John Cox

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Tagged ipad · everything

Interesting

Rethinking RSS, newsletters, and how I read every morning

Reflecting on Terry Godier's newsreader app Current, the author explores why an app built to relieve "reading debt" and unread-count anxiety didn't work for them, despite agreeing with its premise. The piece traces this back to the author's own once-a-day, morning-newspaper-style reading ritual (via Feedbin and ReadKit), which led to a broader realization: newsletters that bundle stories into a single digest actually suit this habit better than raw RSS firehoses, prompting the idea of converting noisy feeds into newsletter-like summaries. It ends less as a review of Current and more as an open question about what the ideal reading app—something between mail client, RSS reader, and read-later service—would actually look like.

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Reflections on software development from anywhere on an iPad

I recount switching to an iPad-centred workflow after bricking my [[MacBook Pro M1]], making an [[iPad Pro M1]] with LTE my primary development machine while working remotely from [[Bunya Mountains National Park]]. I argue cloud-based, reproducible developer environments like [[Gitpod]] and [[GitHub Codespaces]] are becoming the new normal, enabling thin-client workflows and simplifying onboarding. I recommend terminal and productivity tools such as [[Blink]], [[Shiftscreen]], [[Duet]], and [[Speedify]], and outline homelab practices: encrypted ZFS filesystems, backups with [[restic]] to [[Backblaze B2]], remote access via [[Tailscale]], running [[OpenVSCode Server]] on self-hosted infrastructure managed with [[Proxmox]] or [[NixOS]]. The post mixes practical how‑tos (firewalls, mosh, backups) with reflections on remote work, inequality in access, and building a portable “dev from anywhere” setup. He also describes vanlife realities, recommends 12.9-inch screen sizes, LTE and multiple bonded links, and criticises Australian digital policy such as COVIDSafe’s 'hologram' security.

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Print vs. iPad vs. Web (by @baekdal) #analysis

The piece argues that iPad magazine apps, including the Wired app it praises for its visual design but criticizes for overloading the reader, are still print magazines in digital form and miss what the iPad could be. The author contends the iPad is "the next web," a mobile, live, connected medium, and that publishers should stop treating it as a new printing surface. The closing argument is that Apple's closed ecosystem (monthly downloads, locked-in sharing, iAds, Ping) works against that connected future, so the real shift is from disconnected to connected rather than from paper to screen.

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