As is tradition across the globe, I was supposed to do an ‘end of year’ x ‘most used apps list’ blogpost.
However, I’m not a huge fan of listicles and since the idevice didn’t magically turn into a pumpkin at 00:00 2014-01-01 and the list keeps on growing. I thought bugger it. I’ll just do a bi-weekly reccommendation of apps that work together well.
Discovery of 2013:
After having saved countles preference files for hotkeys per program used on my Mac, applied stickers to my keyboard to remember the differing combinations between programs, used multiple hotkey master programs (keyboard maestro) to record my favourite shortcuts for oft used actions.
I found ‘Actions‘ this app allows you to program hotkey’s to big friendly buttons with customizable text and images so you can immediatly see what action you mac will perform, to create a set of hotkeys per program & have subsets of hotkeys. To summarize: it turns your ipad in a giant remote control for photoshop, illustrator, manga studio and other programs.
Dropbox – You can’t save much on the iPad, not really big files, nor weird file formats, but if you use safari browser and the dropbox app you can download zipfiles and pdf’s to your heart’s content to find the files waiting for you on your big computer when you need to bring the full power of illustrator and photoshop.
Discovery of 2014
Remote Mouse – this app turns your iPad into a trackpad for your Mac. It works via wi-fi and does a good impression of a mouse. It can also be used as a keyboard, but in my experience it’s a bit laggy and best used for tweets, since it’ll exchange vowels and punctuation for the nearest button instead of the one you pressed on.
Together with actions, remote mouse, dropbox and my pen-tablet I’ve daisy-chained a very smooth workflow: using the ipad for research, doing the hard work with big image files on the Mac. And switching to twitter to distract and/or delight you all with the swipe of a finger. 😉