Apps & Services — Numeric Citizen Blog

Using My M4 iPad Pro (iPadOS 26.1b1) With An External Display - Observation #2

The iPad running Files.app with two windows, side-by-wide for easier file management.

Working with Files.app is still very frustrating and unpredictable. For some reason, I cannot drag & drop a file from my iPad downloads folder to a specific folder (on my Synology). The only way to get around this is to go up in the folder hierarchy, drop it there then later move it inside the intended target folder. Also experienced one crash with numerous “Content Unavailable” conditions like shown on this screenshot. So far, no file management done. WTF? Let’s try harder.

Using My M4 iPad Pro (iPadOS 26.1b1) With An External Display - Observation #1

My current iPad desktop on the external display.

I just started a one-hour work session with my M4 iPad Pro connected to an external display (LG 5K Ultra Fine) running iPad OS 26.1 beta 1. I should probably update this article I wrote more than a year ago: “Using the iPad With an External Display — Space Oddities”. Let’s see how it goes.

First issue: I started writing this blog post in Micro.blog client. Sadly, Micro.blog’s iPad app is buggy with an external display: I cannot set the blog post category… the little gear icon is missing and iPadOS 26 menus aren’t supported, yet. My fallback plan: Ulysses. Works great. Next step: doing some files management with Files.app using an SMB share on my Synology NAS. Let’s see how it goes. Oh, and ShareShot works… but not without strange visual issues.

Are there any Craft users here? I’m curious to see if sharing short videos¹ about Craft would be of some interest.

Micro.blog is soon launching better video hosting; I might take advantage of that instead of YouTube. ↩︎

Please, would you be kind enough to explain this graph to me (the top portion)?

I no longer use the Mac App Store to update my apps on my Mac; I prefer using the brew “mas outdated” and “mas upgrade” commands instead.

Comet, Dia: these AI-focused browsers aren’t clicking with me. I tried many times. I prefer to use a native client like ChatGPT, which will surf for me when needed.

I created this diagram in MindNote Next today for a video about Craft and tags usage. There is a “Focus Mode” where the UI disappears, allowing us to focus on the content, as shown in this screenshot. There is one big problem with this: the “Focus Mode” status button at the top. It is highly distracting to me; I can’t focus. 😳

Today, I decided to add Screen Studio to my digital toolbox. Some form of video editing is tedious and much less intuitive in ScreenFlow, and I think Screen Studio really shines here. Using this type of quick animation helps focus on what matters most.

It’s been two weeks (if not three) since Apple released iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 are out… and still no iWork update. 👀 It must be hard to implement Liquid Glass… even for Apple.

I think that, from what I observed and experienced since Apple OS 26 releases, some apps inherently lend themselves better at Apple’s Liquid Glass adoption because of dev abilities but also because of the very nature of the app. Craft and Reeder are good examples. There are a few others.