sohail.tech

Swung by the Apple Store at Stanford to grab a spare Pencil and found myself slightly bemused by the contents of the shelves. There are things there I never expected to see at an Apple Store, ever.

I have a secret identity. When I’m not plonking away at my keyboard, working on sysadmin-y stuff, I like to work on more fanciful projects. I write, I shoot photos, and of late, I’m tiptoeing into video.

As part of that, I’m working on a new narrative short and thought I’d try working on that on my new iPad Pro. Now, I have the industry standard Final Draft installed on my Mac, PC, iPad, and iOS devices. Problem is, it uses Dropbox for syncing scripts, which I don’t use.

Instead, I broke out my trust text editor on the iPad and created a file with a .fountain suffix. Fountain, for those who don’t know, is a markup language specifically for writing scripts and screenplays. You write your script in a plain text editor marked up with Fountain syntax and then use an app like the awesome Marked 2 to convert it into a formatted script or screenplay.

I didn’t expect Textastic to recognize the Fountain markup, but to my surprise, it totally did!

With Textastic open in the main window and the Fountain Reference Guide pulled up in GoodReader in the side window, I’m able to type everything up in Fountain and then output it to a finished script later. Score one more for iPad productivity.

My 9.7-inch LTE iPad Pro comes with an embedded Apple SIM, which is awesome for those folks who don’t want to bother fiddling with those tiny Nano SIMs Apple like to use. For those who DO like to fiddle with them, however (like me), there is also the option of using the onboard SIM to sign up for T-Mobile’s awesome $10 plan that gives you 5GB to use over 5 months, along with 200MB per month free for the life of the device. I tried to find a link to this plan but it only shows up when you go to the signup page from inside the Settings app on the iPad.

I’ve been using two iPad Pros over the last week, trying to see which one I will end up going with for my next iPad. As much as I want to “settle” for the iPad Baby Pro, I keep coming back to the Big Pro, for a variety or reasons. With that in mind, here are a few nifty things I learned about using both iPads in the context of a primary work device.
Read more...

I swung by my neighborhood Apple Store this morning to pick up an iPad. That alone was a novel experience; picking up an Apple iDevice on launch day without having to wait in line or preorder was… unusual. Nonetheless, off I went to see what the hulabaloo was about.

First, context. I’ve been using an iPad Pro 12.9” as part of a test at my day job and I’ve got some very definite observations about this device and what it can do, is good for, etc. Peppered in this review are many of those thoughts and notions, both good and bad. That’s the lens through which I looked at what the Baby Pro (props to the folks at iMore for coming up with that) can do.