Migration to iPad — Redux 2

Living on the iPad continues, with occasional moments of missing my MacBook — but those moments have become few and far between. In general, I’m finding I appreciate using a single operating system, in this case iOS. Too many apps on in MacOS were beginning to feel long in the tooth, too much time spent resolving operations between devices.

It took me a while to decide to dive into using split and multiple screens for various apps, but once I got use to the control paradigm it was no big deal, and a real time saver.

OmniGraffle

Great news! OmniGraffle has fixed the bug in their iPad implementation that prevented use of custom fonts.

However, it turns out there are still lots and lots of bugs in the iPad implementation as well as some awkward UX decisions that were made, in particular when using a Magic Keyboard. Examples:

• Multi-select (cmd-tap or shift-tap) doesn’t work. Drag-select works, but that’s a blunt tool for some operations.
• Hiding a layer locks it. Normally, one method I use to locate objects that are in the wrong layer is to hide the desired layer, then select all still-viewable objects and move them to the hidden layer. This works on a Mac, doesn’t work at all on the iPad using the magic keyboard. I can’t find any gestures to do this using iPad without the keyboard, either.
• Un-hiding a layer expands it out, and then you have to re-collapse it. Total pain in the butt when your layer has hundreds of objects. The same thing happens when you open a file: all layers get expanded out. Grrr.
• Locking a line to a horizontal or vertical (or 30 or 45 degree variant) relies on aligning to a grid. So you have to turn the grid on just to do this. No where near as nice as holding down the shift key and snapping to a nice clean alignment.
• Rotating an object is really awkward.
• Snap-to-grid and Smart guides are mutually exclusive. Wha?
• Selecting a line segment with a label for copy-paste only copies the line, not the label. You have to drag over the combo to get them both.
• No apparent way to “move selection into layer”.
• No apparent way to “select all objects in layer”.
• Using the iCloud Drive, there are frequent “Unable to save to file” messages where the app then locks up, needs to be relaunched, and a corresponding loss of work.

OmniGraffle has long been my go-to app for mind mapping, visual prototyping, org charts, even things other people do with SketchUp. In my opinion, the iPad app is not yet usable as a complete replacement for the Mac application. C’mon, Omni, get it together.

Keychain

With the addition of the Notes field in Keychain entries, Keychain can now absorb more of the information I’d offloaded from 1Password into secure Notes records. Much cleaner.

Notes app

I had created a number of notes containing images of scanned identity documents like passports and drivers licenses that were secured with a password. As of this week, the images are no longer viewable, showing a size of 0 kB. Fortunately this is data I can recover, as I have all the actual documents. But still: unnerving and uncool.

Coalescing down to a single Apple ID

Years ago, for reasons I honestly can’t remember any more (it had something to do with being an Apple developer), both I and my wife ended up with two Apple IDs. This was not coordinated — we each arrived at this state via unique pathways. In generally, we each used one account for purchasing and the other account as our actual iCloud account to do all that iCloud stuff like Mail, Messages, Keychain, etc.

This turned out to be a real pain when trying to employ Famiiy Sharing.

For one thing, Apple handles different forms of media in different ways.

• Music shares media via a Family Apple Music account. Any CDs you’ve ripped and added to Apple Music are not shareable. The kludge fix here is that you can use Home Sharing to share that media — as long as you’re all on the same LAN. Not exactly mobile. Or particularly stable, in my experience.
• TV shares subscribed content (Apple TV, HBO Max, etc.) and media purchased from the iTunes Store. Sharing ripped DVDs is, again, handled solely by Home Sharing.