For the past few months, my computer has been unbearably – almost unuseably – slow. I have a couple ideas why that is:
1- I was warned by my colleague before moving to my current office that it has very slow ethernet.
2- the $@^%@$% antivirus UMW insists I must have on my computer even though I’m a mac user.
When El Capitan comes out, I’ll do a clean install and see if that helps. I somehow doubt it will, but maybe it’ll have a placebo effect? In the meantime, I’m experimenting. STAND BACK!
Really I’m making this sound way more dramatic than it is. I’m just going from working partially on iPad and partially on desktop to trying to shift almost entirely to my iPad.
This isn’t much to talk about, I don’t think, because of a couple of factors:
1- I’m not exactly new to working from my iPad. When I travel – including teaching an entire course abroad – I’ve only got my iPad with me anyway. So it’s not like I’m entering uncharted territory.
2- The new iOS9 is already smoothing the way. I’m lucky enough to have the most recent iPad (iPad Air 2) so the multitasking features and new keyboard shortcuts work great. No apple stylus for me, but that’s ok. I’ve tried and failed to use styli anyway.
So, for the weeks to come, I’m going to try to work entirely from my iPad and will document the things I just CAN’T do and the things that are a pain to do.
I’ve already discovered something that’s annoying to do: convert a word doc to PDF. Weirdly, the Word app doesn’t allow you to do this. (Why, Microsoft!?!) But I found a work around: open in Pages and convert to PDF from there. An extra step to be sure, but I can live with it.
On the other hand, this experiment has encouraged me to better use my resources. I’m already using some apps more effectively. For one, I shelled out the $0.99 a month to get more iCloud storage. My entire photo library is now accessible from all my i-devices. I’ve complained before and will again about all the digital storage living in different silos (iCloud, Evernote, Dropbox, etc.) but this is still nice, and not expensive at all.
I’ll write more in my next post about other apps that are helpful (and some that aren’t). Stay tuned!
