphone the ipad version of week calendar isn't that great would you say it's weak it's it's yes i would say that um that's the terrible pun like come on so bad um i use the apple one i don't love it i use the calendar more on my phone uh because the week

we view on my phone is excellent and i'm surprised that apple still hasn't copied that feature um so i don't do much calendaring on my ipad i do it on the phone because there's a client that i prefer but when i do on my ipad the month view in the apple calendar one is i would say on a tg scale is decent um it works it gets the job done barely uh at least it's got the the date on the icon which is nice yeah yeah that is nice uh jason what do you use for calendaring uh i have it's a whole story mike um because on my iphone i use fantastical but i don't think fantastical is very good on ipad either it's funny that rico and i are using using different calendar apps but have the same thing so i'm using apple's calendar on the iPad even though I'm using Fantastical on my iPhone

because I don't like Fantastical's view on iPad now I typically just run Fantastical in the iPhone sized view on my iPad no that solves that problem that's how I do it too that's how i solve it that's a way to do it i never use calendar apps in full screen i'm almost always having them yeah split screen with something else so usually i actually have fantastical and slide over i don't even make it a full thing it's just like it's always there so i can add new things yeah i don't know what it is but like there just doesn't seem to be that many applications that can understand how to like effectively lay out a monthly calendar like fantastical basically tries to have three views at once and it's like what am i looking at but but rent you do you use so you

just you don't use anything else of it in fantastical like me right just in this in the split view you don't have like a magical month view calendar app that you're hiding from us no no i i use fantastical primarily if i want to i don't know i just i i'm also terrible in that i don't really use calendars i use calendars for like the big things uh but i'm much more into the like to-do style list that has dates attached and so i've actually gotten really into using agenda in the last month or two huh really see i every time i think i've heard you say that to someone ran i hear someone go huh really because everyone that i know that's tried it like i can't get my head around agenda agenda is an application which is notes and calendar combined, right? What do you like about it? Because I feel like at least my kind of way of thinking

doesn't match with what the application is trying to do. I think that's it. You really do have to kind of re-challenge your brain into how it all works. What I've found that I really like about Agenda is that I can have all of these separate little folders that have their own separate timelines as to stuff fun working on the iPad. I'll have a note that is scheduled on June 20th. And then I make the note at the very top that it's like, it's at this time. And here's all the information that you need to know about it. And then I also have like,

I do a weekly update for the higher ups who run iMore on like, what we've done at iMore this week. And I have just a reoccurring note that pops up and allows me to fill all of that stuff in. I don't use Agenda for everything. Like I definitely I use I still use notes for a lot of my writing related stuff. But when it comes to podcast episodes, or derby practices, or basically anything that I need to write something with in addition to a date, I use Agenda almost exclusively. And it definitely takes some getting used to, though. Like, I was lucky enough that I was testing it for iMore. So, I spent a good, like, two weeks really trying to dig into it and figure out how it works. And that I think you really, well, when you're talking about your productivity in general, let alone productivity on the iPad,

when you're trying to learn a whole new way of doing things, you really have to give yourself the time. Because there were moments where I was just like, oh, this is annoying. And then as soon as I figured out how to kind of make it work with my workflow, it was fine. It was just the, as soon as I figured out how to kind of make it work with my workflow it was fine it was just the it's the initial it's the initial like stubbing your toe being like why is that rock there before you realize oh maybe I should step over the rock maybe the rock maybe the rock is there for a good reason I think that's interesting because like I know for me and for a couple people I've spoke to they basically just bounce straight off it but because you were testing it you if you're writing or if you're reviewing it or you're testing it for the site and i'm sure you both actually can

like all all three of you can relate to this you kind of have to dig in where like i am just like i'm done and i'm i'm out of there right because i don't write reviews or anything like that so it just didn't work for me for whatever reason. And I didn't bother sticking with it. But yeah, it's interesting to hear that, actually. When it comes to apps in general that are very different than what you might be used to, I really like I'm a full proponent of you have to give it like two weeks and you have to force yourself to use it just that app for two weeks. Like you can't go running back to your old thing. I mean, that's that's kind of how it comes with working on the iPad in general, because I feel like if all of us had

just been like, you know, if if someone had been able to give you Federico and a Mac that was perfectly usable in your hospital bed, you probably never would have taken the time to like actually play with the iPad and like get into it. And that's kind of that's where I feel like on these apps in general, where it's just like we really you need to give yourself the time to be mad at it and then work through it, uh, rather than just be like, this doesn't immediately fill my workflow needs. I'm going to throw it away without looking at it. My kind of working life would be lost without PDF pen. Um, I create and send a lot of contracts I have to amend contracts that people have given me

or have to take a word document and turn it into a PDF to sign it and send it to someone because who sends word documents? Why do you do this? But anyway, people do and PDF pen is what I use I would be lost without it and I guess the same goes for workflow I don't think we need to get into workflow on this show

especially because it's all changing anyway but just assume that I use it we all use it and love it and have so many little hacks for how we do things on workflow. And it will come up, but I don't think I need to get into detail of it now. Dropbox is my file system. I use the Dropbox app sometimes. I use the Files app as well. They're both good in certain circumstances. If I'm ever writing anything long form in markdown i use

bear because it's nice and easy to use and i use peak out on my ipad because one there's no calendar on the ipad and two i really love peak out because it's very customizable and it has a video game inside of it so like what more could you want now federico i see you in our in our wonderful google docs here you have you've entered in a couple of additional applications that you wanted to pull out to mention for how you run your business. Yeah, so the Club Mac Stories, the subscription part of the Mac Stories company

and the business, that's the one that I've been trying to automate as much as possible in terms of dealing with content, with questions that are submitted by members. When we started the newsletter, which is part of Club Mac Stories years ago, we had no system in place for people to submit questions

or to say, I have a workflow request for you, or to say, here's my home screen. I think it's interesting. Maybe you want to feature my home screen. And over time, I realized that there was no point in just having people send me a regular email. I wanted to have a system in place where things would be categorized in different sections. And people could go to a web page and write the question on the web and send me. And I would get an email but i

would never see the actual email the email would be used as a way to uh basically extract information and put it somewhere else so the system that we that that i created is based on trello which we use a lot for both for mac stories for the site for the editorial side of things like we can assign articles to each other we can keep track of what's coming out in like a couple of weeks or next month but we especially use Trello for the club because every week so we have this board and every week there's a new list for the next issue of the newsletter and that's on the left issue of the newsletter. And that's on the left side of the board. On the right side are all these different lists

for different sections of the club. And these sections could be app updates, reader questions, workflow ideas, workflow requests by people, home screens submitted by people. All of these member-created questions are submitted using Google Forms. And Google Forms is this service that allows you to put together a form on the web and people can go to a link and fill in the response or send you a question.

Then automation comes into play. We use Zapier to extract the information from Google Forms and send it to Trello. And that's where a couple of years ago, I went crazy for a couple of weeks. I created this system that uses a bunch of Python on Zapier to format these questions in Markdown. So it takes the data, reformats everything in Markdown, and along with the Markdown info,

it also embeds in the Trello card that is generated by Zapier, it embeds a workflow link that when tapped on the Trello app for iOS launches workflow with the information pre-filled so the workflow sees the input and it knows what to do. But more than that, over time I realized, you know, I don't want to do this for every single individual card that I need to open in Trello and tap on a run workflow link. It's just too much work. So I realized what

I want to do is I want to move a bunch of cards for sections or people that I'm going to interview for things that will be featured in the next issue. I want to move them into the next issue column. And then I want to have a workflow that says, let me look into the next issue column and let me see what I can do for you. And so there's this workflow that it's called export. And depending on what I choose, it exports app debuts for app updates that we want to cover into a Ulysses sheet. Or it does so with Q&A questions. It does the same with interesting links

that we want to write up. It's a way to batch export and pre-fill Ulysses documents using Trello and Workflow. Also, and this is where I kind of want to be crazy again, I put together Workflows, which actually I needed to write documentation for my team. Basically, when you start working for Mac Stories, there's a guide that you need to learn for all the workflows that you need to

install and understand what you got to do. We have workflows for the entire team to save data into Trello from the workflow extension on iOS, which I assume we'll keep working with shortcuts. At least that's a hope. We have workflows that upload files to the MailChimp API for the newsletter so that we can save time from them in the MailChimp web app. Um, everything. So all the technical parts, at least most of them that involve the newsletter are automated so that we can focus on just two

things, writing the actual content and putting together the template on MailChimp, uh, which is a terrible experience. I don't recommend to anybody, but we're stuck using MailChimp and that's what we got to do. Everything else is automated. Whether you're a member, submitting a question, it goes through a script. Whether it's us having to move information from Trello to Ulysses or any other text editor, because the same system can be adapted to drafts or, I don't know, editorials not around anymore. But it's flexible enough to work with anything else. And so that's how we organize all the questions

and requests and ideas. It's really funny. I showed it to Mike last year and Mike seemed impressed. It blew my mind. It's fair. It's quite a thing to see all these applications just spinning around on each other and opening lots of different files federico has built a beautiful house of cards which is underpinned by workflow hopefully

shortcuts in the future i think all of this stuff when it comes to this business-y type stuff, you know, when it comes to email and spreadsheets and stuff like that, this is one of the places where the iPad really shines, I think, because most of the applications and systems that you would need to use, all the popular ones, they all have presence and they're all pretty good. And the great thing is, once you get into understanding how these items work on iOS, you can truly work from anywhere, but in a maybe a more interesting way than any other way with working on an iPad, because once you've understood how to work all of these iOS apps, you can do all of this stuff very easily on your iPhone as well.

And that is one of the great things that comes with being very well versed in productivity on iOS is that you then have all of this stuff, all of this knowledge unlocked to you when you're using your iPhone as well as your iPad. The applications still stay in sync. You're used to how everything looks and works because by and large, the applications are pretty much the same. Would you agree with that, Jason? I mean, I do.

I try to bring my iPad with me wherever I go that I'm anticipating any work being done. But yeah, there are times when you are not hauling around a big tablet somewhere and something happens. And it is really wonderful to have that. I have definitely had that happen in a few different scenarios. I remember having to open an SSH window into a Unix server at a bar on my iPhone because I had to fix a bug in one of my websites. And that was super weird and not ideal. I would rather have more screen space and probably a keyboard. But I was able to do it. And I've done that with photos, too, where I've been taking photos in line for an Apple event, let's say, and I can use my workflow that uploads those photos to my FTP server and resizes them and watermarks them and use that on my phone just

as easily as I could on my iPad. And it's the same workflow I would use to take a picture with an SLR and load that image onto the iPad and then run that workflow there. So having it having that stuff available on the iPhone is great. In context, usually, you know, usually I'm using my iPhone for different things. But there are those moments where suddenly, I mean, like, could I theoretically do my job entirely from an iPhone, I totally could, I would prefer not to, but I totally could. And I think that, you know, the challenges in this respect is mostly the extra hoops that you jump through from time to time. And it's a thing that you kind of have to accept if you're going to be doing any type of work on an iPad. Sometimes it

takes things slightly longer to complete. Sometimes instead of an app having a feature, you maybe just need to get another little utility app. But once you lock into that mindset, it all opens up to you because the app store ecosystem is so rich. You can basically do anything. You maybe just need to use two apps for it instead of one, but that's a perfectly fine way of working. Ren, do you find it to be that way as well?

Sometimes you just have to get a little utility or something, and it allows you to do the thing that you thought you couldn't do. Oh, absolutely. And I think it goes back to my earlier statement where it just, you have to experiment a little bit and you have to be willing to understand that, you know, an app may not work one-to-one. Something that you expect a, for instance, a video editing app to do on Mac may not work one-to-one. Something that you expect, for instance, a video editing app to do on Mac may not do the same thing on an iPad. But instead, you might have a color correction app that is built separately that actually does stuff better than the process that you use on, say,

Final Cut in the Mac. So it's really just about balancing and about being willing to kind of look out of your comfort zone and look for those utilities. Some people might say that that is just trying to make the most of a bad situation. And I would firmly and strongly disagree. I think there's a difference between finding the right tools and the right apps for the right device and saying like, oh, this absolutely has to work the exact same way that I expect it to, you know, there are some there are some workflows, absolutely, where I do like 20 things to make one thing work. And there's definitely that voice in the back of my head, which is like, this would be much easier on a Mac. And usually, that's about the time when I pull out my MacBook Pro and just

use my MacBook Pro instead, like I, I don't know, as I've used iPad over the years, I feel like there's a distinctive line where you say, you know, some things the iPad is excellent for, some things the iPad's not great for, and that's okay. You can just use your Mac, and it's cool. It's cool. All right, so, Ivan, you've all indulged me with the boring business stuff for long enough. We should probably talk about something a little bit more creative. So i think we're going to move into what it's like to write

to be a writer using an ipad which i know obviously my three well my my co-host and my two guest co-hosts today are more than well versed in but before we do how about we take a second break great idea mike this episode of upgrade is brought to you by Boom 3D. When it comes to sound, we all want sharper, louder, and crystal clear audio. Boom 3D is a system-wide volume booster and equalizer app crafted by Global Delight. And does it deliver? It has patent-pending 3D surround sound technology that offers a mind-blowing, immersive virtual surround sound that can be experienced on any headphones, whether you're listening to podcasts, audiobooks favorite album maybe watching a movie boom 3d will allow you to really immerse yourself in it it boosts all your audio and creates the perfect sound profile for your device it extracts spatial cues from your audio to render them in

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so let's talk about writing setups now jason can you talk us through right now your current writing setup and there is a specific reason why i'm gonna have you go first i which one i have all of them i have so many different writing setups let's talk about your home writing setup with the iPad Pro. I mentioned the bridge keyboard. Generally, if I go somewhere else, whether I'm traveling or, in fact, just the other day I went to my Starbucks that's a three-minute walk from my house because I wanted to get out of the house and put in some headphones and be in a different environment and write an article on it. I do that sometimes. And that's all the bridge keyboard. So that's the most common one. But at home, even though I've got a sit stand desk that I'm sitting at right now in my office, oftentimes, especially when it's not the summer of fun, but the other parts of the year when my children are in school, which is fun if you work at home, because then you have the house to yourself. So I will sometimes work at the counter,

basically at the bar top in my kitchen. And in that scenario, I started out with, I've got like a wood iPad stand that I used for a while and a Bluetooth keyboard. And eventually somebody on Twitter actually recommended this iPad Pro. It's an iPad stand from a company called viazon i got it on amazon it was literally somebody just said i have this stand and it's pretty good and it's a it looks kind of like the foot of an imac and then it's got kind of this clampy top that you can kind of you know it just clamps onto the sides of the of the ipad so it'll fit different sized ipads just fine in fact i think it comes with two of those clamps and you can choose which one.

So there's one for smaller devices and one for larger devices. And so now I'm using that. So that elevates it off of the countertop a little bit. It's a little bit better angle for me. And then I still need an external keyboard. And for a while I was using external USB keyboards because I've got, you know, my little clicky mechanical keyboards. Now I'm using a Bluetooth keyboard, which is the Matthias Laptop Pro, which is a mechanical keyboard that's Bluetooth. The big problem is that it's very difficult to find

a mechanical keyboard because I do prefer that. It just feels better. I like those keyboards and prefer them if I can manage it. And one that is Bluetooth and is a Mac keyboard. And the Mac keyboard thing is important because otherwise the command key and the option key are reversed and all of your muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts is broken. And that's not fun. So I prefer to have a keyboard that actually has the command key in the right place and getting that plus mechanical plus wireless is hard on the mac you can remap those keys on uh on the ipad you can't so they have to be settable um either like set that way or have a switch somewhere that lets you set them in the mac orientation so right now most of the time i'm

using the matthias laptop pro keyboard um sometimes i'll try other USB keyboards there, but it's just more setup because I got to get the USB adapter and a power plug. And then I have to plug those because the most of most of them require enough power that you have to use the external power adapter with lightning into the USB adapter. And then you've also got now you got cables kind of snaking everywhere and i can do that but i it's just easier for me to use the um the matthias i'm constantly on a search for a small on other small mac bluetooth mechanical keyboards but there are few if any out there that uh matthias laptop pro is uh it's not much of a looker yeah i know there are people who have it is not it is it is very old school apple design yeah in that it's a big puffy plastic silver keyboard it is with black keys it is so it's tall it's you know they're thick or whatever you want to say it is not super attractive um and what i

would say is first off you're being very judgmental about the looks of my keyboard mike i am matthias do make very good looking keyboards as well though like in the kind of the more modern style why is why is it specifically that you chose this one it's mechanical and bluetooth and mac and that's it like if i if i wanted a uh a thin aluminum keyboard i've got the magic keyboard and i've used the magic keyboard out in that same configuration and it's fine but it's much more pleasant to type on the mechanical keyboard with the you know with the clicky keys and so that's what i that's what i prefer that's what i'm using at my desk so it's also a little bit less of a transition to do it but you know again yeah i've got a magic keyboard i could use i got a whole bunch of other keyboards i could use

in the end i would like a sure a more attractive keyboard would be uh would be better but that's not what i've got that fulfills all all of my other needs uh in terms of what uh what switches did you get on this it only it's matthias's switches it's matthias makes its own keyboard switches so this is the quiet i think it's their quiet uh keyboard switch so it's not super loud but it's a little bit clicky um and that's just that's kind of what i have to go for for now but the the nice thing about the ipad is you can use any bluetooth keyboard with it and and so you can find one that works for you. And there are many options.

The only problem is that if you want a weird keyboard that is made for PCs as well as Macs, like I said, you get this issue where on the Mac, you just click a couple of settings in the keyboard's system preferences pane. And because Apple knows, Mac users sometimes use Windows keyboards and it'll flip the commanded option it's fine um but the ipad has no such feature so you're kind of stuck if you

use a windows keyboard the key um the modifiers will be wrong and i don't like that and then the reason that jason went first federico what is your home writing setup um i have felt the power of the snare zone from afar it has reached europe and italy and after many experiments and way too much money spent on cases and keyboards and just everything i have also adopted the bridge keyboard and the viazon what's the name which i bought from amazon us shipment was kind of expensive but it you know it's very nice um so the way that i work now is uh if i'm at my desk uh by desk i mean kitchen table uh i i use the the the stand so the ipad is in goes into the stand and the bridge keyboard i use in front of the stand uh because it kind of fits you know there's enough space and i love working with the stand because i don't strain my neck right so it's been

really good for my posture and just it makes me feel better when i when i'm sitting and writing if i'm not a if i don't want to use the stand, I can use the bridge keyboard as it was supposed to be used as a laptop setup. So this happens when I'm in... I spend a lot of time, for various reasons, working from my car, at least for a couple of hours each week.

And I find it useful to have a laptop that is actually an ipad because it's got a cellular connection um so i can work i can work from there with the bridge keyboard otherwise i if i don't want to use the physical keyboard or if i don't need to write if i just want to use my ipad for like talking with my teammates or just catching up on twitter or the news or read something or watch hbo um which i can do with the vpn yay technology um i use a smart cover just a plain regular smart cover which i have covered in stickers uh mike is really happy about this so yeah it's the jason snell setup yeah stickers i should mention about that viazon

stand that it rotates of course and um oh yes i i do a lot of when i'm writing i do a lot of it in vertical where i've got a very you know a nice tall screen i can see all my article text if i do need to have multiple apps open in split view, I'll turn it and have it be in landscape. But I have it in portrait, in that vertical orientation, a lot when I'm writing. I tried the vertical thing. I don't know if it's because I use split view so much, or maybe it's something else. I think it's kind of weird to me. It's weird because whenever whenever when i'm writing in split

view i feel bad because i see so much screen and it doesn't feel like i've written enough it's like look at this long document you've never been in you haven't filled not even half of the page uh and so you know the horizontal orientation makes me feel a little better um but yeah i see the benefit i mean you're you're a faster rider than i am so it's i i'm motivated by all that blank space down there it's like i need to fill that that's a life hack okay i uh to have adopted the jason snell lifestyle have you yes i own a viason stand which i've been using for a couple of months because i was getting some neck pain and i was concerned that it might be bad posture when using my ios devices so now when i'm at home i put my uh my 12.9 in the Verizon stand and I sit either at the kitchen table or at my desk. Um, and I use a, I use, um, a magic keyboard right now, the, the Apple magic keyboard.

I kind of like it. Um, I would like something else, but I don't know what I want yet. So like at my Mac, I use the Microsoft scope ergonomic keyboard. Um, and and i'm i've got my eye out for something which might be similar um because you know i like to try and take care of of my wrists because i've struggled from my wrist i mean just any type of strain you know neck strain wrist strain elbow all of it i have suffered with all of it so the uh using the viazon stand has been good for that i wished it was a little higher honestly yeah um i still find myself looking down a little bit more than i would want i wished it was was taller than it than it actually is but it's still vastly better and i found that if i tilt it backwards a little bit that can help me um but i do wish it was just a little bit higher i think

that's one of the reasons why i use it vertically is that i can use it in vertical orientation i kind of push it up in the in the holder and it gets a little bit higher but i agree i would almost want one that was even taller and i realized that there was some that the foot would probably have to come forward and it might be bigger and i i honestly the viazon stand i'm glad people like it i like it too i ended up there because i couldn't find like an arm like a like a like a mounting arm thing that i could just put on my the edge of my desk so i could just float an ipad which i would probably buy um and i could probably i think they make visa mounts and then you could buy an arm and that might be a little bit too much a little a bridge too far um but this was this is like an alternative to that yeah what i like about the viazon stand is i don't have to put a case on my ipad to use it right it just clips in and out of the stand

you know and that works well for me but i'm still kind of thinking about maybe i'm using a different keyboard but um i'm i'm fine with the magic keyboard for now uh rana i have you adopted jason snow lifestyle or are you in a completely different camp i'm in a completely different camp completely um sorry jason that's fine i do like using stands for my ipad but i have never used it for writing uh Usually, honestly, when I'm writing with my iPad, I'm doing it on the go. I'm doing it in a coffee shop or kind of running around. If I want to write at my home or in my office, I'm usually working on the MacBook Pro, just because I have it there and it's an option. And yeah, when it's ergonomically questionable,

I used to use the iPad nonstop, especially with the create, because I felt like I could perch pretty much anywhere and type on it. And it had a really nice mechanical keyboard feel. Uh, and the new Logitech case on my iPad just does not afford me the same flexibility. So by and large, I find, you know, I found that places where I normally would write with my iPad, which is, you know, for a long time on my couch or like outside, I find myself bringing my MacBook Pro a lot more. Now, I'm really curious to see if I add the bridge, if that will kind of bring me back to my former lifestyle. But I definitely don't think I'm going to get into the, you know, put your iPad on a desk and type with an external keyboard.

Unless we're talking about Astropad, which I feel like is a different discussion for later in this podcast. So as writers, you all use applications. Jason, can you tell me what writing apps you're gravitating towards right now? Yeah, it changes all the time. Federico mentioned that editorial seems to just kind of be dead. It's a shame because i used it a lot um i'm using one writer which has some macros in it i don't love it but it syncs with dropbox and has markdown support and those are the two most important things to be honest

i can get by with no other features if it it will sync to a specific folder in dropbox and support markdown maybe give me a little, a little bit of a, you know, conversion capabilities for Markdown to HTML, things like that. Um, so,

cause I write in Markdown. So one writer is my primary, um, tool for writing, uh, short stuff. Um, I also have Scrivener.

Scrivener is what I use if I'm working on long form stuff, especially, um, I wrote all of the, all of the, uh the unpublished yet to be rewritten novels that I have written are all in Scrivener. And that syncs now right across so I can open those in Scrivener on the Mac and on iOS and they all work together together which is very nice but um most of my writing in ios is done in one writer at this point which is again you know there's opportunities for other apps i've tried drafts i've tried ulysses they are fine but um i kind of end up going back to one writer only because it's very simple and reliable for me and those are the most important things when i'm just

trying to get the words out what about you federico So I've been using this sort of split setup, been writing in Ulysses and using Ulysses also as my text editor for most of my articles. But the bigger ones, so my long-form stories, I've been writing them in Ulysses and then moving them onto editorial so that i can use my old editorial and python workflows for stuff like markdown syntax stuff like footnotes or the custom syntax that we use for certain things on the mac stories website but lately i've been considering moving all my old workflows that i put together something like five or six years ago in editorial, moving them over to Drafts 5.

I've been interested in the new version of Drafts, especially because it's got this JavaScript automation that is really interesting to me. I don't know JavaScript well enough. I know the basics. And if I download someone's action, I know kind of my way around modifying the action to do what I need to do.

So I've been considering that, especially for the iOS review that I got to write this summer. Maybe I could find a way to take my editorial workflows and make them work in JavaScript with the features that drafts has also it's really intriguing to me that drafts has this concept of tagging notes and creating workspaces which if you use omni focus it would be like a custom perspective so like it's a custom view that shows you just the things you want to see so i could have a

bunch of different workspaces for whether it's Mac stories or the iOS review or the club. Um, so yeah, I've been thinking about that, but otherwise I've been using Ulysses for over a year at this point. Um, and I've been using editorial for the editing and also I want to mention, um, notes, Apple notes and Devon think I've been using these two for research or for collecting material that I use for writing stuff like screenshots or PDFs or web links or just notes. But I've been gravitating towards Apple Notes more lately

just because every time I use Apple Notes, it feels so much easier and so much faster than Devon Think. It's not as powerful as Devon Think when it comes to indexing stuff or searching for uh you know that exact quote from a pdf using boolean operators uh but it gets the job done and i love the way that it shows you links and attachments um so yeah that's what i use uh i'm not completely satisfied with ulysses especially when it comes to markdown editing because it does a bunch of weird things to mark down you know ulysses has its custom flavor called markdown excel which you know initially it was okay

and then over time every time i look at editorial or any other text editor i'm like yeah i remember markdown playing markdown it looks kind of nice so drafts 5 would enable me to have that back in addition to automation. So we'll see how it goes. It's funny. I talked to Max at the Solman, the developer of Ulysses at WWDC. And really nice guy. And it's a really great app. But it's definitely like I feel like I'm so used to having Markdown be everywhere as Markdown, which like the beauty of Markdown is

that it's just plain text. You can literally write it anywhere. I was syncing the other day to an Apple Notes. I was writing an Apple Notes for various weird reasons. And, you know, I just paste my text in there and it's fine. It's Markdown. It doesn't, Apple Notes doesn't know what it is. It doesn't matter. And the issue that I have with Ulysses and, and Max gets it, but you know, Ulysses wants to be Ulysses and it'll support Markdown, but it,

it wants to present this kind of like friendly, you know, styled. And if you type links in Markdown, it converts them into these like link tokens that you have to tap on and like i get why that's good from a kind of almost microsoft word perspective of wanting to keep it simple but as somebody who writes in markdown it's incredibly frustrating because i wanted to just sort of be it knowing it's a link is good it taking my link and hiding

it away um in a little object is not as good and that's the thing um and i told him about it and he he seemed to totally get what i was saying and yet also say well but this is how ulysses works and we're not going to change how ulysses works and i get that but it means that i either need to just commit to being a ulysses user for everything i write and just which i'm probably write and just, which I'm probably not going to do because I'm probably not going to change from like BBEdit on my Mac. Or I can't really use it because it wants me to work the way it wants to work. And that's not, to me, that's not what the beauty of writing in Markdown is, which is that I can use any tool and it'll just work.

I kind of come around on the idea of Markdown over time. So I used to be really into Markdown to the point where I was taking notes in Markdown and having Markdown everywhere. I was at one point I even used, I think on the Mac Mailmate, which is this email client that allows you to write emails in Markdown. So I was super into Markdown. And then when Unisys came around, I was like, yeah, this is so much simpler than Markdown. It, you know, it removes all of the complexity of Markdown and all these ugly syntax that I don't want to see. And then when Unisys came around, I was like, yeah, this is so much simpler than Markdown. It removes all of the complexity of Markdown and all this ugly syntax that I don't want to see. And then after writing in Unisys for like 18 months, I'm at the point where I look at Markdown and I'm like, yeah, maybe John Gruber had a point. It's just plain text.

And I see all the links and I see all the syntax. This is actually kind of nice. I miss you so much. So, yeah, I don't know. We'll see. Bren, are you firmly in the Markdown app camp? I'm firmly in the Markdown camp, but not so much in Markdown apps. And I'll tell you why.

Because I think my hesitation goes with everything that we've been saying, where I just, the sinking and the frustration of trying to use specific syntax and all of that. I actually have been writing solely in notes for the last year and a half, two years. I know, I know. It's crazy. I've been using notes with text expander keyboard for shortcuts. And then I also have a sticky as a pinned note

with with weird things that we need for for my for imor's various uh cms i love that i'm not the only considered weird one on this episode oh for sure congratulations mike i fully recognize that notes is a weird thing to write in. And I was actually, I used OneWriter for many, many years, except during a beta, I think two or three years ago, I had OneWriter on my iPad. And I think it was iOS 10 beta. And I lost three articles. And it wasn't OneWriter's fault at all. I think it was just an iOS beta problem.

But after that, I was just like, nope, nope. I'm going to just rely on iCloud syncing now. I can't think about that. So I went to Notes on a trial basis as a result of that. And after using Notes for two or three months during the beta, I realized, actually, this is this is not bad at all. And it syncs so fast between the Mac and iOS. And I know without a doubt that no matter what I'm testing, as long as I have my iCloud, like as long as I'm logged into with iCloud, I don't have to worry that I don't have the app downloaded or that I need to do something else.

I can just I can just make it work. So you'll find yourself just, you're just writing raw Markdown into notes and it's syncing via iCloud. You get it everywhere. Kind of that's how you run things. Yeah, that's it. Federico, what do you think are the main benefits for you? Is there anything different

when it comes to writing on the iPad as to writing on the Mac other than just the portability thing that we've mentioned? One of the things is you get this rich selection of apps so i think there's a benefit in having text being a being shared to a bunch of different places like you mentioned utilities that allow you to do different things uh in a in a native in a visual way in a way that maybe it's not necessarily possible on a Mac. Or maybe I should say it would be possible on a Mac if you used a single more complex app,

something like BBEdit, for example. It's a different mindset in that you can write in one app on the iPad and then you can use the share sheet and take your text and move it somewhere else to do something different. So in my case, it would be from Ulysses to editorial, but it would be even stuff like, you could use utilities like clean text,

which will allow you to reformat your plain text and fix weird characters or change from straight quotes to curly quotes or stuff like that. I think there's a benefit in the iOS ecosystem that you can move your data between different apps and each one of them can be a single purpose utility that can process your text and can work in conjunction with the text editor. It could be about image uploads. It could be about turning the markdown to HTML. You could use workflow, soon-to-be shortcuts in the process. I think,

especially with iOS 11, that it's got the files access for apps and you can use the document browser. Apps that use the files APIs have become even more convenient because now there's a unified way to share these documents and open them in place in different apps, make changes and save them back to the original without creating copies. So it's a very different way of getting work done from the Mac where you would probably have, you know, a single app that allows

you to write in Markdown, and you would have scripts, you would have the terminal, you would have Automator and all these different, more complex and more professional apps. On the iPad, I think on iOS in general, but even more so on the iPad, with Split View and drag and drop and the share sheet and files, it's all, at least from my perspective, it's all about the integration of more so on the iPad, with Split View and Drag & Drop and the Share Sheet and Files. It's all, at least from my perspective, it's all about the integration of different apps together. So that, which is also why I like it more because it's more fun.

It's like a mini puzzle every single time. And it's, you know, it's part of the fun is being able to bring these pieces all together in a consistent and reliable way. And it's why I the fun is being able to bring these pieces all together in a consistent and reliable way. And it's why I enjoy working on the iPad. It's because the communication between these different apps and it's visual and it's tactile. You can literally move your, touch your documents and move them around. Yeah, it's what I love the most about the iPad besides the portability.

I guess one of the biggest things is the idea of moving away from a document model to an app model. That's one of the biggest differences from the Mac to iOS. Instead of having a document that you open in applications, you have an app that you open, and then maybe you bring in a document from somewhere else, but the place that you're starting at is fundamentally different. And I assume that this is one of the things that trips a lot of people up when they're trying to make that switch it's like where's the file systems and then you're okay like there is one now but you still don't really need to think of it that way right has that changed for any of you

do any of you tend to start work in files and then go out to any apps take that as a no no no no i will be i will use files there are times when files becomes really useful for me um but it's generally to grab a file that is existing in a store somewhere so like in ferrite if I'm editing a podcast and I need to put in the logo of that podcast for the MP3 export, I will pop open files in a slide over and I'll navigate in my usually in my Dropbox. But sometimes it's in iCloud Drive to where that image is and then drag and drop it into the into the window in Ferrite. But that's an example where I'm retrieving something from a file store somewhere i'm not starting with the file as the as the launch point of like i oh i need to open that file because if i know if i've got a file in excel or a file and you know anything that that is a file-based app i always go to the app and then bring in the files and jason i wanted to ask you

what do you consider some of the biggest challenges for the way that you do your writing work on ios compared to on the mac um well you know one of them is um is text editing as as nice as it is that um apple added this text editing cursor in ios 10 i think um where you can put two fingers down on the screen and then move around, and it actually moves the text selection around. If you're using an external keyboard, it's not great. It's okay, but it's not great. And I actually would be a more productive writer if I could, in addition to my Bluetooth keyboard, have a Bluetooth pointing device that I could use to edit text. Because it's nice to have a pointing device when you need to do text selection and not have to move your hand up.

And that's one of those cases where I agree that having a device that's down where my hands are is going to be more natural than reaching out and touching the screen because it doesn't feel quite natural to do that kind of text selection stuff um i um you know i would like multiple windows at once one of the things that i think it comes up a lot when we're talking about ipad productivity is it would really be nice if apple just had a way for all apps to say we support multiple windows. And so you can have sort of like multiple, it's not necessarily multiple instantiations

of the same app, although it could be viewed that way. But the idea that if I have a text editor and I want to have two windows side by side of that text editor, that I could do that. And so I end up doing a lot of things that are cheating. And I'm sure Federico and Ren have both done this too, where it's like, I have one writer on one side and I have notes on the other side. And like, that's kind of dumb. I do this in web browsers.

Sometimes I have Chrome and Safari open side by side. Safari you can actually do side by side. That's the thing. And I do use Safari side by side, but like, I'd like all apps to be able to do that. So that can be a slowdown. It's ironically, like if I'm writing and i'm doing a lot of research and i've got a split view with safari on one side and my text editor on the other that works great but if i'm trying to look at two

different documents i often will have to copy and paste the text of a document into an alternative like notes just so that i can have them next to each other and that's a place where it really stands in the way i think keyboard support needs to be better apps are better at keyboard support than used to be but there are lots of bugs there i have the one that is that happens really commonly which is when i'm command tabbing between apps and i let go um and i go into the new app sometimes one of the modifier keys the system thinks is still active and so oh my god yes right and you try to type something and it tries to do the keyboard shortcut instead or you use the arrow key to go up one line and it takes you to the top of the document

and that's just a bug i don't know if it'll be fixed in ios 12 or not everybody file your radars but like that's one of those things that's like it's great that the keyboard is there it's not 100 there it's like 96 there and that four percent is really frustrating so there's a whole bunch of stuff going on um that that could be that could be better and some of it doesn't require like major overhauls um but you know there so there are still places where where there are impediments i would say one of the things that i do love even with split view and slide over and one of the reasons I do like writing on my iPad is that it does feel very single purpose in a way that the Mac doesn't that I do like being able to focus in a way that I could do on my Mac, but for some reason, I don't

like the Mac is, is meant to be super flexible and have a bunch of windows open and all of that. And there is something nice about being able to say, I'm just going to focus on writing my article when I'm when I'm writing on the iPad. And that is a positive thing about it that I like. But yeah, I wish there was some more stuff in terms of windowing and fixing some of the keyboard bugs and things like that. Yeah, I agree completely. All right, we should move into art and creativity. But before we do that, let's take a very quick break this very

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new podcast. And if you sign up there, your show could be featured by us in a future ad. That's anchor.fm slash go there now start your podcasting journey today thank you to anchor for supporting upgrade and for giving aspiring podcasters an easy way to get started all right so serenity can you tell me about some of the applications that you use for art creativity drawing. I know that you have made some incredible, I mean, you do some incredible illustrations. Everyone I know that's listening to the show right now is thinking of your iPad review that you made. That's just a wonderful thing that was made all on iOS. So I would love to know about some of the applications that you've come across

that allow you to express yourself creatively on the iPad? Absolutely. Well, why don't we talk about drawing first? Because I feel like that's the that's kind of the genesis of why I started messing around on iPad. So there are a ton of really great drawing apps for iPad and more kind of have evolved. The one that I'm currently using right now is Linea by the Icon Factory folks. And it is amazing. Linea, what I really appreciate about Linea is that it's an app that really focuses first and foremost on just you expressing simple line work on and there's not like there, it's not a huge learning curve to kind of figure out how to make it work. You just kind of take your pencil or your third-party stylus or your Logitech crayon, if that you just found one of those that just came out for students,

and you just put pen or stylus to digital paper and just start drawing. And Linea has some really good options for people who don't really know where to start too, right? Because they have the preset color palettes. So if you're not feeling so great about your color mixtures, you can kind of get an idea from designers who have thought very hard about how these four shades of blue should interact with each other. And then as you get more comfortable, Linea also offers all of these advanced tools that, again, they don't really creep into the app itself, but they really do offer a lot of extra functionality. It includes things like Linea offers storyboarding things and UI design, so it has little miniature iPhones that you can draw two-up and four-up of UI screens on. They have blueprint paper, they have black

construction paper, backgrounds, which just it just allows you to experiment with different things if you're a casual artist. But if you actually do this kind of stuff for your work, it really does give you an additional an additional surface to kind of brainstorm, which I really love. And I also like how everything's organized into kind of little miniature projects. So and they're they're very easily flippable. One of the reasons that the iPad review video that I did even existed is because when Linea first came out about six months prior, or I guess close to a year at that point, I wanted to figure out a good way to review it and really explain why it was better than like paper, which was kind of the current reigning champion of like simple note or simple drawing app. And I did the iPad screen recording and I just screen recorded kind of a pseudo like walkthrough with cartoon version of me showing off all of Linnea's tools. And that really, not only did that really give me

a sense of like how Linnea worked, but it also gave me a really good idea and understanding of how I could put together a video and in a pseudo animated video on the iPad without necessarily proper animation software. It's worth noting as a side note, there is no proper animation software on the iPad. There are some things that like sort of work like Keynote and Pages has some options. And like there's stuff like Animation Desk, which is not terrible. But I really like if there is one thing that I'm wishing for on the creativity side, it's that someone comes out with an amazing stop or not stop motion, but like animated animation app that really allows you to do keyframes and, and, you know, tweeners and all of the above. Cause that's like animation, something that I've always wanted to learn. And I feel like all of the programs are really

frustrating. Well, can I ask like about the idea of an animation app? What does that look like for you? Like what are the require that you draw inside those apps and their tools are frequently not nearly as good as, say, the tools that you might find in Procreate or even Linear or even the Notes app has a better pencil app than some of these animation programs. And then in addition to that, like a lot of these apps do have the technical functionality, but it's like what we've talked about with other writing apps, but also with other art-related apps, where sometimes an app can have all of the tools in the world and just be really difficult to use. Affinity Photo, for me, is one of those apps where I feel like Affinity Photo is incredibly powerful. It's kind of like Photoshop for your iPad and it's, it's, it's an incredible program, but the UI just doesn't make sense to me. It just doesn't like I I've, I have tried, I've spent weeks trying to

get myself comfortable with that app. And I always go back to procreate, even though procreate is in some ways less, you know, less full featured,atured in very specific areas than a video photo. And that's kind of how I feel with the animation stuff, too, where Animation Desk allows you to do a whole bunch, but I think about Hype on the Mac, which Hype isn't even really an animation program. Hype is an HTML5, you know, website designer, really, but people have used it a lot for animated things on the Mac for Safari and stuff like that. And I was making, constantly, I was making animations in Hype on my Mac, because I thought

it was just, it was such a fun thing to do. And I would draw stuff either on my iPad or I'd draw stuff in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, and then I'd import it into Hype and move all of these pieces around and animate all of these things. And that was really cool. So I don't know. Maybe I'm secretly hoping that Hype decides to take up making an iPad app you know, uh, hype decides to take up making an iPad app, uh, because I'm sure someone would buy that for a hundred dollars. I don't know. Uh, but I would, I certainly would. Um, animation aside, um, I want to, I do want to talk a little bit more about like the other art programs. I mentioned Affinity Photo, which again is great. It's just not my cup of tea. Um, Pixelmator, which I use pretty much every day for my work. Um, Pixelmator, which I use pretty much every day for my work. Pixelmator, if you

don't know it, is a photo editing program that has some really great filter stuff. But primarily, I use Pixelmator for one reason and one reason only, and it's that their repair tool is excellent. So what I'll usually do is I'll take photos either on my iPhone X or on my camera, and I'll just airdrop them to Pixelmator on my iPad so that I can fix a blemish here and there or just repair, oh, there's a lot of dust on that iPhone screen. I feel like half of the Photoshop touch-up work that I do in Pixelmator and just for the job in general is like cleaning up dust on iPad screens that doesn't show up before you take the photo. But, oh yeah, it's a great job, but someone has to do it. So that's, I do think there are a lot of other really awesome features that Pixelmator has and especially when it connected to Pixelmator Pro on the and the Mac which is really nice I love the fact that it offers complete handoff functionality so you can start working on something on Pixelmator on iPad and just send it straight to the Mac if you want to do some more work after that you can also

what I'll do sometimes is I'll start it on the Mac on the, and then I will pull it up on the Mac so that I can then save it on the Mac and then upload it directly to our CMS. Procreate is probably the heavyweight champion of the art world, at least on the iPad. It's an incredibly full-featured program that offers, you know, you can can i did most of my wedding prep inside procreate and i had half of half of the people who i commissioned to make these you know we had these little space themed tourist postcards that were done for my wedding and over half of them were designed drawn and finished in procreate uh which which is a pretty like a pretty great test of just how full featured

the app can be i was going to say about pixel matrix actually i've been using that a ton recently on my ipad and i like to make um thumbnails for youtube videos and once you kind of start looking into it like the tools are so good like oh yeah selection tools and stuff like that like again it's a little bit more cumbersome to use than on the mac because you have to like tap a bunch of things to get the tools that you want sometimes but i can't believe how powerful pixel major on ios is like it really is surprising yeah it's they they went out of their way they were one of the first apps that i really noticed like pulling out the big guns on the ipad even before you know I do you remember the very

first iPad Pro demonstration where they're like and Pixelmators come out with a new app here let's show how you can make 3D waves and like completely repair a picture in milliseconds and I just remember looking at that and like having them disappear I think a like a giraffe or something from a scene and it took you know two seconds for it to render and disappear where on my mac it would spin and spin and spin and i just remember my jaw dropping being like i need that i need that in my life right now and then i got it and it was great um so going back to procreate uh like pixelmator procreate is excellent um kind of top of its field for a long time and this is worth kind of a

sidebar, for a long time, it was very frustrating to do art on the iPad as a professional. As an amateur artist between the third-party styluses and then later the pencil, doing amateur art was great, doing starter art was great, but you would hit a wall at a certain point because of the way that Apple and iOS functioned with these canvases. For a while, Procreate, because of RAM restrictions, was limited to only a certain size canvas and only a certain number of layers. And if you've ever met a professional designer, they basically want unlimited layers. They always want unlimited layers. And if you go to them and like, oh yeah, you can only have 12 layers, they'll try and burn something. So with with Pixelmator, you know, I think the biggest challenge that I ran into up until iOS 10 was that Pixelmator wouldn't let you

import Photoshop files. You could save things as Photoshop files, but it wouldn't let you pull in existing content. So perhaps what I always thought of as the biggest use case for the iPad when it comes to design work, which is, oh, I've been working on this crazy thing on my Mac and I want to do some tweaks, but I'm stuck in a car or like I have to run out and I'm not going to be next to my big gigantic system. Oh, I'll just throw it on my iPad and I'll open it there and I'll do some work on the train. Until last year, that really wasn't an option. It just, there was no import functionality. And then iOS 10 was released and really changed the game in terms of what Pixelmator was able to offer.

And you can now import Photoshop files and it just, it makes the the it makes it a lot more powerful of a tool for for professional illustrators and it also you can import all of these brushes right you can create these brushes and there's now like basically an not even an official store there's just there are tons of Etsy marketplaces that just sell all of these beautiful custom procreate brushes I must have bought like 50 bucks worth of lettering brushes for my wedding. Like it's an amazing app. And these all work on iOS too, these brushes? Yes.

That's really cool. I didn't know that. That's really, really cool. Oh yeah. The Procreate brush, like that's the one thing that made Procreate stand out from all the other apps very early on is they are essentially like, hey, you know all of your millions of Photoshop brushes? Well, we don't support the Photoshop brushes, but you can hand create any brush you like on

Procreate. It's just, you know, if you take enough time, you can make it happen. I know Jessie Char, when she was kind of first playing around with the iPad, she spent, I think, a couple days in Procreate and she made makeup tutorial brushes. So she made brushes that imitated precisely the kind of lipstick that she used and the kind of eyeshadow that would result from her using basic brushes. And then she used it to overlay on photos so that she could see, oh, this is how this makeup design might work. And there, you know, there's lots of cool stuff like that. The App Store recently had a really cool feature from I think the woman who does the costumes for The Handmaid's Tale. And she was talking about an app that she used for I can't remember the name of it right now. But she was using an app essentially to do costume design, which is, again, something that

I never really even thought of. But now that I'm now that I read about it, I was just like, yeah, of course, this is the perfect thing for costume design, especially with AR and the camera and everything else is just there are a lot of options there. There are also vector related art, there's things like Bez, things like Vectornator, things like I think Affinity has Affinity Designer, which is a vector program. There's just a lot of really cool stuff. But all of that to say that I think when I talk about art on the iPad and why I think it's really special, Linea is the, this is the thing that allows everybody to touch it. But then there's another app that I feel like does not get enough credit in that it just completely it it does what I've been talking about for years, which is the thought of like the right device for the right space. And you use your Mac when you need your Mac and you use your iPad when you need your iPad.

But sometimes wouldn't it be great if you used both? And that app is Astro pad and and they have both AstroPad Standard and AstroPad Studio. And AstroPad essentially mirrors or extends your display, if you have their little Luna display toggle, of your Mac and provides basically latency-free drawing

and interaction with any Mac app that you open. Full pressure sensitivity on the pencil. So you can hook up, and I would do this frequently, you can hook up AstroPad Studio to Photoshop or to your Mac processor of choice, and you don't even have to connect to the iPad to a computer. You can do this wirelessly, and you can sit and draw on the iPad

and be working in a Photoshop document or be working in your animation software of choice. And it really, it takes the RAM limitations and everything else out of the iPad Pro equation and just says, hey, you really like how the pencil interacts with your iPad. You really like latency-free drawing and the shading and all of that. We have done the background work to make all of that work so that you can just connect it to your Mac and go hog wild. It's an amazing program. I get kind of blown away every time the guys behind AstroPad show me the next iteration just because I think the stuff that they're doing is so smart. And like, I don't know.

I look at that and I'm like, when I'm debating between like, oh, I want a Wacom Cintiq or I want an iPad Pro that I can turn into a Wacom Cintiq at any time with this piece of software. I think I'm always going to go with the latter because it's just the iPad is so much more flexible. Federico, I know that you had some thoughts around um the looking at podcasting on ios but not necessarily from the recording part but everything else that goes into it you know from a creative perspective i cannot do any of the stuff that serenity does uh so i feel like, you know, from an artistic point of view, what she does is amazing.

Like the iPad review that she did was just incredible. Still, I mean, you and I, we put together podcasts on a weekly basis. So that's also a creative task that we need to get done on the iPad. And I think especially for, you know, thinking of ideas for topics to talk about, or, you know, even just stupid jokes that we may share on various shows that we have. I think it's important to be able to save these ideas and to give them structure. And honestly, I've tried so many note-taking apps on iOS.

Over the years, we started with the Markdown note-taking apps from a few years ago, and then these days we have stuff like Bear, for example. But honestly, I just love Apple Notes. It works so, so well for me in terms of giving me the tools to create an outline in rich text, which is something that I would have never imagined doing until a few years ago. But it works so well, and it works with the keyboard on the iPad,

so you got keyboard shortcuts if you want to have sections in a note. And the fact that you can save multiple types of media within the same note, it allows me to have these outlines for the shows that i that i'm working on uh that combine text and lists and images and screenshots that i take on the ipad and that i can drag and drop into a note links that i can save with the notes extension um it you know putting together the show notes for the podcasts that i'm on on a weekly basis i'm doing that with notes and it works extremely well because it like i said it's a combination of multiple forms of media and text content in the same note and also what i like

is that notes has a sharing feature, but I share Notes with myself. You can do so by hitting the collaborative icon in Notes, and it'll bring up a share sheet. You don't actually need to share a Note with anybody. You can just copy link, and you can just hit the copy link button twice without even entering your own email address, and you will get an icloud.com link for the note and what i do is i copy this link and i use it as a launcher so in my task manager i have a task that says prepare connected show notes and there's a link to the note and i can open the note with it just by tapping on the link in my task manager. And like I said, the ability to have multiple types of data items in a note,

I think it's amazing. And it's something that it wouldn't be possible with Markdown because it's just plain text. And I wish that actually Apple went a little bit further than that and allowed us to share, to save, for example, tweets from either the Twitter app or Twitter clients. Right now, if you save a tweet into a note, because, you know, we use tweets as a sort

of a listener feedback and all that. But if you save a tweet, you'll just get this twitter.com bubble in a note. Whereas I would love to add the messages style tweet expansion within notes so yeah it's just a little thought about being able to use notes as a as a creative tool when putting together a show and having an outline and having you know content to talk about and different sections I think it works really well from that point of view yeah I agree i do all these same things right like with all the notes stuff and i collect all of my links every week in apple notes and flesh them out before dropping them into google docs where the collaboration begins i think as well like one thing that we have kind of haven't really mentioned is it was kind of

funny the ipad is a screen like that's what it is and especially when it comes to the creative stuff the quality of the ipad screen especially in the ipad pro is such an important part right like the the color and the 120 hertz stuff like i find that to just make the screen that i'm tapping and interacting with every day just more and more of a joy to use right like i i love it more because of just that it's like it's it's wonderful oh for sure i think that's it's uh it's definitely i i'd hate to say it's underrated because i don't think it's underrated but when you think about the ipad it's easily forgotten yeah especially the the 10.5 inch and promotion likeotion, like ProMotion from, for those who have already forgotten, and it's quite a few, is Apple's marketing term for the fact that they do dynamic 120 hertz refresh, which to non-techies out there, what that essentially means is that Apple is dynamically and smartly speeding up or slowing down the screen refresh rate, depending on what you're looking at. So the best way I can describe this is like, say you go into a movie theater, right? And you're

watching a movie on a, you know, and it's supposed to be displayed at a certain frame rate. Occasionally, if you're watching like motion smoothing on a TV, you can see like, oh, why does that movie look like it's suddenly in a sports program or like a reality TV show, right? You've all seen that. What promotion allows Apple to do is say, okay, we have a screen that can refresh up to 120 hertz, but we realize that like not everything in our content is going to require up to 120 hertz refresh. So we are going to dynamically say, okay, we want the pencil movement to up to 120 hertz refresh. So we are going to dynamically say, okay, we want the pencil movement to refresh to 120 hertz. So it just makes it feel like when you're drawing, it's crazy fast. But if you're playing a movie in picture in picture, or even in split

screen, we're going to simultaneously take those pixels and slow those pixels down, those the refresh on those pixels, so that you still get what looks like a normal movie while you're drawing and it's uh it's it's a really cool thing like it's a really cool technical demo most people they just see it and they're like oh yeah why wouldn't you be able to do that and the answer is because if you do it on anything else it looks wrong it looks so wrong and apple like Apple being able to accomplish this is just, it's such a cool thing. So Jason, do you feel like we've done a good job today with expressing why we love to use the iPad for work? This is a blockbuster episode that I think gets it across.

I feel like at points we talked a lot about what we do. At points we talked about why I think Federico did a good job there and serenity's talked about it the only other thing i would throw in is that the reason that i've kind of abandoned using a mac laptop is because as a as a device the ipad has become essential to me i can't imagine traveling without my ipad because i'm going to use my ipad as i do around the house most of the time to look at email, look at Twitter, look at Slack, browse the web, watch video, do all of these things that I really enjoy doing on the iPad. And I would want to do them somewhere else. And so I'm always

going to bring my iPad with me, which is why when it gets to the point where I'm traveling or I'm roaming around somewhere and I think about bringing my laptop with me I think well I'm going to bring my iPad there's not a question do I also want to bring a laptop and that was the thing that made me stop bringing my laptop and just wanting to use the iPad because the iPad can can do both of those things but I can't tear the screen off my laptop if I hope to use it ever again. And so I'm always going to bring the iPad. So I decided if I'm only going to bring one, it's going to be the iPad. So that's my last reason. But I think there are plenty of reasons.

And there are quirks. And it's not for everybody. But I hope this episode has given people a lot of detail about why we do what we do and what we're doing when we're working and using our iPads. And, of course, we couldn't have done this episode today without our wonderful guests. I want to thank Sreneti Colwell. She is at SETTEN, S-E-T-T-E-R-N on Twitter. And Federico Vittici, he is at Vittici, V-I-T-T-I-C-C-I. Federico is at MacStories.net and AppStories.net.

And he is the host of a lot of shows on RelayFM. Canvas, Connected, Remaster um you can find his lovely dulcet beautiful italian tones there too uh jason is at jsnl jsn e double l jason is the host of even more relay fm shows i can't even no just can't even uh lots of them all the great shows and also over the incomparable.com and he is over at sixcolors.com as well. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much for listening to another Summer of Fun bonus episode for you

and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye everybody. Goodbye! Goodbye! you