An Odyssey from Mac to iPad — Redux

I’ve been using my iPad Pro exclusively as a replacement for my MacBook Pro for a couple of months now. There have been some rare occations where I needed to log on to the family Macbook Pro, or into iCloud.com, to accomplish things the iPad wouldn’t allow, but in all I’ve spent about two hours on the Mac since November. Not bad.

Upon receiving some feedback, I feel I should do a better job of describing my overall feelings about this move beyond merely listing out the quirks and shortcomings I’ve encountered. The truth is I’m quite happy on this new iPad setup. The keyboard has a wonderful feel, isn’t too narrow (this from a person who wears XXL gloves). The V2 Pencil is an acceptable replacement for, if not improvement over, a mouse. Magnetically clipping the V2 Pencil to the top edge of the iPad for storage and charging is a huge improvement over my experience with the V1 Pencil (not to mention that the V1, lacking any flat side, rolled away under furniture countless times). Application-wise, I’ve found only a very few things missing: OmniGraffle lacking proper font support and the fact that Final Cut Pro isn’t (yet?) available for the iPad. Unless I return to writing a lot of code, I really see no reason I’d want to return to a laptop. So there you go.

Following are some additional points of interest along this journey:

IPadOS

Downloads: I added a Downloads folder at the base of my iCloud document tree and set all apps to use that folder, making it much cleaner to grab screenshots or download files into a location I can see on both my iPhone and iPad (and Mac as well).

When using a Magic Keyboard, 2FA codes received via SMS don’t auto fill the way they do if you’re using the on-screen keyboard. The built-in 2FA codes now generated in Keychain do populate correctly. And I’m not missing 1Password at all.

Signing documents: any file which allows access to the Markup panel allows you to drop a saved signature image into the file, similar to using Preview on the Mac. This was a nice find.

I was missing the ability to “export to PDF”, then figured out that, when taking a screen shot on the iPad, I was provided the option of cropping the screen shot — and also the option of saving the display or the entire page, saving it as a PDF.

Swiping from one app to another: If I swipe right to see the app to the “left” on the stack, I can immediately swipe left to return to the first app to the right. But after 5 seconds, the app I’m viewing becomes the right-most app and I have to swipe right to see the app what was, just before, on my right. I’m sure some UX designer at Apple has a rationale for this. I’m not sure I’d agree with their decision.

Reminders

The calendar in Reminders doesn’t reflect Calendar preferences (I start my week on Monday). This was always the case on the Mac as well, but I didn’t notice it until I started using Reminders in a major way after migrating from OmniFocus. A silly oversight, but in no way a reason to consider returning to OmniFocus.

Contacts

You can’t add an existing contact to a group — you have to use a Mac or iCloud.com and drag the contact into the desired group. Then it syncs properly with other devices. Another silly, but manageble, miss.

Notes

You can’t remove a tag if a deleted note is using it.

You can’t lock a tagged note.

You can’t lock a note containing a PDF.

You can’t get rid of Quick Note — Apple has decided you will use this, like it or not (I don’t like it and I don’t use it).

Within a note, you can’t get the keyboard to auto-display/minimize.

When performing a “Select All” (command-A), Notes doesn’t actually grab all content in the note. It’s more than the display window, but not the entire document. This is a really strange fail.

It is very easy to accidentally delete the note you are working on (it just happened to me, again, writing this note). To clarify: I’ll be in a note, writing content, and I’ll suddenly find myself back at the top level with my note missing. A search will find the note in the Deleted folder, and recovery is easy, but it’s a bit heart-stopping when it happens. I’m still trying to identify the keystrokes that cause this.

Music

You can’t create smart playlists. You can see them, though, if you first create them on a Mac.

Books

With my iPad Mini, I always held the device in portrait mode for reading, which displayed a single page at a time. With the larger iPad Pro, I tend to keep it in landscape mode, which in the Books app displays two pages side-by-side. I actually struggled with that at first until I realized I was back to viewing the book as I always would have done with a physical book. My wife started checking out books from our local library, and she related that she’d had to work through the same feeling of wrongness after reading on the iPad Mini for years. We are creatures of habit.

3rd-Party apps

OmniGraffle

This design app (Omni touts this as their “Premier Design Application”) still doesn’t support imported fonts (like Adobe), even though OG has always supported this on the MacBook, and Omni support claimed a fix was coming. That was 3 months ago. This remains one of my very few major stumbling blocks for relying only on the iPad.

Note: This has been fixed with the 03 Feb release of OmniGraffle.

Lightroom Mobile

There is no way to edit EXIF data like location. Still waiting for Adobe to bring LR CC up to par with Classic. It’s better than it used to be, but…

I had to turn off auto-import as Lightroom was slurping up every photo I took on my phone. Also, when I created an album in Photos to sync with my Apple TV for a screensaver, the import from Lightroom was categorized as “recent” in Photos, which was promptly re-imported back to Lightroom, also as “new” photos. Good grief.

An odd change in the works

This is a bit off-topic, but I think it has the potential to confuse a lot of people.

Apple seems to be going through some structural changes to the way it handles IDs. When Apple first offered email, your email address ended with “@mac.com”. Then came MobileMe. Anyone adding an ID at that point was issued an email address ending with “@me.com”, while existing users could use either “@mac.com” or “@me.com”, the latter address being effectively an alias. Then came iCloud and the “@icloud.com” addresses. Same thing — new users could only use the “@icloud.com” form while previous users saw the same backward compatibility. For example, I can use “@mac.com”, “@me.com” or “@icloud.com” which all map to the same account.

With me so far?

In spite of all this, logging into the App Store has always forced my account email to be the “@mac.com” form (my original) regardless of what I enter. Another rather odd oversight in terms of usability.

Now, it appears that someone at Apple has decided that only the “@icloud.com” address is to be accepted — for certain very specific uses. Lots of people are having issues when using Siri with HomePods and Apple Music, getting “I’m sorry, there is a problem with Apple Music”. This seems to be fixed by logging out and back in again using the “@icloud.com” address. Similarly, Apple’s new “Legacy Person” feature, allowing one to designate a person to gain access to all their Apple stuff upon their death, seems to require the same address form. I see this as a pretty serious systemic fail within the Apple environment: someone, likely a developer or product manage, has made some rather poor unilateral decisions. But there’s enough buzz generating from this that, hopefully, Apple will wrangle the cats.