Going All-In With the iPad Pro

Introduction

Published in

Contrary Content

10 min readJun 28, 2016

In fall 2014 I began attending law school at night, while continuing to write and produce a cable TV docudrama by day. During law school orientation, a professor urged us all to take notes by hand, rather than on our laptops. Her reasoning? Studies have shown that when a student types his notes, he’s merely transcribing the professor’s lecture. But when a student takes notes by hand, he is forced to paraphrase the lecture language, which leads to better memorization of the material. I was sold on this premise and immediately dug out my dusty old “iPad 3”.

I downloaded the iOS handwriting app Notability and for the next year muddled through taking class notes with all manner of iPad styli. I found every “dumb stylus” to be severely lacking. Bluetooth styli proved less useful still. Notetaking apps like Notability do have “Zoom” modes that make handwriting on an iPad doable — but really, it was a slog.

Things improved considerably last November, when Apple released the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the wondrous Apple Pencil. I was first in line at the Pasadena Apple Store on the day the iPad Pro dropped — then had to wait a month more to actually purchase an Apple Pencil. But it was worth the wait.

Taking notes in class became positively fun. And although I purchased the iPad Pro for use at school, something unexpected has happened: I’ve started to use it as my almost-exclusive work computer, too. That means most weekdays I’m on my iPad Pro from 9am-5:30pm at work, and then from 6–10pm at school. On weekends, more often than not you’ll find me using the iPad Pro to mark-up case law. I must be using the iPad Pro as much just about anyone out there. Here are my impressions of this incredible device.

My Setup

Typical Day

9am — Arrive To Work

Settling in at the production office, I flip open my iPad Pro + Smart Keyboard and check on last night’s email. I’ve recently settled on CloudMagic as my email app of choice across all devices (iPad Pro, iPhone, and MacBook Pro). CloudMagic’s ultra-minimalist, clutter-free design adds a little serenity to to the stressful task of putting out email fires.

In addition to its serene-styling, CloudMagic has a sexy “Cards” feature that allows me to “Share” an email to other apps like Evernote or Todoist. In Todoist, the the email’s body text is converted into a to-do item.

It’s nice functionality to have, but I don’t use it as much as I anticipated. Instead, most mornings I have CloudMagic and Todoist running side-by-side in split mode. I simply type out actionable tasks in Todoists and then archive the email. I find iOS restricting me to running only two apps at once makes this process go more quickly, and focuses my mind.

I’ve only recently switched from 2Do to Todoist, a truly terrific to-do list app. The killer feature is its Fantastical-style natural language entry. I can simply type, say, “Check on third party footage by Monday at 5pm,” and Todoist automatically parses the day and date information to create a reminder for the task. Todoist syncs seemlessly between my iPad, iPhone, and Mac. The bloated, antiquated OmniFocus can’t touch Todoist’s functionality, seamless sync, and pleasing design.

10am-5pm — Writing

“Producing” TV documentaries can mean many different things, but for me it primarily means writing. I write pitch documents for new episodes; I write show outlines for network approval; I write 50 page scripts consisting of interviewee sound bites and voiceover narration; and I revise those scripts countless times during the editing process.

I write my outlines using Ulysses, which, like CloudMagic, syncs across all Apple platforms and is downright calming to use.

For writing the actual scripts, I need a word processor with a little more horsepower. Our network requests A/V Scripts consisting of a video column and an audio column. And they want those scripts in .docx format… Which means I’m forced to tangle with Microsoft Word.

I — like every other right-thinking individual — loathe Word. It is the only software that ever crashes on my Mac. And it crashes frequently. On the Mac, Word is sluggish, buggy, and overcooked. Therefore, it is with happy surprise that I report Word for the iPad is actually great. Fast, feature-rich, and shockingly powerful, Word for iPad runs circles around its macOS counterpart.

Even though A/V scripts in Word can be somewhat complex and finicky (our series’ scripts consist of four-columned tables, multiple style sheets, hundreds of “bites”, and tracked changes from multiple producers), I’m able to edit scripts on Word for iPad and send the .docx files onto my PC-using colleagues without any lost or altered formatting. It’s impressive.

Word for iPad isn’t perfect, however. It hasn’t achieved feature-parity with the desktop version, and some of the omissions are headache inducing. For instance, although I can add new empty rows to a table — a feature I use constantly — there’s no way to split a table in Word for iPad. So if I want to divide a table in two (say, at an act break), I need to send the Word document to my computer and split the table there. Thankfully, this isn’t a task I need to do all that often.

The lack of a delete key on my iPad Smart Keyboard also makes it impossible to delete the contents of multiple table cells at once (although the “Cut” command can be a quick-and-dirty way to achieve the same result).

Word integrates well with Dropbox, but our production company utilizes Google Drives. I can open Word docs from Google Drive, but there’s no simple way to automatically save changes to Google Drive as I write. Therefore, I usually just duplicate the document from Google Drive and re-save it to Microsoft’s own built-in OneDrive solution. It works, but it’s definitely not ideal.

There is one stage of script writing I do not do on my iPad Pro. To start a script, I go through 500 or so pages of interview transcripts, copying-and-pasting sound bites from the transcript documents and into my growing A/V script document. Doing this initial grunt work is simply impractical in iOS, for two main reasons. 1) It is not possible to have two instances of Word open in Split View. 2) Copying-and-Pasting in iOS is abysmal. To reiterate: I’m sifting through 500 pages of interview transcripts. I select, copy, and paste words, sentences, or paragraphs thousands of times when constructing a script. Even if I could have two instances of Word open at once, copying and pasting between two different apps is in iOS is tedious to say the least. It’s a functionality begging for serious improvement.

For some other missing Word features, I’ve found suitable workarounds. For instance, I often track changes in Word when replacing soundbites and rewriting VO, and then email just those changed pages to my editors as a PDF. (For instance: if I am on my Mac and do some rewrites on pages 12–15 of a 50-page script, I can “Print to PDF” with a page range of 12–15, and send the PDF of just those pages to the editor. Simple.) However, converting a page range to PDF is not possible on Word for iPad. I can export my full 50-page Word doc as a PDF, but not just selected pages.

Luckily, the iOS automation app Workflowprovides a workaround. I can choose “Share PDF” in Word, choose Workflow from the share sheet, and then run a custom workflow that allows me to “clip” a page range from the resulting PDF, and send just those pages via email to my editors.

This silly procedure is a perfect example of what it’s like to do “real work” on an iPad today: it’s possible to get stuff done, but you need to find or develop complex workaround solutions to achieve tasks that would be trivial on a Mac. Personally, I kind of enjoy setting up these overly-complicated little systems. I know most “normal” users don’t.

6–10pm — Law School

Around 6pm, I arrive to my evening law classes. I spent my first year of school hauling multiple 1,500 page case law books to work and then on to class in the evening. With the iPad Pro, those days are over. I’ve come up with a system that allows me to take handwritten notes in the margins of my case books on my iPad — though it requires a lot of prep work.

About half of my law books are available through Kindle. When a book is available on Kindle, I buy and download it to my Mac. I use the Calibre ebook software to strip out the Amazon DRM. I then convert from the ebook format to a DRM-free PDF. One very annoying thing about this process? While Kindle books now have “real” page numbers, those page numbers are lost when you convert a Kindle ebook to PDF. I’ve spent literally hours adjusting the font size and margins of my PDF exports, trying to get the PDF page numbers to match those of the “real” page numbers for the original book (it’s useful for me to preserve the real page numbers because homework is assigned by page number). But I can never it get it to all match up exactly. If only the Kindle App allowed me to take handwritten notes right in the book margins… I’m not holding my breath.

Instead, I import the PDF I created from the original Kindle file into Notability and do my reading, highlighting, and note taking there.

Things get a bit more complicated when a law book isn’t available digitally. In such cases, I’ve resorted to using the iPhone app FineScanner to photograph each page of the law book I need to read (hundreds of pages over the course of a semester), exporting those “scans” to PDF, and then importing that PDF into Notability for note taking purposes.

Is doing all this work just to note-up my case law on the iPad crazy? Probably. But it’s so incredibly freeing to have every one of my law readings available always on my iPad. And the Notability app is fast and rock solid, even when importing a law book PDF that’s thousands of pages long. I love this app.

Once I’m actually in class, I launch Notability on my Mac and keep my noted-up readings up on my Mac screen (Notability syncs between the Mac and iPad Pro automatically, a great feature). I simultaneously launch Notability on my iPad Pro and take class notes with the Apple Pencil. Notability can also record the lecture audio via the iPad’s microphone and sync the lecture audio up with your handwritten notes. We’re living in the future here, people!

Conclusion

Like many others, I struggle to express logically why I prefer to work on the iPad Pro instead of my MacBook Pro. It is more difficult getting things done with iOS, no question. And there are many, many tasks I simply cannot do at all with my iPad. So why put myself through all this?

The wholly unsatisfying answer is it just feels better. I like opening up my iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard in the morning and zipping from app-to-app, feeling a bit like Tom Cruise in Minority Report as I swipe across the screen to mark Todoist items complete, alt-tab over to Ulysses, and then start typing away in a beautiful, distraction-free work environment. And while the common knock against the locked-down iOS system is that it’s not as flexible as macOS, I’m not sure that’s quite right. After all, I use my iPad Pro as a laptop computer each workday, a college notebook each evening, and a school textbook every weekend. What the iPad Pro represents, I think, is a new kind of flexibility.

Nowadays, every time I’m forced to do something on my Mac it stresses me out. Compared to iOS, the Mac interface feels cluttered, graceless, and distracting. Working on the iPad Pro is a better, more flexible expereince. I wouldn’t bet against it.