I’m not an iPad person, even though I’ve used one since the day they were released. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks they can be anywhere near as productive on an iPad as on a “real” computer. Stockholm Syndrome or something, I always figured, but smarter people than I are doing it, so who’m I to judge?

Riccardo Mori has a few comments on the beta of Safari 15 showed up. Here’s one:

In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards, sacrificing horizontal space to give us what, 28 more vertical pixels?

I can’t begin to describe how deeply I dislike the new tab handling in Safari 15.

Curio to help manage the project. I opened the Curio project and within thirty seconds of just looking at the workspace I had a handle on the project and easily found an answer to the questions I’d been asked.

Whenever I revisit something that I’d created in TheBrain or a mind map or Curio or Tinderbox, I find the spatial layout of the information to be instantly useful.

I’m almost certainly using Zotero wrong.

Instead of for citations and research, I’m using Zotero as a bookmarking tool and read-later service, and it’s working really well. Is no one else doing this?

I’ve used many tools meant for saving links for later, from del.icio.us to Pinboard to Instapaper to Pocket to Raindrop. All of them are fine. Some focus on social bookmarking, some on archiving, some are meant as “read later” services. And all of them are prettier than Zotero. And yet…

Riccardo Mori:

But this review was underwhelming and, as I commented on Twitter, with unusual fanboyish tones I’ve never really detected in his past product reviews.

I notice that when someone agrees with a review, it’s “thoughtful and detailed.” When one disagrees, however, it’s “a brief from Apple’s marketing department”.

TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to rudimentarylathe.wiki.

For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday.

It’s the “elsewhere” part that drove me nuts. I have a private Roam database in which I would track things I don’t want to share. Or maybe I should write it in Org mode. Or Obsidian, or Craft, or or or. The difficult part for me has been that I want to take a note about, say, a new camera purchase. There are two components to it, the information about the camera itself, and information about the purchase. The former is public, the latter is private. This means I create one note in TiddlyWiki and one in, let’s say, Roam. There are dozens of examples like this, and it’s crazy-making. I thought I could manage this using links or copy/paste but it sucks trying to do that. I could also make everything public or private. Neither of these are feasible.

Software-wise, this incredibly powerful iPad is as capable as a 2014 iPad Air 2 (the oldest iPad model that can run iPadOS 14). There is still, in my opinion, a substantial software design gap preventing iPads from being as flexible as they are powerful. Software-wise, iPadOS still lacks flow. Don’t wave Shortcuts in my face as a way of objecting. Shortcuts are a crutch. A good one, no doubt, but a crutch nonetheless. Software automation can do great things for an operating system, but if an operating system comes to depend on it to become usable, then maybe you have to rethink a thing or two.

It’s 2021; structured data and ~transclusion~ are still the sidewalk around the quad, while screenshots are the diagonal desire path, worn to bare dirt

It’s embarrassing how true this is. His tweet was part of a short thread about Multiverse, which is something else entirely, and it’s adorable.

As an experiment, I’m going to live the month of May in “Easy Mode”. This means I’m going to solve problems with quick, obvious, easy solutions. I’m going to use the easy-to-use tools. And I’m going to make various processes as easy as possible.

reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this:

If you are thinking about getting one, I have no reservations recommending that you do. The hardware is very nice and the experience of writing on it is terrific. It’s not exactly like paper, but it does feel analog. It feels “real”, unlike using the iPad and Apple Pencil, which feels like writing on a computer screen.