I came back from what I’d like to think of as a well-deserved vacation earlier this week and, unlike previous vacations at the camping I’ve been spending most of my summers in for the past 15 years, this time I went there with my friends and a specific goal in mind: I didn’t have to write anything, but I should have been able to do so and check on MacStories if my attention was needed. Last year, I went on vacation knowing that I would have ended up writing for the site anyway. Not this year. Yet, I told myself, if something happens – or really, just to make sure I could at least read the news – the devices I work with every day should be capable of letting me get things done quickly, and efficiently.
I went on vacation for roughly ten days, bringing an iPad, an iPhone, my new MacBook Air and a slew of other iOS accessories and cables with me. My girlfriend brought her iPhone, too, as well as her MacBook Pro and iPad. All my iOS devices managed to fit in the Tom Bihn Ristretto bag I’ve been using for the past months, whilst the MacBook Air snugly fit into a new sleeve I bought two weeks ago. I did not bring a digital camera because the iPhone 4 is the best camera I’ve ever owned, nor did I choose to unplug those external drives from my desktop iMac and AirPort Extreme. If we ever decided to watch a movie, we’d buy it from iTunes and stream it over 3G. The MacBook Air wouldn’t have been capable of backing itself up to SuperDuper!, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t use the Air much.
As I set out to drive to the camping and think about how I would keep up with MacStories news and updates without actually working on them, I had a feeling iOS and the great apps I had installed on my devices would help me go through the task without much effort.
They absolutely did.
In these past ten days, iOS – and more specifically the iOS 5 beta I’m currently running – has turned out to be a more powerful productivity platform and ecosystem than I initially imagined and experienced. I mean, I’ve always been an advocate for content creation and task management on iOS devices, but considering the lack of vacations and relax in the past two years of my life, I never had to chance to exclusively rely on iOS as the sole platform for remote and passive MacStories management and news reporting.
In ten days, I never opened my MacBook Air. Not once. The iPhone and iPad, alongside the apps I decided to trust for my work and personal needs, did all the work for me. With the new Twitterrific and Tweet Marker support, I was able to jump around between timelines and devices keeping my position when I had time to check on the people and sites I follow. Every couple of hours I would sit down at the bar on the beach, fire up Twitterrific on my iPhone and see what was going on, marking some tweets as favorite so I was sure I could find them again. Later in the day, I would take the iPad with me, find my position in the timeline with Tweet Marker, and catch up on news and updates. The new Twitterrific is fantastic, and at this point I just wish the desktop app would sooner or later implement live streams so I can close Twitter for Mac once and for all and get used to the Iconfactory’s ecosystem on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
When my colleagues wanted me to tweet a new post they had published on MacStories, they didn’t have to send me a DM or email to notify me about it. Instead, I was able to stay on top of MacStories’ articles with TweetFire, an app I reviewed a couple of weeks ago that lets you receive push notifications for new tweets from a specific user. Plus, TweetFire is fast, which means I was able to load tweets instantly even when on the poor 3G (sometimes poor Edge, too) connection of Montalto. As soon as I heard TweetFire’s custom notification sound assigned to MacStories’ tweets, I would wait a few minutes, read the post if I had time to load the website, and tweet it again with my account. I know, you could argue that one shouldn’t be bugged on vacation by notifications and even the smallest things to do, but for me the effort was minimal and, actually, it was nice to see my team was working whilst I was relaxing and enjoying the time with my friends. If you manage a Twitter account with other people, TweetFire is a must-have.
But it wasn’t all Twitter and news for me. Looking at the big picture, I realized how much the new notification system in iOS 5 will change things for the better and improve the way information gets pulled onto our devices: sometimes I would leave my iPhone away in my girlfriend’s purse for hours, and coming back to it didn’t turn into the usual mess of pop-ups and annoying alerts iOS 4 used to be. With iOS 5 and Notification Center, I felt safe I could not watch my iPhone for hours, and get a nice summary of what I missed through a simple, actionable list whenever I wanted. But the iOS 5/vacation mix wasn’t only about Notification Center. Just as I suspected, Photo Stream has become an indispensable addition to my photo-taking workflow, the new brain behind my photos that takes care of uploading media for my cloud, making everything available for later consumption and viewing on all my devices. Here’s a typical scenario: I’m that kind of guy that shoots a lot of pictures at the beach – in general, I’m always shooting photos while on vacation because I want to remember the great moments I’m having with the people I love and care about. Like I said I don’t have a camera, but the iPhone 4 is always with me and it provides a fantastic way to shoot decent pictures that can be organized on a Mac later using iPhoto and the Faces functionality. Prior to iOS 5, I used to keep photos on my iPhone, perhaps show them to my friends on the device’s small screen, and then import them on my Mac at home. Not with iOS 5 and Photo Stream. Because iCloud is always connected, I could shoot dozens of pictures using my iPhone, and sit down with my friends later, checking out those very same photos on the iPad’s bigger screen – the iPad obviously fetched the files automatically using Photo Stream. This is exactly what Apple refers to with “Your photos are just there”, and I expect great things from Photo Stream in the future.
Speaking of photos and media: I can’t recommend Capture and Camera+ enough. Camera+ makes it incredibly easy and fun to snap photos, process them and save them back to the Camera Roll, whilst Capture is simply the best way to quickly record a video on your iPhone without dealing with the Camera’s awfully slow interface (even on iOS 5).
Even if I was away from my office, there were times I needed to take some notes, or save some ideas for later to outline them properly on my iPad or Mac. To capture notes on the go, I used a combination of Captio, Simplenote and Evernote – the latter is also capable of archiving images and audio recordings, which turned out to be quite useful (although some people stared at me while I was talking to my iPhone whispering secrets). With Captio, I’ve configured my Simplenote email address so I can launch the app, type something real quick, and hit Send to have the note immediately available in Simplenote. This is the method I used for extremely short notes I needed to get out as quickly as possible. For longer, and quite possibly more elaborated notes, I used the Simplenote iOS app, which is pretty nice to look at, fast, and elegant. I’m not a fan of Apple’s built-in Notes app – I like to keep my notes stored separately somewhere else than Mail, and the Simplenote/Evernote setup has worked well for me over the years. I’m seriously looking forward to the new Evernote for iPad though, as the current version of the app is just terrible and awkward. For all those other kinds of notes, I obviously used Day One.
When it wasn’t Simplenote, Capture or Twitterrific to keep me “busy” with my iPhone or iPad, it was because my devices were playing some music or a podcast. First off, a note on podcasts: my friends are not geeks and they don’t even know what 5by5 is, so podcasts are more of a personal enjoyment that I keep close to my ears with Instacast (which we all love here at MacStories) and the Jawbone Jambox, perfect for both music and podcasts. I managed to catch up on some of 5by5’s programming while away, but music was definitely a bigger part of my audio “setup” on vacation. And by setup I mean an iPhone, and iPad, and the aforementioned Jambox. My friends love the Jambox. They think it’s based on some kind of magic – I tried to tell them it’s just Bluetooth, but they’re still amazed by the quality of the speakers and how you can walk around the house, changing songs wirelessly. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced technology really looks like magic. I confirm everything I wrote in my old Jambox review: the thing has got great battery life and integration with iOS devices, quality of sound is excellent considering its size, and, overall, it’s the perfect device to bring on vacation with a group of friends. For podcasts or playlists, the Jambox turned out to be the trusted companion I knew it would be all along.
And last, there were games. My friends like to use my girlfriend’s original iPad to play games like Monopoly, Fruit Ninja, Battleship and Angry Birds Rio – admittedly, she curates a growing collection of games that are perfectly suited for local multiplayer on a single device. And when these games don’t have a functionality to keep track of scores from multiple players, they use the iPhone’s Notes app to write down results and individual records. I’m still impressed to see how the iPad has replaced the Wii or Xbox as a gaming device in our living room – this says a lot about the changes going on right now in the industry. Maybe my friends and I won’t ever be taken as an example of how iOS devices are disrupting the video game business, but I know from what I’ve seen so far that the iPad is the greatest thing to happen to multiplayer since the Wiimote. People can share a single device, play and have fun, watch and touch the screen as they hold the bezel with their fingers without needing an explanation of buttons and controls because it’s all about touching and swiping and pointing and, ultimately, having fun. It’s a different kind of gaming, one that seems to be taking off for real this time. The iPad is a gaming device for everyone, and while on vacation I saw how it can bring six people together, having genuine laughs as they couldn’t slice a banana in a Fruit Ninja competition.
As for the technical details, that iPad we used for games as well as all our other devices were connected to a single Personal Hotspot on my iPhone 4. 3G coverage was excellent at the camping (not so much down at the beach) with five full bars powering an iPad, iPad 2, MacBook Pro and, occasionally, an original iPhone (that’s right, one of friends still has one imported from the States in 2007 running Whited00r). The benefit of having Personal Hotspot always turned on and providing a connection to multiple devices at once is that you won’t notice a serious impact on data usage when nothing or no one is accessing the Internet, but you’re still able of doing fancy things like Automatic Downloads for apps, which are instantly pushed to any device configured with an Apple ID and connected to the Internet. As you can guess, this resulted in me having to download games for my friends from my iPad 2, because “I knew how the App Store worked”. Overall, huge thumbs up for Personal Hotspot – I’m glad I didn’t buy a 3G iPad.
Next year, I won’t be bringing my MacBook Air on vacation, because I know I won’t use it. The past two weeks have taught me that it’s important to unplug your brain from the Internet every once in a while, but also that mobile devices and apps have reached a point where you can trust your iPhone or iPad to be powerful replacements for your Mac. Some people say you can’t get things done on iOS – I believe the opposite it’s true. In many ways, iOS makes me feel more connected, productive and “safe” than my Mac.
