Today's continuation of the Hey.com In-App Purchase drama in the form of a widely-circulated response from Apple (and a Phil Schiller interview) inspired me to write a slightly different version of Apple's response letter:

---

Attention, Residents of Apartment #428:

We are writing to inform you that your appeal of our decision to evict you from The Orchards at Calabazas Creek (hereby referred to as “The Properties”) has been denied. Our investigation has uncovered clear and repeated violations of the Terms of your Lease Agreement that fully justify our decision to terminate your residency at The Properties. We have itemized your violations below:

Item 3, Section 1, Subpart 1 - Pet Weight Restrictions:

Per your Lease Agreement, you are allowed to have one dog in your apartment home at any given time. In addition, that dog must be subjected to regular weight-checks to ensure compliance with our strict 35lb weight limit. At last weigh-in, your dog weighed 42lbs, and as such is in violation of your Lease Agreement.

Item 3, Section 1, Subpart 3(a) - Pet Weight Restrictions by Breed:

Certain breeds of dog may be exempt from the weight restrictions listed in Item 3, Section 1, Subpart 1. Exempted breeds include (but are certainly not limited to) Golden Retrievers, Australian Shepherds, Yellow Labs, Black Labs, German Shepherds, Great Danes, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, full-sized Poodles, and other large breeds subject to an additional $20 per-pound-per-month surcharge. As your dog is a Golden Doodle and not included on the above list (and you have declined the large breed surcharges), you will not be granted an exception to the aforementioned weight limit.

Item 3, Section 1, Subpart 3(b) - Apartment Guests:

Per your Lease Agreement, guests may visit your apartment without prior written approval of The Properties provided they are residents at another Fruit Company Holdings property. However, guests in your apartment unit who do not meet this criteria must sign-in at one of the Guest Registration Kiosk located in each apartment building. You have instead been logging your visitors on an individual basis and sending them to Fruit Company Holdings via unapproved channels. This is a clear violation of your Lease Agreement.

Next Steps:

To resolve these issues and reacquire ownership of your apartment unit (and the personal belongings therein), please refrain from violating the Lease Terms itemized above (as well as the many other items delineated in your lengthy Lease Agreement).

There are a number of ways that you could revise your behavior to adhere to these Terms. For instance, you could reduce the number and/or amount of daily feedings your dog receives to encourage rapid weight loss — thereby adhering to the 35lb weight limit. Alternatively, you could re-home your dog in any of our cities’ local animal shelters and acquire a new dog from the list of weight limit-excepted breeds (or perhaps keep no pet at all) in order to be in compliance with the above Terms. Lastly, you could have your guests sign in to your apartment building using the approved Guest Registration Kiosks — or choose to not entertain guests for the duration of your Lease.

We are here as a resource as you explore these or other ideas to return to compliance with the terms of your Lease Agreement.

Thank you for being a resident of the Orchards at Calabazas Creek. We understand that you have been a resident of a Fruit Company Holdings property for over eight years, and have been diligent in paying your monthly rent on time. That said, you have opted out of our Deluxe Cable Subscription Package valued at $40/month, and have avoided any infractions that would have allowed us to seize your deposit in the last eight years of your tenancy. We are happy to continue to provide you with mediocre housing at slightly-above market prices — so long as you follow and respect the the same Lease Terms that all Fruit Company property residents must follow.

We hope to assist you moving back into a forever-home at the Orchards at Calabazas Creek.

Sincerely, Fruit Company Holdings, LLC

A group of 90+ indie app developers and designers combined their efforts to create a lovely sticker pack of including app icons and custom designs — with all proceeds being split 50/50 between the World Health Organization’s COVID Response Fund and the Equal Justice Initiative.

Beyond the fact that the developers spearheading this project include many names I recognize and respect, and ignoring the really slick stickers I’ll be getting in the mail sometime down the road, these are two incredibly important causes whose I am delighted to support through this project (and directly!), and encourage you to do the same.

While scrolling through Twitter today, I noticed a lot of folks outside the US have been disappointed at the high cost of international shipping on these sticker packs — in some cases the shipping exceeds the cost of the pack itself. Now, there’s nothing I personally can do to change the market rate for global shipping, but I can help out folks who might otherwise not be able to pay that higher shipping cost. As such, if you live outside the US and can verify a donation of $15 or more dollars directly to either the WHO COVID response fund or the Equal Justice Initiative, I’ll personally cover the full cost of an Indie Sticker Pack shipped right to your door. I’ll cover up to five (5) sticker packs for international folks who can verify a $15+ donation. You can reach out via Twitter or email me at matt@peerreviewed.io to verify your donation and coordinate ordering your sticker pack.

And while you’re here, check out this awesome promo video that motion graphic artist extraordinaire (and part-time white noise connoisseur) Charlie Chapman made for the Indie Sticker Pack:

After listening to Cortex #101: Productivity 101, I’ve finally decided to give a real task manager an honest try. Thanks to the helpful folks on the Relay FM Members Discord, I’ve settled on Todoist as the task manager that best suits my needs. My previous system involved a mix of calendar events, Due reminders (an app I’ve praised highly before), and hand-written task lists in various GoodNotes documents spanning all areas of my life. I very frequently jot down to-dos during meetings and brainstorming sessions in GoodNotes, but this method has the major flaw of my quickly-scribbled tasks disappearing in GoodNotes and never actually being completed. It’s this bit of my legacy system that need some integration with the new system centered around Todoist.

Step 1: A Template for Hand-Written To-Dos

The first step in connecting my GoodNotes task lists with Todoist is creating a standardized format for when I do jot down to-dos in a given GoodNotes document. Luckily, GoodNotes has excellent support for custom notebook templates, so I set out to modify the standard GoodNotes line-ruled notebook template for my purposes. This was simple enough — export a blank GoodNotes page to PDF, and use Graphic (or any other vector graphic app) to add an area to the document specifically to accept hand-written to-dos in a consistent format. I opted for a small bubble in the bottom left with enough space for five tasks at any given time. I intentionally chose to match the font and bullet colors with the the standard GoodNotes ruled lines, so that when I didn’t need to add any tasks that area would not be too distracting.

I also added a subtle “Date” line to my usual GoodNotes template, since I was going through all this effort anyway.

The small degree of structure added by five bulleted lines in a roundrect enclosure is an important ingredient in the success of this system (more on that in a moment) — that said, your own custom GoodNotes template may work just as well (if not better) for your specific needs.

Step 2: Tying GoodNotes and Todoist Together with Shortcuts

Perhaps a lesser-known feature of GoodNotes is its built-in ability to convert handwriting into text for saving or sharing to other apps, presumably using the same Vision framework that powers its document OCR. Using the lasso tool to select a handful of to-do items in the template we just made gives us the option to “Convert” those items into text. It ends up looking something like this:

Using the Lasso Tool to select hand-written tasks allows you to convert it to text and share it with another app...like Shortcuts.

Importantly, the generated text also maintains the separate lines we enforced with our five-bullet custom GoodNotes template — which means parsing this snippet of text with Shortcuts is a trivially easy task. All we need to get this list of tasks from GoodNotes to Todoist is a Shortcut with five actions:

Five simple actions takes my handwritten task list and sends each individual item to my Todoist Inbox.

Sharing the converted text from GoodNotes to this shortcut takes each line of text, converts it to Title Case, and add it as an individual task to my Todoist Inbox. With this simple shortcut, I can quickly convert all of my hand-written tasks from a meeting into actionable tasks in Todoist that are much harder to forget about. All I have to do is regularly triage my Todoist Inbox by adding due dates and reminders as needed to these imported tasks and sorting them into their appropriate projects. That said, the smallest of tweaks to the shortcut above lets you triage each item right away — simply change each of the parameters in the “Add Todoist Item” action to “Ask When Run”:

If you’d rather triage your tasks right when adding them to Todoist, only a small modification is needed.

One Less Point of Friction

As I experiment with Todoist and task management in general, it’s been convenient to maintain “backwards compatibility” with some of my harder-to-shake habits — like writing down things I need to do in my meeting notes document on the fly. The ability to take these quick to-dos and funnel them directly into my task management system helps keep important items from falling into the cracks, and motivates me to rely more heavily on Todoist going forward.

You can click the following links to download the simple “GoodNotes ⭢ Todoist Inbox” shortcut, or the more complex “GoodNotes ⭢ Todoist Project Picker” shortcut for your own use. You can also download a PDF of my custom GoodNotes template here.

Since the release of Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12, and even more-so since iOS 13 opened up Shortcuts parameters to third-party developers, “Shortcuts utility apps” — apps who by their nature rely entirely on Shortcuts integration to function — have exploded in both number and quality. Apps like Toolbox Pro and Pushcuts all build on what Shortcuts has to offer with otherwise-unavailable features or useful add-ons to the functionality of the Shortcuts app. Joining their ranks today is the super-handy data visualization app Charty, from developer Rodrigo Araujo

Charting, of Course

Charty is built entirely around the goal of plotting data generated via Siri Shortcuts so you can more easily visualize your habits, health data, and other graphically-oriented information. Through a pair of crucial Shortcuts actions — Create Chart and Add Series to Chart — you can create a blank canvas to plot data generated by a series of Shortcuts action as a line graph, scatter graph, bar graph, pie chart, or donut chart. The easiest example to provide is a simple Shortcut that pulls in your heart rate data for the last month and plots it on a scatter plot.

Disregard all of those days where I neglected to wear my Apple Watch.

After plotting all of the points, you can fine-tune the settings of your chart in the Charty app itself (or automate this process too with advanced actions like Style Axis and Style Line Series). Custom minimum and maximum values for both the X- and Y-axes, the option to add a secondary Y-axis for multi-series graphs, customizable X-Axis labels when needed, as well as the ability to create stacked bar charts are all available through Charty and the power of Shortcuts. Charty also allows you to plot data imported directly from a .csv file — expanding its capabilities beyond data strictly generated by or connected to Shortcuts. Simply point your Shortcut at a .csv file and tell Charty which column headers you want plotted and you’re off to the races. I’m looking forward to see how Rodrigo continues to expand Charty’s functionality — as a researcher, I’m hoping to see boxplots, trendlines with regression equations, logarithmic corrections, and other more advanced plotting methods added in future releases.

There are lots of Shortcuts actions and routines that generate data and could easily benefit from a simple bar graph or pie chart to provide useful insights more quickly and effectively. One example that comes to mind is graphing time-tracking data from Toggl once every week, let’s say, to see what tasks or projects you’ve been the most busy with — all without having to open the unpleasant Toggl app or the clunky web client from your iOS device. Charty is the perfect companion for those who accumulate lots of meta-data about their lives and want to frequently revisit and reassess the areas they are seeking to improve — whether that be calories burned, books read, or tasks completed, Charty plugs right into your existing Shortcuts routines and allows you to quickly turn those datasets into easily-digestible graphics. The option to create default chart format settings and custom “Export Profiles” of chart size, font size, and background color both help to add consistency in how your charts are formatted before saving them for yourself or sharing with the world.

The ability to create custom export profiles is a great way to standardize how your charts look when ready to share.

Charty also comes pre-equipped with a library of Shortcuts that serve as idea-fodder for what things you can graph as well as mini-tutorials on how to create complex Shortcuts that integrates even Charty’s most advanced actions. And, naturally, two dozen or so custom app icons and a wide variety of chart themes are pre-installed for the colorfully-oriented among us.

Charty’s custom icons, graph theme options, and extensive collection of example Shortcuts each add a nice touch.

Useful, Given a Usecase

The only major complaint I’ve had while beta-testing Charty is the sense that it just isn’t an app that I personally have a use for. This doesn’t make Charty a bad app — quite the opposite is true, in fact. Charty is an excellent app in its very niche sliver of the market. The nature of what I do as a PhD student might make you think that I am making charts and graphs all the time, but in reality the data analysis work I often need to do is well beyond what Charty (or any other iOS app I know of) can provide. Unfortunately, this is an area where I still rely heavily on my Windows PC to accomplish the things that my iPad can’t. In addition, once you are comfortable with different tools — whether it’s Shortcuts, Excel, Numbers, etc — you’ll feel drawn to the ones that give you the highest return for the least effort. I am extremely comfortable with spreadsheet software like Excel, so there were many instances while using Charty where I said to myself “I know exactly how to do this in Excel in 1/10th the time.” This isn’t a criticism of Charty; it’s understanding my own needs, my own proficiencies, and Charty’s unique place in the market of graphing tools. Let me explain what I mean with, well, a chart:

Finding where you land on each of these lines will give you an idea of how useful Charty might be for you.

Charty is an app that is tailor-made for advanced Shortcuts users who very frequently want to graph the same set of data quickly with minimal fuss over the details — things like graphing how many steps you’ve taken or glasses of water you drank in the last week. Charty is also capable of graphing much more advanced datasets with its .csv import actions...but often times when generating those .csv documents you’re already in an application far more capable than Shortcuts and Charty when it comes to handling tables and graphs. If you’re like me and are very comfortable in applications like Numbers and Excel, Charty might feel like a lot of extra fiddling for the same end results.

Pushing The Limits That Should Not Exist

Ultimately, I think there are a lot of people who will be extremely happy to have Charty integrated into their Shortcuts routines and available to quickly and repeatedly graph data on their iOS devices — and I’m quite happy for them. The developer has made a very well-designed app and an excellent addition to the growing array of Shortcuts utilities pushing the limits of what Shortcuts can do. Although I myself may not be someone who will use Charty every day, I’m always happy to see new apps that keep the pressure on Apple to continue expanding Shortcuts’ functionality and third-party integrations. Despite my own lack of uses for Charty, I still highly recommend giving it a try for yourself — it solves a set of problems I do not have, but you just might! Charty is available on the app store today for free with a portion of the Shortcuts actions and features, and the full app experience can be had for a one-time payment of $2.99 for a limited time.

Last week, I posted my first impressions of the new Magic Keyboard for the 11” iPad Pro, as well as a quick demo on Twitter of just how precisely balanced the Magic Keyboard is. What I largely glossed over, however, are some of the finer details that in many ways help justify the name of “Magic” Keyboard. Let’s take a moment to appreciate (or perhaps invent) some of the subtle hardware design choices in this device, and while we’re at it jot down some measurements for posterity.

Fantastic Details and Where to Find Them

Much of the focus in any review of an iPad keyboard-case will inevatibly fall on the keyboard and the form factor. Less attention is paid to some of the minor details worthy of appreciation. To correct that, I’ve assembled below my brief list of “Fantastic Details of the Magic Keyboard That I Assume Were Intentional Design Choices”:

• The USB-C passthrough port lies on the opposite side of the iPad Pro’s USB-C port. This is a super obvious choice, but still one that greatly improves user experience when trying to charge from a power supply on the left side of your device.
• Flipping the iPad Pro/Magic Keyboard combo 180° results in a preposterously perfect drawing angle (if removing the iPad is too cumbersome for you). This definitely wasn’t intentional, but I love it nonetheless.
• Pressing the volume buttons on the iPad doesn’t shake or move the device an inch — doing so with the iPad in a Smart Folio kickstand was a wobbly mess.
• The Apple logo  on the back of the Magic Keyboard is vertical while the iPad is in landscape orientation — which makes sense, since this keyboard is intended to only be used in landscape orientation.
• These two flat protrusions on the barrel hinge that seemingly only exists to protect your iPad from being scratched by the hinge (or vice versa) if it’s somehow detached from the magnets while closed. (If someone comes up with a better idea, please let me know)
• The barely-detectable ridge around the circumference of the keyboard deck that prevents the keycaps from smudging (or worse: scratching) the iPad’s screen.

I’m sure there are more small decisions and choices that I’ve overlooked that could easily be added to this list. Many of the items above may seem trivial, but ultimately I think that its the attention to detail in certain devices that end up setting them apart as some of the best in their class — and the Magic Keyboard is certainly the best iPad Pro keyboard on the market.

Angle Gauges, Dial Indicators, and Calipers, Oh My!

There are a lot of questions (and side-by-side comparisons) about the Magic Keyboard’s hinge angle — the most popular among them being “How far back does the hinge tilt?” Well, I grabbed a digital angle gauge from my wood shop (and some calipers and a dial indicator — more on that later) to answer that question. As it turns out, the 11” Magic Keyboard has a usable range of 77° to 127° of tilt angle. 77° is the angle of the initial hard-snapping point when opening the keyboard — technically lower angles are possible (at least with the 11” iPad Pro), but really anything lower than this point is untenable. And 127° is the maximum tilt angle of the 11” Magic Keyboard. I checked the maximum hinge angle of my wife’s 13” MacBook Air and it was 141° — meaning the Magic Keyboard is about 14° shy of the Mac laptop experience.

Turns out those magnets are good for other things too.

The keys on the Magic Keyboard, however, easily replicate the experience of typing on on a laptop — they are some of the most satisfying low-travel keys I’ve ever experienced. At my desktop I use a Ducky One 2 TLK mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Brown swithces, so I am partial to a keyboard with a lot of travel and a pleasant tactile bump. Although the Magic Keyboard obviously comes nowhere near a full mechanical keyboard in either department, somehow it feels more responsive and bouncy than any other keyboard I’ve used in its size class. I don’t have a 16” MacBook Pro to compare the “type-feel” with, but I have tried out it’s keyboard when walking by at Costco in the Before Times™️ — for some reason, the Magic Keyboard feels better to me than the seemingly-identical scissor switches in the 16” MacBook Pro. My theory is that the thin deck of the Magic Keyboard somehow gives more spring-back to the keys when you bottom them out while typing, whereas the 16” MacBook Pro has the full thickness of a laptop to potentially dampen any such springiness.

1mm of key travel seems to be the sweet-spot for Apple devices going forward.

In addition to bounce-back and springiness, key travel and key spacing both play a big role in the typing experience of any keyboard — so I borrowed a page out of Marco Arment’s playbook and measured the key travel and spacing on a few keyboards to compare with the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. (Full disclosure: I was unable to measure every device in the graph below — measurements marked with an asterisk were taken from Marco’s 16” MacBook Pro review, which is really worth a read).

The Magic Keyboard’s 1mm key travel is a continuation of Apple’s course-correction first seen in the 16” MacBook Pro.

I think Apple has probably found 1mm of key travel to be the Goldilocks Zone of maximum thinness and adequate key travel for a good typing experience. I expect most Apple keyboards will stick to ~1mm of key travel for the forseeable future.

Key spacing on the Magic Keyboard has been perfectly fine for me, even for someone accostomed to a spacious mechanical keyboard.

I’ve seen some folks on Twitter saying that the key spacing on the Magic Keyboard makes the keyboard too cramped — especially on the 11” iPad Pro. But based on my measurements the spacing itself is fairly comparable to the 16” MacBook Pro. I think the cramped feeling stems from the half-sized peripheral keys (including the dash key I use so overzealously), and the fact that the Smart Keyboard Folio has more key spacing than the Magic Keyboard (although, it paid for this with smaller keycaps). That said, it’s taken very little time to acclimate to the size constraints of the Magic Keyboard; though I do look forward to testing out the 12.9” Magic Keyboard when we’re able to go to stores again.

The Sum of More Than Its Parts

After a week and a half of using the Magic Keyboard, the experience has only grown more positive — the pleasing subtleties of the details above have added to the list of rationalizations for why this device might be worth $300...even though I still think it’s still a bit over-priced. That said, I’ve felt all of my usage habits with my iPad Pro shift over the last week and a half to fully-embrace the Magic Keyboard as part of my workflow. It’s really been wonderful to be able to type wherever I want to, with a keyboard that feels exactly how I want it to. My return window for the Magic Keyboard hasn’t closed yet, so nothing is set in stone...but I think I’ll end up keeping it after all. It fits my needs well, and the price will be easier to bear once I resell the other keyboards I’ve accumulated to get “real work” done on an iPad Pro.

Today I saw this post on r/iPad from /u/jdayellow — in it, they’ve plugged one end of a USB-C cable into the iPad and the other end into the Magic Keyboard’s USB-C passthrough port (thus: “unlimited power”). As it turns out, Apple considered the possibility users might use the two USB-C ports to create a universal connector ouroboros and included a warning on the Magic Keyboard’s support page:

This warning is very reassuring.

I’m not entirely sure what the consequences of doing this would be, considering the wattage output from the iPad Pro is substantially lower than most chargers that you might plug into the Magic Keyboard’s USB-C passthrough port. Anyway, finding this support page also turned up this .gif of the Magic Keyboard being opened (sped up with some Shortcuts magic):

Satisfying.

When the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro was announced, many users (myself included) were disappointed at the lack of hardware media keys — especially ones to manually control the brightness of the long-awaited backlit keys. Alas, the only way to currently do so is to navigate to Settings > General > Keyboard > Hardware Keyboard (or a bit faster using Federico Viticci’s shortcut workaround). However, it seems plainly obvious that a backlight brightness slider should live in Control Center. I present a simple mock up of what that might look like:

Adding a keyboard brightness slider as a long-press option to the system brightness slider is a no-brainer.

Barring a complete overhaul of the main Control Center dropdown when a Magic Keyboard is connected, I think the long-press menu of the system brightness slider is where an additional slider for backlight brightness should live. Swipe down, long-press, adjust brightness, and you’re done!

Call me, Tim Apple.

At the end of March, Apple announced the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, and iPad fans the world over rejoiced at the prospect of a first-party solution to their years-long productivity problem. Those of us who use the iPad as our primary device (the mythical “laptop replacers”) have longed for the ideal keyboard-case that brings it as close to the laptop form factor as possible without abandoning what makes the iPad an iPad. I received my 11” Magic Keyboard on Wednesday, and have been using it for the last two days to send emails, edit work documents, conduct Zoom meetings, watch Netflix, and write this post. Even in that short time, it’s clear that the Magic Keyboard is Apple adeptly striking the delicate balance between portability and performance...at an unfortunately uncompromising price point of $299.

Priced by the Pound

The most noticeable trait of the Magic Keyboard is its heft. Even before opening the slim and unassuming UPS packaging, it felt like I had received a plate of lead in the mail. It’s an incredibly dense device, with much of the weight concentrated in the keyboard‘s base to offset the weight of the iPad in it’s floating cantilevered perch. In fact, the 11” Magic Keyboard weighs more than the iPad Pro it is designed to hold by ~130 grams. My wife and I tried to compare her 2013 13” MacBook Air to my 11” iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard by feel and had a very difficult time determining which felt heavier (turns out, the Air is heavier by ~270 grams). I’ve definitely struggled to get used to the substantial increase in weight from just the Smart Folio to the Magic Keyboard encasing my iPad — however, given my current lack of mobility due to COVID-19, I find it hard to assess how much this will bother me. I think I won’t really know how I feel about the added weight until I am out and about with my iPad again.

The center of gravity on the iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard is so far back that the entire keyboard can float off an edge.

Other than the physical weight of the device, the overall build quality is excellent — a firm keyboard deck with essentially no flex, a sturdy hinge that almost takes too much force to adjust, and much stronger magnets securing the iPad than those found in the Smart Folio. The USB-C passthrough port on the barrel hinge is an excellent addition to this keyboard, finally allowing us to charge our iPads without unattractively dangling a wire from the iPad’s USB-C port — not to mention that it frees up the USB-C port on the iPad for a storage drive or other USB accessory.

The Keys to Success

The main draw of the Magic Keyboard is, well, the keyboard, and I’ll get right to the main takeaway: These keys are fantastic. Gone are the somewhat-mushy, fabric-covered butterfly switches of the Smart Keyboard Folio — these are full scissor switches with backlighting to boot. Typing on this keyboard feels almost more tactile than typing on other scissor switch keyboards in the MacBook line — I only have my wife’s somewhat-old 13” Air to test with, and the Magic Keyboard’s keys feel far more resistive and bouncy (though I admit this may be due to the age of our control group). The adaptive (and manually-adjustable) backlighting is an excellent addition to what is frankly an impressive keyboard for its size and thickness. I will say that some of the periphery keys feel too cramped and small to consistently hit — count how many dashes I’ve used so far and assume at least half of them involved me missing the tiny half-sized dash key. But even after just a short time of using the Magic Keyboard, I’m beginning to acclimate to those half-sized keys and my accuracy is improving rapidly.

The Magic Keyboard is hands-down the best portable keyboard for the iPad Pro on the market.

The trackpad of the Magic Keyboard is as excellent as you’d expect from Apple — though a bit shorter than I’d prefer. The trackpad clicks mechanically across the entire surface area — no haptics, actual clicks. And the substantially improved cursor support in iOS 13.4 paired with the fluid gestures built into the hardware makes navigating iPadOS a breeze. My only complaints about the trackpad are its size (which I can get over), and that some of my most-used gestures require three fingers — like swapping quickly between recent apps. Would some customizability in the system gestures be asking for too much?

My previous iPad keyboard of choice was the Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard — obviously optimizing for portability. The scissor switches of the Magic Keyboard are infinitely more pleasant than the chicklet style keys you may recognize from Microsoft’s Surface line, and the complete lack of key spacing on the Microsoft foldable keyboard means the 2.75mm of key spacing found on the Magic Keyboard feels almost luxurious to me. And considering the Magic Keyboard also comes with a trackpad too, it’s really no contest. Apple‘s recent struggles with keyboard problems seem to be blessedly behind them; much like the new keyboard in the 16” MacBook Pro, this keyboard feels like a return to the durable and reliable keyboards of years past.

A Pivotal Component

The keyboard is excellent. The weight may tilt the scales, but it’s too early to tell. Now to consider the hinge. As previously mentioned, it is an impressively stiff mechanism — I almost wish less force was needed to adjust the angle of the iPad between minimum and maximum tilt. That said, opening the iPad from closed to almost the maximum tilt angle is possible with one hand (though a little jiggling is necessary to get the keyboard to flop open). Unfortunately, that max tilt angle seems just shy of what I would consider ideal for some of my go-to workspaces. It’s adequate in most positions, like on a lap and even most desks — but I’m fairly tall and also like to use my iPad while standing at counters and other places where more tilt range would be appreciated.

The integral USB-C passthrough port is a welcome addition to the Magic Keyboard’s feature list.

I have found that the lower screen angles (even at the < 90° angle the barrel hinge snaps to before tilting) have been useful when watching shows in bed with my wife. The Smart Folio has been decidedly mediocre in this task, so having a way to suspend the iPad screen at an acute angle is actually more useful than I previously thought. In fact, I think what I’ve appreciated most regarding the hinge so far is it’s overall improvement in stability compared to the Smart Folio. It seems obvious, given that the Magic Keyboard has a much larger base to rest on than the triangular origami tent of the Smart Folio, but that extra stability has really made a difference. The Magic Keyboard’s powerful magnets, heavy base, and rigid hinge make tapping on the screen or adjusting the volume feel like pressing on a wall.

The Bottom Line

It’s pretty apparent that this is the best iPad typing experience on the market that still preserves the iPad’s portability and flexibility — switching from “laptop mode” to “tablet mode” is as easy as grab-and-go. The set of tradeoffs presented with the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro are, in my estimation, a precise threading of the needle. It’s heavy, but not too heavy. The iPad remains solidly grounded when typing, yet fluidly freed when needed. And the value added by the backlit scissor switch keyboard far exceeds the cost of weight, thickness, and managing form-factor transitions...

...However, I’m not sure the value exceeds the monetary cost of the Magic Keyboard. Retailing for $299 (+tax!) in-essence means this keyboard case is worth nearly 50% of the iPad it holds, and almost twice as much as the Smart Folio Keyboard it ostensibly replaces. My purchase was largely rationalized by Apple’s currently-extended return policy due to the COVID-19 pandemic (and I seem to have persuaded others with this logic), but I’m still unsure if I plan to keep the Magic Keyboard or not. In my opinion, this product should have retailed at $199 and the Smart Folio Keyboard should have slid down to $129 — the price floor to have an excellent typing experience on the excellent iPad Pro is just too high. This is a fantastic keyboard, and very nearly every aspect of its design and function is praiseworthy — I just wish that it came with a less discouraging price tag. Since the debut of the iPad Pro, many have discovered how capable and enjoyable the "iPad lifestyle" can be — Apple should prioritize reducing the monetary barrier to entry to what I consider their highest-potential product line.

I just finished installing a new CPU heatsink on my desktop PC; a new-in-box Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4 I got a good deal on from a reseller on r/HardwareSwap. It’s an excellent heatsink, especially considering how excessive it is for my Ryzen 5 2600X CPU (I’m essentially passively cooling my PC!). Now, I could review the Dark Rock 4 as I have other products; highlighting its pros and cons, assessing it’s price-point, and elaborating on why it is (or isn’t) a good fit for my needs. But ultimately, that wouldn’t fully explain why I bought it. My stock AMD Wraith CPU cooler was more than sufficient, and I certainly didn’t need to burn $55. What I needed was a project; some mechanical task I could do with my hands. What I needed was a sense that even through all this uncertainty and chaos, there was something in my life that I could disassemble and rebuild as better than it was before.

The Dark Rock 4 is a good CPU heatsink. It was a better “bulwark against madness”.

I’ve been exclusively working from home since the first week of March due to the COVID-19 pandemic that quite nearly everyone has been affected by. Transitioning to 100% work from home has been challenging, mostly in the area of keeping myself sane. I’m spoiled to have a job where there is plenty for us to be doing from the safety of our homes, I’m spoiled to have a desk with a computer where I can do that work from, and I am spoiled to have a wife and a dog to keep my home feeling like home through all of this mess. Many reading this may be more spoiled, and some perhaps less — regardless, home isolation, perpetually bleak news, and the creeping anxiety caused by a global virus outbreak can really take a toll on one’s mental health.

I’ve had productive days, and I’ve certainly had unproductive ones too; but one thing that I’ve noticed (now, as well as during other stressful times in my life) is that I periodically need a tactile project to clear my mind and calm my spirit. Most often this need is satisfied by working in my wood shop (which I am also incredibly spoiled to have) — today, it was the anticipation of receiving the CPU heatsink I carefully selected and hunted for a deal on, the process of delicately affixing it to my PC’s motherboard, and the fine-tuning of fan RPM curves to quiet the noise my computer makes as much as possible.

“You aren’t working from home — you are at home during a crisis trying to work.” - Unknown

The unnecessary purchase of and frivolous fiddling with a computer part may seem both wasteful and trivial, but in these unusual times it also meant much more to my sanity than the money or time it “cost” me. You probably have a hobby or interest that may feel much the same — lean into it. If spending a little extra money on a high-quality calligraphy set, a handsome piece of figured walnut, a Nintendo Switch, or a CPU heatsink is what it takes to give you a sense of normalcy and safeguard your mental health, do so. There’s an excellent quote circulating on Twitter lately: “You aren’t working from home — you are at home during a crisis trying to work.” Your first priority should be you and your family’s physical and mental health. Much has been said about the former — don’t neglect the latter. Find what brings you joy when things are hard. Reference good resources (like IsolatedNotAlone.com). Consider what little things you can do to settle your mind the next time anxiety over world events takes hold, or what gift you can give to yourself or a loved one to brighten an otherwise gloomy day. Because we all sometimes need “bulwarks against madness...museums against entropy.”

Last week, my wife and I had our first game in a local rec center volleyball league. We usually do sand volleyball in the summer, but since it's January an indoor league was our only option. As it so happens, this is also my first time playing volleyball since upgrading from a Series 3 to a Series 5 Apple Watch.

You may know where this is going.

Our team circled up to practice a bit before the game, and I bumped the ball across the circle. Moments later my Apple Watch was buzzing up a storm. "It looks like you've taken a hard fall." I laughed and told my wife as it happened — how funny that bumping a volleyball tricked the Apple Watch into thinking I had fallen and couldn't get up.

The Fall Detection feature is quite useful, I just hope that crying wolf on a volleyball court doesn’t bite me if I actually fall one day.

Then it happened three more times, on three consecutive bumps. The humor quickly turned into annoyance, and I ditched my Apple Watch for the remainder of our volleyball night. Perhaps Apple needs to add more customization or contextual smarts to the fall detection feature — the option to automatically disable it during certain Workout types that incessantly trigger false positives, for example. Better yet: they should add this and other Apple Watch Settings toggles to Shortcuts; then I could make my own set of Automations for this exact purpose!