Linked List: April 27, 2020

Monday, 27 April 2020

Jason Snell Reviews the 12.9-Inch iPad Magic Keyboard ★

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

This is basically my iPad dream, fulfilled. But dreams are amorphous things, and they fall apart if you begin to interrogate them logically. The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro isn’t a dream, it’s a real product, one that’s sitting in my lap right now. It’s one thing for Apple to decide that it’s time to offer a full laptop experience on the iPad — and an altogether different thing to execute that vision.

As I scrutinize the Magic Keyboard, it doesn’t fall apart as if it were a dream — it holds together, solidly. This is a product that isn’t for everyone, to be sure… but it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

I really enjoyed Snell’s review, and found it comforting that we came to extremely similar conclusions despite coming from quite different starting points. We’re both longtime — very longtime — Mac aficionados, but he’s been on Team Do Work Using an iPad for years now. Long story short, I have not. But for all the same reasons that he finds the iPad Magic Keyboard and newfound pointer support in iPadOS make working on iPad even better, I find they make it possible.

I think that’s the key to all this: Apple has made iPad better in new ways without making it worse in any existing way.

Dan Moren Reviews the Logitech Combo Touch iPad Keyboard Cover/Case ★

Dan Moren, writing at Six Colors:

The biggest argument in favor of the Combo Touch is that it was developed in concert with Apple. That means that, unlike other third-party keyboards with trackpads, there’s a reasonable expectation that the pointer support will work pretty well — and it does! Logitech also has a history of making solid keyboards, and the Combo Touch delivers on that as well.

Where it’s less good is when you want to do other stuff with it.

iPads other than the 2018 and 2020 iPad Pro just weren’t designed hand-in-hand with a modular system of peripherals in mind. The dealbreaker for me with the Combo Touch is that you can’t just connect/disconnect the iPad — you have to put the iPad in a case. I don’t know how much of this is a design concession, and how much is a feature for education buyers, who for obvious reasons prefer their iPads in protective cases.

If there’s one addition I’d like to see on this and other iPad keyboards, it’s the return of something deeply ingrained into my muscle memory: the Function key. On Mac keyboards, it’s in the bottom left corner of the keyboard, and not only allows you to access secondary functions of those F-keys, but also other useful features. For example, holding Function and using the up- and down-arrow keys allows you to page up and page down; I haven’t discovered any other keyboard shortcuts for that, though command-up-arrow and command-down-arrow do, as they long have on the Mac, double for Home and End.

It seems slightly odd to me that you can’t remap a modifier to Function in Settings → Keyboard → Hardware Keyboard. I suppose Apple’s thinking might be that Function is primarily for modifying F-keys, and Apple’s own Smart and Magic keyboards for iPad don’t have F-keys — but most third-party keyboards do, as does Apple’s own Bluetooth Magic Keyboard (which pairs nicely with an iPad with Studio Neat’s Canopy).

Option-↑ and Option-↓ do map to Page Up and Page Down, but only when you are in a read-only scrolling view. When you are editing text, Option-↑ and Option-↓ move the insertion point to the beginning/end of the current paragraph. Likewise, Command-↑ and Command-↓ only map to Home and End in read-only views; when editing text, they move the insertion point to the beginning/end of the document. That has the side effect of scrolling to the beginning/end of the document, too, but the actual Home/End keys (and Fn-↑/Fn-↓ shortcuts) only scroll the view — they don’t move the insertion point. That’s handy when you want to look at something at the beginning/end of the document but then just start typing again right where you left off.

Ben Sandofsky on the New iPhone SE’s Monocular Depth Estimation ★

Ben Sandofsky, writing at the Halide blog:

“Doesn’t the iPhone XR do that? It also only has a single camera!”, you might say. As we covered previously, while the iPhone XR has a single camera, it still obtained depth information through hardware. Its sensor features focus pixels, which you can think of as tiny pairs of “eyes” designed to help with focus. The XR uses the very slight differences seen out of each eye to generate a very rough depth map.

The new iPhone SE doesn’t have focus pixels, or any other starting point for depth. It generates depth entirely through machine learning. It’s easy to test this yourself: take a picture of another picture.

The fact that the new SE apparently has the exact same sensor as the iPhone 8, but is noticeably more capable, exemplifies the potential of computational photography. Remember too, that everything Apple does for the SE can also be applied to iPhones (and iPads) that do have multiple cameras and focus pixels on their sensors. A rising tide lifts all boats.