Tuesday saw us head again to the Curzon to see Kajillionaire, which is a lovely film that I’d recommend to everyone. We’ve been seeing a lot of independent films lately, partly because I want to stay in the habit of going to the cinema and partly because… well… there isn’t much else on. A very big FU to Eon, who aren’t releasing James Bond and so are actually damaging cinemas that desperately need revenue (and yes, you can go to a cinema safely).
Seeing quite a few indie films has definitely rekindled my interest in movies, which has been bludgeoned into submission by years of mostly seeing huge films about people with various kinds of superpowers. One from last year that everyone ought to see is Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart which is a sharp little comedy. I was reminded of it by something which arrived this week, Google’s new Chromecast with Google TV. Google TV is a revelation – it has a better interface for movie discovery than anything else I’ve found, and because it incorporates every streaming service1 it works really well. It also supports movies that aren’t available to stream anywhere, letting you tell it that you want to add them to a watchlist or have seen it before, so it can base recommendations and alerts on even movies which aren’t available anywhere.
Rearrangements
It’s funny how rearranging your working space can have such a big impact on how it feels to work. For months I’ve had my office space set out with the window to the side of me and my desk facing the wall (one with some lovely pictures on it, but still a wall. On something of a whim I decided to move the desk so that I am sitting facing outside, which means I get a glimpse of sunlight. I also did away with the (quite lovely) big monitor, replacing it with a 12 South MacBook Stand which works brilliantly with my MacBook Pro.
It also works really well with my iPad Pro, which sits up at a perfect height for typing and reminds me of the way Matt Gemmell has his iPad-only work desk set up. Mine is, of course, more cluttered than Matt’s but I’m still stuck in the dark ages of using an actual laptop for some of my work.
In fact, two laptops. I’ve always liked having an up to date Mac and an up to date Windows PC. It’s an old habit from computer journalism: an effort to be cross platform, to know “how the other half lives” and not to get too wedded to either Windows or macOS. It’s a professional thing.
Of course I’m not actually a computer journalist anymore. What I should be doing is simply striving to use the best tools for my job and sticking with those. But that old habit dies hard.
The iPad as main device
Using the MacBook Stand with the iPad is a joy and a reminder that the iPad can be a perfect brilliant standalone computer. The screen is big enough to work and iPadOS means you’re not constantly bombarded with the distractions inherent in a multi-window operating system. Where most computer systems encourage you to multi-task, the single window approach of iPadOS means it’s actually harder to be distracted.
Of course plenty of people have been using the iPad as their main device for some time. However, I think we’re now at the point where it’s a viable option for most people, including ones that don’t want to go down the route of setting up endless Shortcuts to compensate for something that’s easy on a laptop but hard on an iPad.
Things I’ve been reading this week
Ulysses 21 Brings Revision Mode to iPhone and iPad Alongside Updated Design. Ulysses has been my writing tool of choice for a while for everything except work documents (we’re very heavily invested in Microsoft there, and I still love Word). Revision mode answers some of the biggest issues with it as an editing tool where the aim is to sharpen when you have written. And it’s on both iOS and macOS.
FoodNoms' Widgets Thoughtfully Combine Goal Summaries with Actions to Make Food Tracking Easier Than Ever. Food tracking is a privacy nightmare, because all the main apps you can get for it use the data on what you’re eating to either advertise something to you or sell you some kind of expensive weight loss course. FoodNoms is designed to be private: what you log stays with you (at the moment, it doesn’t even support syncing with Apple Health, although that is in the plan).
The downside is that its food database is incredibly US-centric, and although it has the ability to use text recognition to bring in data from food labels, it’s designed for US food labelling and doesn’t do a brilliant job of UK labels. It works, but it’s sometimes confused between the amounts for portions vs 100g.
Things 3.13: Bringing Your Field Notes To-Do List to Things. Things gains support for Scribble on iPad and it’s excellent. You can literally scribble anywhere on a list in the app to add in an extra to do, which makes the Pencil a great tool for capturing idle thoughts about tasks into your inbox.
- Except, of course, Apple TV - Apple, please do support this! ↩
