Bernie Goldbach in Celbridge | Laptop photo from Irisheyes on Flickr
AS THE HOURS tick away towards the opening of Pen & Pixel 2012, my laptop sits unattended in a classroom, rendering animations for public display. I wonder if I could survive if it disappears.
The short answer is: I cannot create my full complement of content without a laptop. In this very telling moment, we cannot edit and render video using mere tablets or cloud services. Rewind one week and I would not be able to edit and compile documents for secure publication without using high-end editing tools and certificates on the laptop.
The long answer is: If I could negotiate the types of content I'm supposed to produce, I might be able to live with just touchscreens, APIs and cloud services. But that is a big reach at the moment because many of my collaborators use well-oiled structures that don't change overnight.
I'm typing this blog post on an old iPad. It weighs more than any other device in my Bihn bag. It feels old and it also feels expensive. I cannot write on the iPad during the normal day at home because our 4yo wants to use it whenever she realizes it has a charge. She last used the iPad to dress Thumbelina (saving copies of her work in the photo gallery) and she watched two hours of Ben and Holly before reverting to water colors and yellow paper.
I face editing limitations with the iPad. At the moment, I cannot use the exact image I want for my post because the editing window on Typepad's app doesn't permit HTML code. This means I can't insert an HTML snippet as I usually do in these cases.
But looking at my normal work day, I spend less time with action items on my laptop because I push the core items onto my most-cloud services (i.e., Evernote, Dropbox, Pinboard, and Instapaper). I toggle into each of those most-used services up to four times each day. I see my work in progress whenever I sit down anytime during the work day. I stand to type on my laptop and sit to review and revise priorities.
As I continue using touchscreens to tap and edit work, I get the feeling that the world has only begun to see the value of a tablet work flow. Unlike most of my friends, my workflow is easily managed by sharing stuff from my laptop to the cloud and onto my Nokia Lumia phone. Nothing is ever lost. Everything automatically syncs and the cloud exposes my working material on the phone, the iPad and the iPod Touch. I thank the API developers for this lovely synchronicity.
But all things considered, synchronicity alone would not compensate for the loss of my laptop. It would be a massive personal loss, just considering the hundreds of euro of software I personally bought to edit text, images, audio and video on the laptop. So I hope to find the rendering went well and my laptop is parked back behind a locked office door.
Bernie Goldbach thinks this post belongs in his GTD links.
