Moving away from Typed
I’ve been playing with iCloud Drive and an app called Documents recently and they’ve made me realize that there’s a lot more productive work to be done on the iPad these days.
With the arrival of the iPad Pro’s and the Smart Keyboards I’m trying to move as much work as I can away from the laptop and towards the iPad. I’ve been spending more time looking at iPad apps in the AppStore as a result and I’ve been experimenting with a few UI ideas to try and build some really nice, fluent interfaces for productivity apps.
Every now and then I’ll digitize a walking or cycling network that I find on the internet. I used my own OSX app for that before. With this app I can add/delete/rename nodes on a map and draw the trajectories between them. The app stores the data in a MySql database server-side, from where I can create the SQLite databases that are needed in my apps.
It’s a great tool to bring networks on paper or even pdf to the format that I need for my apps. The only downside is that this proces is very time consuming. With the arrival of the iPad Pro and the Pencil I ported this OSX app to iOS. The idea is that it the pencil will give my a more direct interaction to the map. I’ll be tapping and drawing with the Pencil directly onto the map and I’ll get rid of the mouse and mousepointer that I used in the OSX app. I haven’t bought an iPad Pro yet but I hope to do so soon. I’m kind of undecided between the 9.7 and 12.9 model. Definitely leaning towards the 12.9 model because my iPad Air 2 is still in great condition.
As I was looking at more iPad apps in the AppStore last night, I stumbled upon an app called Byword. It’s a typing app that allows you to post blogposts to Medium, Tumblr, WordPress and a couple more blogging platforms. I bought the in-app purchase functionality to try it and it turned out to be a really, really nice workflow.
As a result I’ve cancelled my Typed subscription, but I wanted to give the guys from Realmacsoftware some well-deserved credit. If anyone here is considering Typed to do some blogging, I cannot recommend them enough. The entire platform has been faultless while I’ve used it. I found it easy to understand and fun to use. I can’t remember ever having a single problem with it.
