The question: Can this iPad Pro replace my laptop? Apple is strongly promoting the affirmative, and after a week and a half of learning, much of it by trial and error because those who develop apps and operating systems prefer making users go on treasure hunts and solve puzzles rather than provide clear instructions, I agree. With the single exception of maintaining inthepresentsea.com, which I do with iWeb long abandoned by Apple, I can do everything I need or want to on this iPad Pro, and most of it better and more enjoyably than on my MacBook.
Many of the solutions I have discovered have been random. My faulty depth perception often causes me to tap a touch screen at a spot other than that for which I was aiming and often the miss hit has been instructive and useful.
The final problem to be resolved was how to upload entries to the journal. By chance I found that an app I no longer use, Swifkey, was commandeering the Apple Smart Folio keyboard and rendering it useless. Deleting Swifkey and all is now well. I think.
(I was wrong about Swifkey being the cause of the problem. It still exists when editing a post in Blogger. Perhaps some conflict with Pages, Safari and Blogger. Thus I am trying a new format, not indenting paragraphs.)
Along the way I found much useless and outdated information, an example being the keyboard short-cuts in Apple’s own Pages that include using the function key. The Smart Folio keyboard does not have a function key.
Even though I often mis-touch, I really like the touch screen and increasingly find myself futilely touching the screen when I go back to my MacBook.
Face ID is a welcome advance.
The display is a joy and big enough so that split screen is useful.
Many of the sites I routinely visit, including the NY TIMES and THE GUARDIAN, are far better on the iPad Pro than on iPhone or even the MacBook. As are, of course, the chartplotting apps.
Of chartplotting apps, I did not have detailed charts of Panama in iSailor and bought that region from iSailor yesterday. After downloading it to this iPad, I picked up my iPhone and went through the purchase procedure again until I got a window that said, “You have already purchased this. Would you like to download it again for free?” Obviously. Then to my iPad mini. With iNavX I would have had to pay multiple times and again whenever I replace a device in the future.
I also downloaded the IOS version of LuckGrib, which when first opened has a clever and useful series of tutorials.
So, except for maintaining the main site—and I just added to the Wit page: I face oblivion with equanimity, although I am apprehensive about the probable pain in the process—and accessing the C-Map charts and chartplotting app, my MacBook is history and this iPad Pro is the future.
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Louise, my oldest friend in terms of how long we have known one another, recently mentioned a Thanksgiving she and her then male companion had at my Grandmother’s house in Mission Beach. I recalled the occasion. Neither Louise or I can recall if I was then ‘with wife.’
Louise commented on how well my then aged Grandmother cooked and prepared the dinner.
I am not sure of the exact year, but I smiled to myself as I realized that however old my Grandmother was then, she was younger than I am now.
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From Guy in England comes a quote from Samuel Beckett, “If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory Reply, it is the question of what am I doing.”
