Thoughts After My iPad Week

As I wrote last week, I spent the last week without my MacBook Pro as Apple replaced my battery. This was a blessing in disguise, as it gave me an opportunity to experience my month-old iPad Pro as my go-to device.

With a little help from my friends

As I mentioned in my previous post, uploading to WordPress was quite the challenge. I was using this Shortcut from MacStories’ lovely Shortcut directory, but I was getting an authentication error from WordPress every time I ran the action. After consulting the fine folks over at the forum for the great Relay FM show Automators, I learned that an app-specific password was required when multi-factor authentication is enabled on the WordPress account. Once this problem was solved, posting a blog to WordPress was actually easier on the iPad than the Mac, so much so that I’m currently searching for a macOS solution to bridge that gap.

Fun with Shortcuts

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a little bit of time messing around with Shortcuts and its predecessor, Workflow, but I could only get so far on an iPhone-sized screen. Having the 11″ iPad Pro gave me more screen real estate to take full advantage of Shortcuts. On the iPad, there is a sidebar that allow for easy dragging and dropping of actions into the Shortcut, so you can scroll through various actions while still looking at the Shortcut.

I spent some time tinkering with a few of my own Shortcuts, one of which takes advantage of Todoist’s API by collecting all of the tasks completed within a set period of time. Beyond building my own Shortcuts, I tinkered with a few of the MacStories team’s creations, modifying them for my specific needs and preferences.

For example, I prefer to archive my blog posts in Dropbox with the following file naming convention:

yyyyMMdd_PascalCaseTitle

The MacStories Shortcut defaulted to using just the title as the file name, which went against the grain of how I already have my Markdown files from BBEdit on the Mac organized. By using the Current Date variable in Shortcuts with a customer format, the title of the exported file exported file is automatically prepended with the properly stylized date.

To solve my problem with the title casing in the file name, I turned to the Text Case app, which Federico Viticci used in the original MacStories Shortcut to stylize the H1 markdown heading in title case to be posted to WordPress. After the post is published to WordPress, an action from Text Case converts the H1 heading it previously converted to title case into Pascal case before being saved to a predetermined Dropbox directory ¹.

I think that this sort of customizability is the true beauty of Shortcuts, though it may be applicable to any sort of scripting or programming. Federico made a Shortcut that works for him and the MacStories team, but with a little elbow grease, I am able to make it into something that better suites my needs. I’m excited to continue playing around with Shortcuts and find out about how much it can truly accomplish. With changes to Shortcuts coming to iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, there is a definite upward trajectory for Shortcuts users.

Drafts is an essential app

I’ve been a casual user of Drafts since developer Agile Tortoise released Drafts 5 in early 2018, but as a Mac version went into beta and was eventually released, and I got my iPad, I became more of a power user, though I am nowhere near the likes of Rosemary Orchard or Tim Nahumyck. One of my favorite features is the ability to make custom Workspaces, a powerful tool that allows you to control how Drafts are grouped. Workspaces can be created by choosing which tabs a group should filter. For example, my current Workspaces are Inbox, Blogging, Journaling, Networking, Social, Task Management, and Work, but as I wrote previously about Shortcuts, the beauty lies in how malleable this feature is and how it can be used for your specific needs.

A lot of Drafts’ power comes from the action directory, a hub where users can upload actions, mostly related to JavaScript and Shortcuts scripting, to share with the community. I’ve found quite a few actions that I can use in my workflow, particularly those related to social media. Through Drafts actions, I can post to various forms of social media without actually visiting the sites. My favorite of these is a tweet storm action that creates a thread on Twitter without the fuss of doing it manually.

When I first got my iPad, I used 1Writer for blogging before switching to iA Writer a few weeks later. Once I started using the iPad as the main tool in my writing workflow, Drafts became indispensable, and now that I have my Mac back, I think this cross-platform solution will remain my weapon of choice ².

How iPadOS 13 will change everything

One of the weird things about my current iPad setup is that I feel as if everything is subject to change. With iPadOS 13 coming in the fall, I am going to need to relearn a lot habits I’ve created in the past month or so to optimize my workflow with the platform’s latest and greatest capabilities.

For example, my home screen layout will likely change drastically once I install iPadOS 13. One of my biggest pet peeves with the iPad at the moment is the way the app layout changes between landscape and portrait modes, but the new operating system will thankfully fix this nitpick. I’m also excited to play with the option to add widgets to the left side of the home screen in landscape view. This will be particularly helpful for apps with widgets like Shortcuts, Todoist, and Drafts.

On a less superficial scale, iPadOS 13 builds upon its current paradigm with improvements to multitasking and slideover. For my own needs, the change to slide over allowing easier switching between apps will be a welcome addition to the way I use my iPad for both productivity and entertainment.

More than any of these other improvements to the iPad comes simply from the name of its new operating system, iPadOS. In the past, we’ve seen Apple focus on the iPhone in some years and the iPad in others. The iPad might receive paradigm-shifting updates one year, but essentially nothing the next. Now that we have iPadOS in the pipeline, I think those days are coming to an end. The name iPadOS is a promise to iPad users that the platform will receive continued updates that will drive the platform forward, both for users who see the device as just a tablet and those, like myself, who seek more out of their iPad.

I’m not going to stand here and pretend that I am going to abandon my Mac for the iPad wholesale. I mean, there was a reason why I spent the time, money, and effort to get my MacBook repaired. I am, however, keen to seen how the iPad will evolve and improve my workflows, not only on the iPad but across all of Apple’s platforms. With version of iPad apps coming to the Mac this fall with macOS Catalina, developers are incentivized now more than ever to invest in the iPad. I don’t think that the iPad is the computing solution for everyone, but I think it can be an incredible tool for many users, myself included.