• The weather continues to shift in Central Illinois, sometimes daily. Monday had highs in the 60s, followed by highs in the 30s-low 40s for the rest of the week. And next week looks to be even cooler, with highs in the 20s-30s. I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, as it is still Winter. 😬
• My schedule calmed down somewhat at work this week, which was good, because I had a few projects that I needed to be able to devote working hours to.
• There have been a number of meetings and discussions at work over the past week (and extending back to early this year) regarding tool consolidation and/or selection for a number of disparate teams within the organization that will be working more closely together in the future. In my current role, I get the opportunity to speak into some of those decisions, which is interesting, but also somewhat time consuming.
• I’ve been wanting to set up my iPad to be able to function as a light-weight computer replacement while traveling. After an hour or two of work over the weekend, I think I a) like most of the apps that I’ve set up with, and b) have a working solution (combined with a keyboard) for my use cases. I’ll be able to answer email + messaging questions, but that’s about it.
• I really like using emojis as part of my pattern for written communications, and the fact that I don’t have Rocket on my iPad is kind of really bothering me. I have a dedicated emoji button on my keyboard, but it’s really not as seamless as just typing : and typing the name of the emoji I want.
• I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned VueScan on my blog before… I primarily use it for scanning old photographs, but it also has come in handy for general purpose scanning with my flatbed scanner as well. Today (Sunday) I had a document to scan and submit to a website, and it was an awkward form factor which didn’t work with my ScanSnap, and the combination of VueScan plus my (very) old flatbed worked fantastically!

App Selection

This started out as just a set of bullet points, but quickly became too nested, and so I spun it out into a separate section…

My increased usage of my iPad for productivity has brought me back to my perennial debate between notes apps and productivity apps. 🤦‍♂️

Notes

On the note taking front, I’m overall very happy with Obsidian, and the iPad experience is actually very good. I was slightly surprised. However, I still have an affinity for Bear Notes (both in terms of ease of use on mobile platforms, and its overall design), and so I once again have both apps on my devices, and am examining the pros and cons of each.

The things that are really missing right now from Bear for me are a) a web app, or way to access my notes when not on an Apple device, and b) good version history. I have hardly ever needed a way to revert to an older version of a note, but I’m lightly paranoid about it.

Tasks

I haven’t looked as seriously yet at an alternate to Todoist, as historically I’ve always come back to it every time I’ve considered an alternate within the past decade. However, being on an iPad has once again made me debate if I should consider OmniFocus. I think it’s still more work to maintain than I really want, and slightly clunkier to use than Todoist, but the more native app has its appeal… 🤔