Hello all, I was going to send this directly to Adam but felt that it may be of use to all so ...
Bit of a long email, but hey, it’s a holiday weekend 😄🏖 Shortcuts is an amazing app and very flexible but it still requires some study and a certain mindset. However much companies like to dress things up these days, as in “You don’t need to be a programmer to use ...” well no you don’t, but you still need to be able to think a bit along those lines. This isn’t intended as a discouragement, far from it, as I think even a little bit of Shortcuts practice is well repaid with a whole load of new capabilities for you on iOS / iPadOS. I have written one that on a single tap, checks me in and out at work, logging my times in Reminders so that I can update my timesheet later. I have one to set a sequence of Reminders for when I’m baking bread that asks if I’m making white/wholemeal, tells me when it will be ready then tells me when I need to fold, fold again, switch on the oven, etc. Also, you can bulk remove all your completed reminders, have it play the entire album containing the song you are listening to in Apple Music and a LOT more! Federico Viticci at https://www.macstories.net/ is the main man for Shortcuts and a browse through that site will yield much discussion of and articles about Shortcuts. David Sparks has done an introduction too which I don’t have but is probably accessible and straightforward as he is that kind of guy - https://learn.macsparky.com/p/shortcuts13/ Rosemary Orchard also has a book on Shortcuts - https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/shortcuts/ She is full of enthusiasm and I always love listening to her on the MacSparky podcast. Last but not least is Apple’s own documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/welcome/3.2/ios/13.2 And really last!, are two great new Shortcuts-related apps that I’ve found via MacStories - LaunchCuts ( https://launchcuts.com/ ) which is a vast improvement to Apple’s interface for managing your Shortcuts. Another, is Toolbox Pro which adds a who load of enhancements to many, many areas of Shortcuts to allow you to write things that would not have been possible otherwise ( https://toolboxpro.app/ ) Then there’s the iPad itself. I’ve been a Macintosh user continuously since 1984 and there’s nothing I’d rather use as a desktop/laptop computer. I still have my MacBook Pro and I realised that in addition to Xcode and Curio which I mentioned in my previous email, the third reason I still need it is because Apple still don’t allow ANY way in iPadOS to update the metadata in Photos. As someone who has just added 627 scanned slides taken over a 30 year period to Photos, the inability to geotag them, add keywords, titles or descriptions on iPadOS is a source of recurrent frustration. It’s easy to do on the Mac. So, it may be very clever and analyse my photos so that I can search for cats and/or dogs, but it can’t determine MY cats and dogs without the help of a Mac because I can’t enter their names anywhere at all. I think Federico Viticci summed it up very well in his most recent article on the iPad where he wrote: “The more I think about it, the more I come to this conclusion: the iPad, unlike other computers running a “traditional” desktop OS, possesses the unique quality of being multiple things at once. Hold an iPad in your hands, and you can use it as a classic tablet; pair it with a keyboard cover, and it takes on a laptop form; place it on a desk and connect it to a variety of external accessories, and you’ve got a desktop workstation revolving around a single slab of glass. This multiplicity of states isn’t an afterthought, nor is it the byproduct of happenstance: it was a deliberate design decision on Apple’s part based on the principle of modularity.” Personally, I think that the 11” iPad Pro 4G is the most satisfying piece of technology that Apple have ever made/I’ve ever used. To have all that power, speed, flexibility, storage, lightness and elegance that I can slide into a narrow slot in my small shoulder bag is a joy. At the moment I’m typing onto my Logitech K380 keyboard and my iPad is in a small stand that looks like the bottom of an iMac ( https://www.cultofmac.com/564543/abovetek-ipad-stand-review/ ). It’s like a desktop computer at the moment. It’s the flexibility I love about it. I’m really looking forward to the release of the Magic Keyboard especially having read about the excellent re-imagined trackpad support/interface in iPadOS 13.4. The change that really allowed me to jump to the iPad was iPadOS as it finally supports local storage (fairly) properly. Prior to this version of the OS, the storage space on an iPad could only be used by apps. In iPadOS, the Files app finally allows me to create my own local folders in any arrangement I want and store my files there. I moved about 150GB of files from my MacBook Pro onto my iPad - now I have every photo I’ve ever taken since 1974, videos, Pages documents, sound recordings, choir rehearsal parts and scores and much more all on something I can slip in a shoulder bag. And it’s faster than my MacBook in terms of performance. The downside is still file handling though; applying and organising tags, which I use extensively, is dreadful on iPadOS. So is the fact that that it won’t tell me the total size of a folder and it’s contents! These are such weird omissions and I’m just hoping that iPadOS 14 will address them. Apart from the uses mentioned above, I can do just about everything I need on here as nearly every Mac program I used has an iPad equivalent. I do still flip to Pages on the Mac sometimes to edit our parish magazine. Sometimes I slip back to the Mac simply because it’s there when I ought to push it a bit in Pages (for example) to see if I can do it all on my iPad! And of course, there is the Apple Pencil as well which is so elegant and useful in its V2 incarnation. I think that’s enough enough for now. If you want to ask anything in particular I’ll try to answer/explain in case you’re thinking of moving to iPad. If you are, I’d strongly suggest you read Mr Viticci. In a video interview on MacStories there a video interview between him and Craig Federichi of Apple where Craig says “I don’t feel we’ve properly released iOS/iPadOS until I’ve read your iOS review”! Federico gets iPad in a way that resonates really strongly with me. OK - I’m heading out to the sunshine now (out the back of the house, of course!) Enjoy your weekend everyone and stay safe. All the best lovely SMUGgers, Stephen You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung >> On 7 Apr 2020, at 21:47, mac98aop <[email protected]> wrote: > > Nobody minds! > > London MUG is just, well, a little more London - events, socials, > membership... and I've never made it along. > > And in current pandemic, won't be for a while. > > Speaking of the pandemic, I'm hoping to put some of the diary space to good > use and wanted to get my head around the Shortcuts App. Any tips? I really > find it rather complicated! Every workflow I create is basically already a > Siri function. Anything more complicated seems incredibly non-intuitive. Any > tips, pointers or reference sites? I've Googled it but wouldn't mind the SMUG > filter! > > And Stephen, fascinated to know you're 95% iPad only. I'm wondering the same > and the new iPad with that 'floating effect keyboard' trackpad and Apple > pencil looks a really good setup indeed. > > Do hope you're all safe and well SMUGGERS > > Adam > > >> On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 12:39:00 PM UTC+1, Jason Davies wrote: >> On 4 Apr 2020, at 9:44, mac98aop wrote: >> >> > SMUG has some tried and tested charm, the friendliest most helpful >> > community, >> >> Seconded: I joined SMUG about 20 years ago, after looking at quite a few >> that were outside London, because London MUG was an absolute disaster of >> a list (I wonder if it's any better now?) >> >> I'm now in Buckinghamshire and am hoping no one minds... >> >> Cheers, >> >> Jason > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Sussex Mac User Group" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/17becb6d-f96f-4424-bf00-64c249b9a66d%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/A38E99FF-BFFA-422E-9C37-97FEEBC8CCB2%40icloud.com.
