I tried something new today. I held a presentation with the slides coming from an iPad. Specifically, the slides were on Keynote and were beamed wirelessly using AppleTV. And it was neat. I have an iPad Pro gen 4 (so the one that came out just before the first M1 model) which has caused me much joy. Today it also proved to be useful. It’s possible to connect the iPad to a second display using HDMI (through a USB-C to HDMI dongle) or by AppleTV, but this second screen will mirror the first one; you can’t have two separate screens on one iPad.

Using an iPad with a hard keyboard is kinda nifty. There’s Cmd+Tab to switch between apps, Cmd+Space to search. Arrow keys, with the Cmd and Alt modifiers work as they should. And while i’ve been searching for a Back button on the iPad, you can go Home using the keyboard with the shortcut Cmd+H. Nifty. Coming from an Android world, a universal Back button is a central navigation device that i’m truly missing.

Thers’s this thing in the Apple admins community called The Apple Way. It’s a half-humourous, half-cynical and just half-given-up way of saying that on an Apple device, you can do things the way Apple intended, or you can do it the hard way (but regretting you did). I publish my blog the hard way. My blog is built using a static website generator 1. Under the hood, it’s a bunch of markdown files, configuration files, styles and stuff, which the generator converts into a website.

Two happy things coincided this week. Apple released a new iPad that you can use an actual keyboard with, and i had a meeting with my Apple SMEs. So i voiced an earlier thought i’d had, “can you get any actual work done with this?”. So the other one asked “Do you want to try?” Yes! Absolutely! Shure dang! (just as soon as i return the MacBook i borrowed from them :) 1