An orange in an apple orchard
How to Customize the Look of Your Cursor in iPadOS 13.4.
This was something I had hoped would be possible after messing with the new mouse support. The default cursor is rather too damned tiny for my tastes, which I assume is an artifact of designers with 20/10 eyesight or a Mac thing. But it’s waaay smaller than I’d expect, coming from Linux and NT machines.
A little bit of tweaking later, and it’s quite nice 🙂.
Cursors on the iPad – MacStories
This transform ability has been a large part of why tablets became my primary computing platform. Android since Honeycomb, and iOS since iPadOS increasingly so, handle the whole mouse / monitor / keyboard thing pretty well.
Whether I’ve wanted a device docked that can be my work terminal, or to lean back on the couch, tablets have served me well. Aptly these are both environments where I’ll probably yell at you if you take away my keyboard, or force me to use a conventional laptop, lol.
Much of my advanced computer use revolves around an X-Terminal, so it’s been pretty easy to delegate other tasks like email and notes taking. Where as at home, I’m more likely to be focused on reading and messaging. Tasks that tend to benefit from either a keyboard centric use case with a big assed screen, or from a portable touch screen device.
My Decade with the iPad: Upping the Ante
https://flip.it/-_vnWx
For me it was the Asus Eee PAD Transformer, the original model TF101. My Linux powered netbook had fairly limited battery life compared to the bottomless battery life of a docked TF101, and the desktop struggled under loads that Android breezed through on even less powerful hardware. On the flip side even the lowly netbook could compile code far faster, but couldn’t handle the rising UI load of modern web pages and desktop applications.
Or as I like to remember those days, if all I did was type notes into a vtty, my netbook would often be dead during one flight, and was mostly dead weight on longer trips. That experience traveling lead me to consider a rooted Android just for the battery life. The TF101 was kind of special in that it had a good battery life, and that it had a slightly smaller one in its clamshell keyboard.
The tablet with the keyboard dock had enough juice to take three planes, and fall asleep watching Netflix before needing to charge. After that travel experience, I went on to using Android pretty extensively as laptop and desktop replacements until last year.
Beefy endurance compared to Intel brought me into the platform for getting stuff done. Having an excellent lean back on the couch experience kept me using it.
I finally broke down, and gave in, and giving this a shot. There’s the reality, that most of the time I find a tablet an ideal form factor. But it is also a reality that I am not always near a desk or table like surface when it would be effective to have an external keyboard.
Thus far this is looking good. Study enough that I’m not worried about tap-tapity-tap-taping it over, or gravity getting the sudden best of me. Big enough that I can get a decent typing experience, and light enough not to have to remove the tablet constantly. Although to be fair, ease of removing the tablet is one of my goals—most of the time I actually want my tablet to be a tablet, and the lighter the better.
Hitting https://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/english I was able to get a decent result after 10~15 minutes of putting around. 85 words per minute with 91.81% accuracy isn’t a bad first attempt. Close enough to my full typing speed, that it’s more a matter of accuracy and getting used to the keyboard, than it is the actual size.
Which is really nice: because that was my primary fear. See, keyboards for smaller devices have generally been a failure for me. A widescreen 10.1” works pretty well, and 11.6” is probably my idea of the perfect sized keyboard in terms of widescreen. For standard laptops of yore, I usually would vote for the ~12” range. A 7” or 8” tablet keyboard is so small that I am better off using two-thumbed touch screen typing, for both accuracy and speed. A 9.7” iPad size keyboard is too small, but at least approaches a size where I don’t feel like snapping the keyboard in half. Given that sordid history, I’m happy to find that the iPad Pro 11” in this dock, is pretty effective; much like how my old 10.1” systems were big enough to use as a full time keyboard but more error prone than a standard PC keyboard.
Yay, it doesn’t suck!
This past week, I’ve been trying an experiment with my work journals: handwriting. Shy of writing a novel, this is probably the greatest mark of Nebo being a useful tool.
For a long time now, I’ve used Evernote as the central note taking hub. Regardless of where created, if it’s non-transient, it’ll end up in Evernote. For the years of working from Android: it’s usually been just an alt+tab away when using my keyboard while docked, and when undocked I’ve been a stylus with glide/swype style input.
A side effect of the iPad change over is multitasking sucks, and the floaty keyboard has a bugnormous history on iPad. When I shift between apps in Android, Evernote yields a pretty lossless experience. When I do the same thing in iOS, it’s more like “Snap back to save point”, so alt+tab’ing back to Evernote on my iPad can be followed by changing side-tabs, finding the note again, and repositioning my cursor. Yeah, that sucks, but that’s the iOS app. It took quite a while for most of the floating keyboard bugs to get knocked out of the OS as well, for us freaks that do swypy style writing with a pencil.
Nebo’s been a side tool for a while now. Often my choice in meetings^ and simple charts/diagrams, which would then be exported as PDFs for Evernote or HTML for my internal web server, depending on context. But I’ve never really used it for my journal, despite being unexpectedly good at handling the funky nouns local to my environment.
By in large my work journals have consisted of typed text, entered into my notes system.
Handwriting has mostly been limited to tasks that called for mobility, such as scribbling results as I move between pieces of equipment, and not converted to typed text–which is Nebo’s speciality. Depending on what I’m working on, my journal entries can vary from a note per day to a note every few months.
What I’ve been doing this week has been creating my entry in Nebo. Usually written a sentence or a paragraph at a time, and then converted to typed text. No, I can’t spell any better with a pencil than a set of fingers; but Nebo works excellent at converting handwriting to typed text. Among other things.
So typically, I’ll have my iPad across from my keyboard, and I’ll shift to it periodically to write stuff in my journal entry. When I’ve finished: I export the page as text, and send it to Evernote. Send it to my notebook for journals, tag it as a work related journal entry, and tag it for the projects and search-worthy terms relevant to what I’ve been writing and working on. If I start the page with the title, Evernote for iOS even picks that up as the note title.
This has been working well enough for me that I think that I’ll stick to it. Things that Nebo doesn’t support, like attaching files, I can always do after the export. Things that are lossy, like subtitle formatting, I can usually enter manually or omit. Nebo also lets me shift to directly typing text: both using the on screen, and my Bluetooth keyboard.
Net result is I get the convenience of pen input, the searchability of typed text, and don’t have to curse profanities at the autocorrect for swiping words. I’m liking it a lot more than I thought.
——
^ I’ve given up on Evernote’s handwriting stuff. Because it mostly sucks on all platforms, and when combined with app switching on iOS, usually erased my frakking writing!
Apple is a lot of things, some good, some bad; consistent is not one of those things.
I actually used to have a fairly high opinion of Apple’s design skill, until the first time I tried to help an iPhone user. That was somewhere around the 3GS or iPhone 4. At which point I wondered how the fuck anyone could use the things.
Over in the land of PCs and Macs, I kind of recognize that many oddities exist. A great many are also artifacts leftover from a time where Apple or Microsoft did a thing, and were probably the first to really do it, rather than following on the trail of standards and successful giants. But that feeling never has repaired my opinion of the fruit company’s software. Today is also a much more connected world than the ‘90s and ‘80s were.
Apple actually does make some great stuff, and folks that helped create those products and experiences should be proud of their work. But like anything else with ten trillion moving parts, consistency kind of goes out the window quite rapidly.
I will admit though:
How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?
Is the kind of thing, that lead me to start making jokes about having to swipe friend in Elvish.
The iPad has developed a pretty nice on boarding experience, give or take four hundred privacy notices, and the user guide in the Safari default bookmarks is well worth giving anyone that has never used an iPad before. But there is definitely IMHO, a trend towards learning to swipe and gesture in elvish.
One of the things that I think people mocking tablets, often forget is how revolutionary desktops were once upon a time.
In its context: the IBM PC and many of its close relatives were not powerful computers by any means, yet they helped change the world. The 5150 was no where near as capable as expensive time sharing systems, but it was cheap, and it was good enough.
For under ten grand you could get a pretty nice setup, and for a few grand you could get something worth using. Most early PCs ran an operating system that was a simplistic piece of crap, compared to what you would expect to find on computers costing tens of thousands, but it was enough for getting things done. Combined with the very anti-IBM approach of openness and third party support it caught on, and exploded—effectively wiping out competition from previous attempts to build an affordable ‘Good enough’, and eventually becoming more ubiquitous than the more capable machines that came before.
Remind you of the rise of Android and iOS any? In many ways the extent, and methods that exploded Android into the dominate phone OS, and a major player in tablets, reminds me a lot of how we went from computers that were too expensive to be personal, and reached a point where literally everyone can have their own computers.
You know, that kind of makes me feel more positive at Microsoft’s efforts with Metro and UWP, lol.
The iPad at 10: A New Product Category Defined by Apps
As someone that’s come to rely on tablets heavily, despite avoiding the fruit company for much of the past decade, I kind of like the notion of tablets as a middle category—because that’s where most people’s computing lands.
A long time ago, I preferred laptops to desktops for the portability. Today, I don’t really believe in desktops so much for two main reasons: laptops aren’t as underpowered as they used to be, and rack mounted servers pwn most towers if you’re really going for raw compute power.
Tablets kind of answer the ability to do most of what regular people do with their computer. But aren’t so tied to the concept of a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and tower; laptops both suffer and benefit from rubbing the same software. And tablets would mostly suck for running the same software as desktops, far more than it would from adding a mouse and monitor to today’s tablets.
For better or worse: software often defines are interactions with devices. Think otherwise? Try using Windows 95 without a mouse or keyboard 🤣
Buggy behavior observed:
So far I’ve been using an ESR for iPad Pro 11 Case with a surprising level of success. When I ordered it back in October, I found several similar ones, which likely means same thing from the same place with the branding of whoever is paying for the batch, lol.
Generally, I’ve tended to keep my devices naked. Tablets are already too damned hefty for my tastes, and most generic cases add considerable weight. First party ones tend to be ridiculously expensive, and likely due to litigation happy Apple, somewhat hamstrung into sucking.
Pretty much I wanted to solve two problems: