Saturday, April 15, 2017

Delaying the Upgrade

When I joined my current company the hiring boss asked me what computer he should buy for me and I said, "nothing yet. Next week is WWDC and I'll be they are going to announce something cool." It did not dissapoint as they announced the first retina computer and he got me a maxed out Retina MacBook Pro. That good and faithful servant lasted with me for four and half years and then finally gave out when it started to kernel panic everytime it swapped from the intergrated GPU to the discrete GPU. Funny thing about that? It happened precisely two months after Apple's GPU recall ended for that machine.
When my work computer died, I had a week where I exclusively used my iPad Mini to do my job and it worked pretty darn well. The most impressive thing I think I was doing is that every day I had to download a 80MB text file from SFTP, run some regex search/replace on it, and then upload the processed file to another SFTP. Holy moly, Coda for iPad did that with very few issues. Anyway, my list of Pro apps that I used!

  • Coda 2 - I don't actually do website development with this, but the SFTP engine (it's Transmit!) combined with a text editor that could actually handle regex process of files that are 800,000 lines long made this an amazing app for some of the work I needed.
  • Airmail - Funny thing here is that I would much rather have used Gmail app for this process, but it doesn't support split screen multitasking so I had to use this instead.
  • Microsoft OneNote - I know that Evernote is the darling of the industry, but when they changed their pricing model I swapped to OneNote.  Totally free and works great between my iPad, iPhone, and new MacBook Pro.
  • Hangouts / JoinMe - I spent all of my days in video conferences with coworker and customers and these programs work "just fine."  This is *THE* major blocker for me using my iPad for everything, because I need to be able to screen share presentations and web page demos.  Also - why doesn't Hangouts support split-screen multitasking?!?  (Google!)
  • Slack - yeah, we use Slack. It's gross and works fine.
  • OpenVPN - I was mostly just surprised that OpenVPN had an iOS app and it worked just fine.  I kind of expected that it couldn't, but it did, and that's cool.
  • Productivity - These all works great whether it was Apple Pages, Numbers, Keynote or Microsoft Words, Excel, Powerpoint or Google Docs, Sheets, Slides. We use all of them and it's great.

So for my real job that I am paid for there were two challenges I had. The first was that I couldn't screenshare the way I need to. That was basically a deal breaking.
The second was that I do a lot of REST API scriping for demo's using Bash and it doesn't look like I've got a good options for that either. The best bet I have is Pythonista, but technically speaking all of our scripting is done is Bash - so I'm going rogue if I use Python to do it.