Updates: see the comments below this post…
Two days ago, I took my work laptop into the shop for warrantee work on the keyboard. Since then, I’ve been doing almost all of my work on my iPad. I have a personal iMac that I could use, but mostly as an experiment I wanted to see if I could use my iPad for work. It’s generally been a success.
Not surprisingly, there are a few things I cannot do.
- I logged in with my personal iMac to view a course assignment that featured the WC Peer Eval tool. It is an antiquated tool and would not run in Chrome or Safari on my iPad.
- I’m limited by what I can do in the Smartsheet app, so I have to make sure I’m using it in Safari.
- A number of the hot-keys do not work the way I expect, so I’m not as fast performing a number of functions I’m used to.
- I use my iPhone for Zoom, mounted on a stand above my iPad because the built-in camera on my iPad has me “looking down” at everyone. My camera also cuts out whenever I switch to a different app during a meeting to do things like update or view the meeting notes.
- I’ve lost the ability to keep a large array of items in my clipboard. Having an app to do that on my laptop saves me a lot of time on certain tasks. Thankfully, the MacOS ecosystem allows me to copy something on my iPhone and paste it immediately onto my iPad without having to do anything.
I am surprised that the smaller screen really isn’t a big problem, but I’m used to working around that. Unlike many of my peers, I haven’t used an external monitor once since we switched to remote work back in the spring.
Using the College’s virtual machine also helps because it allows me to access a “full desktop” right from my iPad.
What’s the purpose or benefit? Well, I have a lot more confidence and knowledge of being able to work remotely with very little while not having to sacrifice any productivity.
The iPad and my home-office setup are not outdated! I just moved my office laptop back to campus along with all of my other stuff from work that I brought home almost a year-and-a-half ago. With all of that stuff gone, I still need something to do work on here at home and my office iPad will be just great! Unlike some, I don’t like carrying around my laptop even though it’s a MacBook Air. I’m also going to be working from home two days-a-week after 8/16 so I’ll need something on those days. I’m kind of excited that I’ll be using both options.
It’s the end of an era. After 120 days of only using my iPad, I’m back to a laptop. The office purchased a 2021 M1 MacBook Air and I just picked it up yesterday afternoon. So far, it’s been very good in the few hours I’ve used it. There are already somethings I miss about my iPad. The Apple Calendar app doesn’t work the same in Big Sur. I can’t view all of the additional calendars I’ve added to my Outlook account. Outlook doesn’t allow me to move meetings from one week to another easily. I’m sure the transition will be less restrictive however. Overall, I’m definitely happy. It’s just another change. I’ve already got my external screen and camera hooked up. That’ll be good for Zoom. We’ll see how this goes.
I just saw an article, https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/09/zoom-ipad-camera-api-access/ – not the one that I’ve actually linked but still on the same topic, that Zoom can remain “active” while multitasking. That should mean that I can keep my camera active while I’m working on taking notes or referring to content in other apps. I did need to move apps that might need to use commonly to the dock but that’s OK. Readjusting the screens will probably blank out my camera, but it should be brief. I think this will really help me to keep engaged with others while on Zoom but again will need to test this out. My new computer is still on its way, so learning about this will still be very useful until I have my new laptop.
I may not need to work on my iPad too much longer. Amy just forwarded a confirmation from IT that my new machine is on order. I could easily be another couple of weeks but that’s OK. I’m not necessary in a rush. Using my iPad has been working out wonderfully over these last few months. I’ve been pulling my iPad off my desk stand as much as possible though because I don’t have reading glasses and the angle isn’t the greatest with my daily bifocals. The most challenging things are: the iPad is slower so switching between apps under pressure is annoying, the apps are still designed with mobile limitations so they directly interfere with productivity, and I really do need my trackpad to interact fully since touch gestures do not always work or are less accurate than using the trackpad. All-in-all, I’d give iPad-only a four out of five stars.
I really like how working on my iPad really focuses me on task. Due to natural limitations, I cannot have 25 tabs open and 12 different apps. I do need to rely on my productivity software to help me track and prioritize tasks and projects but I like being able to focus on one thing as I’m working on it. I’m not particularly psyched how developers are either limited or intentionally limit functionality of the iPad apps or websites. In this day-and-age of distributed working, I should be able to do whatever I need to do from my iPad, iPhone, or laptop.
I’m trying to find the perfect iPad browser, but am having trouble doing so. I’m experiencing limitations on the following apps:
O365 Word – cannot copy and paste
O365 OneNote – cannot copy and paste
Smartsheet – Chrome cannot view the bottom of the page; Safari cannot display pull down menus or right-click menu
1Password – Chrome and DuckDuckGo does not show all login options, Safari does
DuckDuckGo sometimes forces me to authenticate every time I open a link in Canvas
So, I’m going to try out Edge, Firefox, and Opera as well.
Firefox – Smartsheet OK, O365 Word OK, O365 OneNote no copy
Edge cannot paste into O365 OneNote either. This could be a bug on their site. Opera cannot paste into O365 OneNote either. Looks like I can’t evaluate browsers based on functionality on this site/web app.
I’m getting to the point where I’m more comfortable doing work on my iPad than on my desktop. I’m working on configuring one of our backup Macs for my work use, but until then I’m going to keep working on my iPad. It’s been over four weeks that I’ve been without a laptop and I have to say that the “experiment” has been working well.
Of course I have had to adjust my work flow considerably. In the past month I’ve deleted all of my Office 365 apps and then reinstalled them. There are things that I cannot do well in the apps and mobile browsers. I’m sure there are reasons, but I think the developers could do more on both platforms to bring the experiences closer to working on a desktop OS. I’m sure I would forget a lot of the tricks and workarounds I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks if I were to switch back to a laptop. There are funny things like OneNote will not let you copy content when using Chrome or Safari but you can do that in the iPad app. Weird.
The biggest challenges right now is using Smartsheet. The native app has severe limitations, but it is OK for casual data entry and viewing sheets and reports. Safari works OK, but you cannot view pull down menus which is a big problem when editing content. Chrome also works OK, but you lose valuable screen content at the bottom which disallows you from using the horizontal scroll bar and other features that get pushed down to the bottom of the page.
I found out that it will cost at least $960 on top of the $110 that we paid for diagnostics to fix my MacBook Pro. I didn’t really like that machine anyhow. I’ve recommended that we not fix that computer and wait until the budget “chill” is over to order a new computer. This laptop is three years old already. I’m thinking of asking for a lighter weight laptop.
I’m thinking of trying out my Raspberry Pi 4 as well. Zoom will be the biggest issue. I found this article, https://raspberrytips.com/install-zoom-raspberry-pi/, that does have a way to use Zoom from the Chromium browser. I’ll have to give that a shot. I will need to use my external USB camera to make that work. I’ll probably start off by looking at my app usage history and see what apps I’m using the most. O365 can be used entirely in the browser, so I think I’ll do that.
I just ran into my first issue that I could not use my iPad to solve. I’m tying to prepare for the upcoming Box Migration now that PSU is dropping Box. There are a number of things I need to do like find any files over 15 GB that I cannot do on my iPad. I decided to not rely on the Box Migration process and do it manually. It’ll just take more time, but I’m more confident that my files will be moved they way I expect. Given these “unique” tasks, I’ve had to use my personal machine to move my private work files from Box to OneDrive manually.
On a related note, I discovered that Smartsheet will run in my iPad browsers, so I will not need to use the IST WinDrive resource as I have in the past.
A week later and I’m still using my iPad. It’s gone pretty well which is somewhat an indication of the kind of work that I do. I’ll have to go back and take a look at my usage reports to see which apps I’m using the most. I can say without looking that it’s probably: Safari, Chrome, Email, Smartsheet, OneNote, Word, OneDrive, and Teams.
I just purchased a “gooseneck” iPad mount and it’s working great so far. Today is the first day that I’m using it. Now that iPad OS can interface with trackpads, I’ve got my Apple TrackPad hooked up along with my Logitech iOS-specific keyboard and things are great! The mount allows me to keep my iPad at eye level which is great for using it but much better for Zoom. I don’t feel like I’m “looking down” on everyone when in a Zoom session.
That all said, I wish IT would get back to me about what to do with my laptop which is just sitting at P2P. I’m not sure it is worth fixing at this point. It is three years old and I am up for a new machine.
I’m working on my iPad again. I have to take my laptop back to P2P. It’s not because the work they did recently wasn’t good enough. I accidentally damaged it and the screen will not properly work anymore. I cannot see anything except brightly colored bars. Not good. I tried resetting the P-RAM, booting it in Safe and Recovery Modes and nothing worked.
So far, working off the iPad has been going well today. Zoom is funky because the iPad’s camera is off to the side and relatively low, it looks like I’m looking down at everyone when my camera is on.
It’s definitely tricky to upload files to Box. I have to use Safari and force the link to open as a new tab, otherwise iPad OS will default to opening the Box app. That doesn’t work because PSU administrators will not allow me to upload files from my iPad. Good thing we’ll be switching to OneDrive soon. I haven’t tested that out, but hope it works better.
I’ve definitely needed to use winlabs to do some work, but that doesn’t take too long. I’m still a little uncomfortable using the iPad for everything. It’s more a comfort thing, since I know I can do 95% of my work on my iPad and that last 5% is only weird or very rare tasks, like editing audio. Even then, I should be able to use GarageBand. Maybe I can do 100% of the work that I need to do.