Federico Viticci's Review of the iPad Air 2

Federico's review of the iPad Air 2 is far more than a breakdown of its specs and features. It's a credo for why the iPad has become his primary computing device.

“The iPad’s screen and body are glued together physically and conceptually. [...] as a computer [it] truly disappears in your hands, feeling like a display that you grab and touch and swipe and throw away when you’re done.

[...]

Three years ago, when I was stuck in a hospital bed and I wanted to continue my work, I started using the iPad out of curiosity, challenging myself to get more done on iOS in spite of its limitations and differences from OS X. Today, some of those limitations still remain, but the iPad and new versions of iOS have solved most of my problems in new and unexpected ways.

The iPad is the best thing that happened to my professional life.”

Like Federico, the iPad—mine is the 4th-gen model—is my primary device. In fact, I don't even own a traditional computer anymore (unless you count my wife's Windows 7 laptop, which I avoid using at all costs).

I'm in a better position than most to find any holes in Federico's argument, but I can't disagree with a single word of his review, or more importantly his philosophy concerning the iPad. It truly is an incredibly versatile device. Most shortcomings with it I've ever come across have been due to lack of developer interest, but even that problem is getting less and less prevalent by the year.

Just to give an example, here are some of the apps that help me get my writing work done:

• I write in Editorial, with a bevy of workflows and TextExpander snippets that make my life at least 10x easier.
• I publish in Squarespace Blog.
• I capture ideas in Drafts and often move my more long-term personal notes over to Simplenote.
• As I come across interesting links in Twitter and RSS, I save them in Instapaper and archive the best stuff in Pinboard (which I often access using Pinner).
• My teammates and I at Tools & Toys and The Sweet Setup use Slack and Basecamp to communicate and stay on top of upcoming projects.
• I use a mixture of apps for managing blog photos: VSCO Cam for editing, Pixelmator for creating and/or combining images, Reduce for resizing images to appropriate widths and file sizes (with EXIF Wizard Pro to double-check EXIF data), and Droplr for hosting Spark Journal images.

And this list is just the tip of the iceberg. The iPad has limitations, sure, but those are more and more becoming edge cases. Nearly all my needs are covered by the iPad, and I have almost no desire for anything more.

* * *

Further reading: Josh Ginter's review + gorgeous photos of the iPad Air 2 on Tools & Toys.

iOS 8's Time-Lapse Feature

Dan Provost of Studio Neat examined how the time-lapse feature in iOS 8 works and shares his findings.

“Time-lapse videos look best when they are buttery smooth, and dynamically selecting intervals in this fashion would create a jittery and jerky video. So what does Apple mean by "dynamically selected intervals"?

Turns out, what Apple is doing in quite simple, and indeed, pretty clever.”

Apple's method is indeed clever, even elegant.

(By the way, can I just geek out for a moment about how gorgeous the Studio Neat website is nowadays? My goodness.)

Big Morning in My Little Corner of the Web

I woke up to all sorts of good news today:

• Dropbox increased my Pro storage from 100 GB to 1 TB.
• Quotebook, one of my favorite iOS apps, has updated to version 3. I was on the beta and loved watching the developers' thoughtfulness and attention to detail as the app came together. [iTunes link]
• My friend Federico Viticci and his girlfriend Sylvia Gatta have released Perspective Icons 2, a lovely set of 100 icons for OmniFocus 2. Introductory price of $10.
• The guys at Studio Neat have redesigned their website (it's gorgeous) and made their Neat Ice Kit available for everyone to purchase now that the Kickstarter backers have been taken care of.
• Smile have announced that they've created a custom iOS 8 keyboard for TextExpander Touch that will allow you to expand snippets within any app. Now I won't have to rely on iOS' own built-in keyboard shortcuts anymore, as helpful as they've been to me.

There's probably even more I'm forgetting but man, this is one of those days when it's awesome to be a nerd.