The thing that bugs me about statements like “iPads are toys”, or “iPads are for consumption, not creation”, or “iPads aren’t real computers” is that they implicitly do what’s proven to be the stupidest thing you can possibly be guilty of in the tech industry: betting against innovation.
We will figure out how to create a touch-based interface for that complex app you use. We have audio and video editors, vector drawing apps, CAD tools, photo editors, and all kinds of other stuff right now. We have Office and iWork, and Affinity Photo, and Autodesk Graphic, and Procreate, and countless more. Is your hold-out app really that special? Is that even possible?
Apple's Pencil stands out from the rest of the stylus crowd for a number of reasons: It works in tandem with Apple's display to create low-latency brush strokes, it's lengthier than your average digital pen, and it charges via Lightning connector. But when it comes to drawing or writing with one, there are only a few basic techniques you need to know before you can start mastering your new tool.
You have a new iPad, and you have anew Apple Pencil. Time to learn how to draw, right? Not necessarily. Just like a regular pen or pencil, there are ton of other things you can do with an Apple Pencil. You can write, of course, but you can also play games, compose musical scores, do coloring in books, edit photos, and even play the Apple Pencil like a musical instrument.
Let’s take a look at the best non-drawing apps for Apple Pencil.
Former Google project manager Tristan Harris advocates turning the colour filters of your phone to greyscale, which makes those red notification badges and technicolour Snapchat filters far less alluring. A 2017 Lifehacker article on the topic proved hugely influential. Kevin Holesh, meanwhile, has launched an app to restrict our apps. Four and a half years ago – back when many of us were still in awe of all the cool stuff we could do on our new iPhones – he created Moment, an app that tracks how long users spend on their iPhone or iPad per day.
“I got the idea for Moment when my now-wife and I moved in together,” Holesh says. “We did the cute couple stuff for a couple of weeks – cooking dinner together, drinking wine on the porch. But then we fell back into our old tech habits, which was us putting Netflix on and sitting on the couch, each on our phones. I’m on my phone a lot during the day for work – or was – and I wanted to have non-screen time in the evenings. I realised there was no app or tool to see how much time I was using my phone, so being an app developer, I hacked one together.”
The first ad shows off the new Portrait Lighting effects found on the iPhone X, noting how the quality compares to an image taken with a normal camera. Meanwhile, the other focuses on the strength and security of the App Store, illustrating that apps on the App Store are stable and don’t just stop working.
Things 3.5 is a collection of smaller yet welcome improvements that are worth outlining because they all contribute to making Things more powerful, intuitive, and consistent with its macOS counterpart.
Setapp is gaining steam at a time when Apple's future is increasingly in subscriptions, education and enterprise, three areas where Setapp thrives. The subscription service also supplements an area where some people think Apple is lacking — MacOS.
Apple may be close to announcing a follow-up to the iPhone SE, after the discovery of a regulatory filing reveals details and images for unannounced mobile devices from Apple, effectively confirming new iPhones will be on the way in the near future.
The Echo Look won’t tell you why it’s making its decisions. And yet it purports to show us our ideal style, just as algorithms like Netflix recommendations, Spotify Discover, and Facebook and YouTube feeds promise us an ideal version of cultural consumption tailored to our personal desires. In fact, this promise is inherent in the technology itself: Algorithms, as I’ll loosely define them, are sets of equations that work through machine learning to customize the delivery of content to individuals, prioritizing what they think we want, and evolving over time based on what we engage with.
Confronting the Echo Look’s opaque statements on my fashion sense, I realize that all of these algorithmic experiences are matters of taste: the question of what we like and why we like it, and what it means that taste is increasingly dictated by black-box robots like the camera on my shelf.
I can see that Apple as a company strongly believes the iPad is the future of computing. I hope Apple agrees that there are still many wants and needs to be filled on this platform, and moves to fill them faster. It's okay to have a MPW first before the Hypercard of iPad.
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Thanks for reading.