In a recent article from Josh Ginter for The Newsprint, If found the idea of having a separate computer for work and one for creative activities interesting and I’m close to feeling the same about my personal and work life. I do most of my work on an M1 Mac mini, while my creative work is done on an M1 MacBook Air. My iPad is used as a second screen on my Mac mini or for some photo processing stuff with Adobe Lightroom. The distinction between two worlds gets blurry when you consider how the cloud brings those two worlds closer to each other. If you are like me and use a single Apple ID for all your Apple services, as soon as you set up iCloud on both computers, you’ll get access to the same “virtual space and digital content” on both machines. This is where the idea of two separate computers becomes blurry and probably more of a theory.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

I recently wrote an article about where the iPad should go from here. On the subject of iPadOS, looking at this article on Behance from Parker Ortolani, here are the few interesting ideas that caught my attention:

• The updated Dock with the ability to move an application window to an external display.
• Still on the Dock, the frequently used applications replaced with standard folders (like downloaded items).
• Stacks in the Dock, just like on macOS.
• Home Screen icon placements can include things like Shortcuts, or files.
• Studio Mode for external display full support. My number one request.
• Addition of Preview from macOS would be super useful for more pro-like workflows. Same with the addition of Dictionary. It would be super useful for content creators like me.

WWDC 2022 is around the corner, starting another round of updates for iPadOs over the coming year.

I recently came back from a one-week vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The first thing I did before leaving the airport to go home was to call an Uber taxi. My last experience with Uber went well, but it was quite a while. Boy, this time it was a surprising and unexpected experience. After ordering the car, I was met with a plethora of notifications and ads within the application and via Uber Eat to order food on the go or before arriving at home. Those ads took the form of notifications, but also big popups taking the whole screen within the application. It was so intrusive, it wasn’t always clear how to dismiss the ad to return to the actual trip details.

I understand the idea of integrating two different services from the same company, but doing so at the expense of a great user experience with the basic feature of the application is not the way to go with me. Even Apple sometimes seems to be going in that direction. Not good.

After spending some time cleanup my office this today, I found these in my drawers and other places. I no longer use these. Do you? I know some people here on Micro.blog do. I don’t which I find fascinating because I did a lot in my younger times. Before the computers.

Now that I’m finally having my dedicated room in the house for working, I’m wondering about returning to podcasting (I used to have a podcast, in French) or even testing the YouTuber world (even though I wrote in the past that I’ll never be a YouTuber). Why is that?

First, a dedicated room is mandatory to be able to record without being disrupted too much. Second, sound quality would probably be much better than recording in an open space. Third, I could create a better background because my room is decorated to my personal tastes.

But is this enough to convince myself to seriously consider getting back to audio or video content creation? I have all the tools: a great MacBook Air, a Mac mini, an Apple Studio Display, a good microphone, a NAS for archiving purposes, etc. Yet, I’m not really good at audio or video production, and it’s very time-consuming for me. I would certainly learn a lot while working hard at this. Moreover, should I do this in my native language which is French or do it in English, which I’m not perfectly fluent with? Maybe I could try to do it together with other podcasters (I know a few of them). Too many questions, not many answers.

Photo credit: Will Francis on Unsplash.

If you are wondering what’s up with me, I’m on vacation for a week. I’m not only taking a break from work, my office, but also from blogging. Expect a return to normal programming next week.

Written on my iPad, somewhere on a sandy beach in Mexico 😃😛

Thanks to MacRumors, as reported today, I didn’t know today was the fifth anniversary of a special meeting between Apple’s top brass and select journalists to talk about Apple’s plans with the pro users and their commitment to the Mac.

At the time, we didn’t know how serious Apple’s upcoming pivot would be. In retrospective, Apple delivered and then some. It is simply a tour-de-force to flip the Mac product line upside down and bring power efficient, mighty and beautiful Mac designs. The Mac transition to Apple Silicon is probably the most important change to come to the Mac line since its inception in 1984.

I can’t wait to see what the next ten years will be made of.

This weekend I did some cleanup in my old papers and documents. I found an old bank account statement where I can see a withdraw transaction to help me pay for my Macintosh 128K in 1985: 3460.75 CAN$. 🤑 Ouch. I did some research to better document the time when I had a Macintosh SE while studying at the university and remembered about using Think Pascal, Prototyper and ResEdit to build a floppy disks indexer. That was before the Internet. It was so much fun. It’s gives you an idea how old I am. 😜

It’s March 2022. Spring is finally here. Moreover, among us, Apple Silicon, first announced in June 2020 and massively available since November 2020. Furthermore, also available is Center Stage, a new feature introduced with the 2021 iPad Pro and now available on the MacBook Pro and more recently the Apple Studio display.

Here’s the thing. Microsoft Teams, currently at version 1.5 still isn’t supporting Center Stage and worst, Apple Silicon. Running Teams on any recent Mac is an execrable experience: slow, bad image quality (compared to Zoom for example) and consume far too much memory. How is it possible for a company the size of Microsoft who’s so slow to move and fix Teams? I don’t buy the argument about Teams being built with the Electron framework. The latter already supports the M1 chip. Microsoft is supposedly working on Teams version 2.0 which will be presumably built on WebView2. They’ve been working on this since June of last year.

It’s highly frustrating. Sorry for the bad mood, but Teams is one of the most used application for work giving me the right to vent my frustration.

Dear iOS developers, dear @Substack, when building screenshots for the App Store, show us your software, not the device on which it is running. Thank you. With love. The Direction.