Going All In on iPad

Hello and welcome to Daily ish for February 2. It's Friday. It's, feels like minus 31 outside with the wind chill. Minus 21 is the actual temperature, and it's really freaking cold. But this is not a weather podcast.

This podcast is, however, brought to you by Patreon supporters such as yourself at patreon.com/ichris and also by coffee and a smart lav plus from Rode. But I'll explain more about that in a second. This episode of Daily(ish) begins a bit of an experiment where I have recently picked up a refurbished iPad Pro 10 inch, and I'm gonna see over the next month or so if I'm able to run most or all of my business from iOS. There's a bit of a logistics reason for this that I'll get into later in future episodes, but for now it's been an, it's an experiment that I've kind of wanted to try and not for any sort of sadomastic reasons where just trying to inflict punishment on myself, but just to give iOS and in particular the iPad as a platform, a sort of thorough attempts and working through to see if it can make sense. And main reason being is because I'm cheap and new Mac hardware, I still like the Mac platform, I like Mac hardware, but MacBooks, MacBook Pros, that kind of stuff is so expensive.

I have, I don't have a lot of problem, putting money in, like in terms of my business and investment into a desktop iMac, that makes a lot of sense to me. It's where I spend most of my day. It's what I would do a lot of my work on. I need it to be fast to plow through, videos and podcast exporting and all that kind of stuff. But in the mobile space where if I'm out at a coffee shop or meeting a client or even if I'm on vacation or something, I need to do some work, I want to be able to take something with me, but I don't want to have to spend $2,000 plus for for a Mac laptop.

It's especially bad right now, I think with currency exchange rates with The US, maybe there's some Bitcoin to be blamed in there as well. And, and so I thought I saw some iPad Pros on, in the refurb side that were basically what I was looking at, at retail price, but like a $150 cheaper. And so I decided to jump on it. And so that's what I'm recording on right now actually is, with a SmartLav plus Rode lapel microphone. I'm trying it out, which, got as a Christmas gift this year from my parents actually.

And, and then into Ferret for iOS, which is a funny named app for, recording and audio editing, but it's multi track audio editor for iPad and iPhone. And so we'll see what it sounds like. I don't think the microphone itself isn't going to be obviously as good as my Heil PR 40, but, in terms of being able to use it for mobile recording or recording interviews with somebody as an Amazon email pops up. Sorry. I've got to turn off notifications while I'm recording.

Otherwise it's going to distract me too. And I have some other mics that I can try. There's an adapter that hasn't arrived yet, the the lightning to USB camera dock connector thingy for the iPad that would allow me to plug in a USB mic and possibly even my my Sapphire Pro or Sapphire USB mixer interface thingy that would basically allow me to use my Heil PR40 or any microphone I want with the iPad. So that'll be coming this week, next week sometime, so I'll try that out again with that. But so far, what I did today was, as part of good stuff, I published my brother in law's, sister in law's podcast way too seriously.

And it's a, in terms of audio stuff, it's fairly simple. They do all the editing, cutting things out and Basically just a bit of touch ups in terms of EQ and stuff that I do, and then put it into our good stuff, CMS. And so just, there wasn't a lot of, I knew there wasn't a lot of audio stress that I would have to have in terms of finicky editing or lining things up or anything like that really. And so I thought it'd be a good way to test to see how well it could work. And aside from our CMS itself, we use something called Siteleaf to manage what is basically Jackal GitHub repo.

But Siteleaf itself, the browser version on iPad for whatever reason is, doesn't allow me to see what I need to see to edit a particular episode, so I had to basically fall back on my iMac to edit that. But otherwise it worked fairly well. ICloud Drive is really actually quite powerful, if you use it on a modern iPad, and also, that combined with Dropbox, combined with Pixelmator for iOS, which I had from before, instead of using Photoshop for editing artwork and things like that, and also, yeah, Ferrets, the audio editing app that I'm recording in right now. It's a multi track editor, like I said, and it's, really slick. So far, there's a the I ordered one of the Apple Pencils, which will help with sort of fine tuning any edits and things like that that I might want to do if while I'm recording or editing, on the iPad because it is like, I don't know, maybe I just have fat fingers.

Well, I do have fat fingers, but it's also kind of finicky trying to like press in the right spot when you're wanting to, you know, that like a mouse or a touch pad or whatever, hopefully the pencil would work just as well. So so far I've been excited. It's like it took me probably twice as long to publish that episode as it would if I was on my, on my Mac, but, there's apps for like using, we use GitHub or Git to update the websites and update the sort of back end and that worked really well, checking out, adding a branch to our GitHub repo, editing the file, all that kind of stuff that works just as well as it does on the on the Mac. And what I didn't do that I would do next time too is if I was using the iPad solely is hook up my Bluetooth keyboard that I have next like an Apple or any Bluetooth keyboard for typing and stuff like that, which would make that part quicker as well. So because then you can have copy paste commands pretty easily and and obviously typing letters into words to make sentences and paragraphs.

Anyways, this begins our my experiments with iPad, and, we'll see. I I I fully I'm kind of coming in with a fairly pessimistic attitude that it's gonna not gonna work, and it's gonna be too painful, and I'll wanna quit, because there are certainly moments of that today where it's just like switching to a new workflow when I know the other workflow works fine. I was ready to toss toss it in, pack it in, send it back, but, yeah, we'll see how it goes and I'll hope to be monitoring or not monitoring, obviously I'll be monitoring, but I hope to be updating you on Daily(ish) with how it's going and trying different things out. And also, I just want to make sure I mentioned, because I've mentioned it everywhere else almost, but except for on here so far is the Instagram course. One of the courses I've been talking about that I'm recording and putting together was finally, I finally launched it yesterday, and so that link is in the show notes, but you can visit courses.chrisanns.com and could see it listed there.

And that'll allow you to, you can pick it up and it's, over an hour, just over an hour of, video that I'll be adding to and and as Instagram updates and changes. But, yeah, it's basically sort of a Instagram 101 introduction to getting familiar with the app, what the various interface, where things are, how it works. It's not so much the business side of like how to use it in marketing and things like that. That's another course I wanna do is sort of have those separate, so there's sort of the intro to using Instagram as one course and then sort of the business angle and marketing side would be a second course that I'm hoping to put together that I can sell possibly to you know clients or whatever who who don't wanna necessarily hire me to consult with them, but would buy a corset that they can do it themselves with. So, there's other plans and schemes that I'm working on along that line as well that hope to be able to talk about soon, but, yeah.

Hope you have a great weekend wherever you are in the world. Thank you for listening, and hope you have a great day. Bye.