I almost lasted the week using only my iPad, but one thing held me back

"When my trusty 12-inch MacBook went in for repair last Saturday, I decided to try a week using just an iPad Air as my main computer," Martin Bryant writes for TNW. "I write for a living. Okay there's more to it that that – there's email, talking to colleagues via Slack, editing images, traveling to events, and more, but the iPad should be good for all of that, right?"

"Since the last time I tried an iPad as my main computer, back in 2010 when Apple had just launched the first model, working from an iOS tablet has become a lot more pleasant," Bryant writes. "Our WordPress-based CMS works like a charm in a browser, apps are available for pretty much any work-related task, and navigating between them all is flawless thanks to the way iOS now allows one app to directly open another."

Bryant writes, "I had to get used to saving the draft of an article in WordPress every time I switched browser tabs or apps, so that I wouldn't return to find the tab had reloaded an old, cached version of what I'd written, meaning I'd lost a few minutes' work."

MacDailyNews Take: This is due to iPad's dearth of RAM, about which we've complained for every iPad model prior to iPad Pro. Losing data because you're switching apps or even Safari tabs in unacceptable and negates the usefulness of iOS multitasking abilities. Again, with iPad Pro, this does not happen as there's plenty of RAM to do the jobs we throw at it. We hope iPad Air 3 arrives with enough RAM to allow people to do real work.

"It was only when I came to think about preparing this week's TNW Weekly newsletter that I went running back to the arms of my backup laptop," Bryant writes. "The problem? No iPad image editor I found let me set a specific, custom cropping aspect ratio and a compression percentage."

"The newsletter requires me to crop and resize images to specific aspect ratios, and then save them as Jpegs, compressed to a specific percentage. For example, one needs to be a 1280×520 pixel image, compressed to 70 percent, while another is 376×164 pixels, compressed to 80 percent. There are typically 13 images in the newsletter, three of which require me to edit a .psd template," Bryant writes. "The problem? No iPad image editor I found let me set a specific, custom cropping aspect ratio and a compression percentage. Apple's own Photos app lets you do a free crop, but you can't see the size in pixels as you prepare it. Snapseed, Pixelmator, Photoshop Express… I tried them all and more."

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Bryant doesn't seem to have tried them all. The app Crop-Size (US$2.99) may exactly be what he's looking for.

Source: I almost lasted the week using only my iPad, but one thing held me back