Last week, Apple made a big splash with its latest iPad offering, the iPad Pro. Featuring a massive screen with insanely high, pixel-perfect resolution, a nearly-perfect don’t-call-it-a-stylus digital pencil, and an incredible amount of computational power than surpasses the overwhelming majority of laptops in the wild, the new iPad should be a no-brainer for a creative professional like myself. I want one so badly. But I still can’t use it for work. 

With that explosive, perhaps controversial lede out of the way, I should clarify: I think a growing number of people can use the iPad for work, particularly with the split-screen features of iOS 9. If you tend to work a lot in the Office suite and send a lot of email, I think the iPad could easily replace your laptop. 

But for the creative pro that Apple is pitching this to, I think it’s a dud. 

To begin with, there’s a dearth of applications in the creative industry for the iPad. Adobe has made a couple, but they’re designed for mobile and meant to get us started with our ideas. If we want to finish them, Adobe is pretty clear that we need to do so in a desktop application. You still can’t run Xcode on an iPad. You still can’t make a proper mockup on an iPad. 

Part of the problem is the App Store. My preferred mockup app on the Mac, Sketch, won’t be coming to the iPad any time soon. Emanual Sa explains:

But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. We cannot port Sketch to the iPad if we have no reasonable expectation of earning back on our investment. Maintaining an application on two different platforms and provide one of them for a 10^th of it’s [sic] value won’t work, and iPad volumes are low enough to disqualify the ​“make it up in volume” argument.

Yikes. I don’t believe that app trials would fix everything, but I think it’s time Apple threw developers a bone. Unsustainable software businesses won’t entice great software developers to invest in your ecosystem. 

The other problem is that iOS is still a sandboxed environment. You can have a great app like Coda running on iOS, but it’s pretty limited: no external servers, limited language compilers, etc. I spend a lot of my day coding in text editors. When I can’t do half my work on a device because there’s no possibility of an app in that product category being available for it, that’s very constraining.

With all that being said, even when there is an app available for iPad that I could use in my workflow, I’m not sure I want to use it. 

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the beta of an app called Protosketch. It’s similar enough to Sketch that I can get some work done with it. But doing some of this work without the precision of a mouse is cumbersome, particularly on my first-gen iPad Air (whose single gigabyte of RAM is really beleaguered while running the app). The larger iPad Pro might make it better, but it’s not worth spending $1,000 to find out. 

If you want my hot take on when iPads will kill off desktops, it’s pretty simple: desktop computers lose their usefulness when the software available on the iPad becomes more valuable than its hardware. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I hope the iPad Pro helps spur us along. Like I said, I want one.

I never used to be interested in making New Year’s resolutions, and I still don’t like calling them ​“resolutions”. Resolutions imply that you need, in the immortal words of Dave Grohl, ​“a little bit of resolve” to see them through. And it makes me feel like they need to take a whole year to complete, when in reality some goals may only take two weeks to implement.¹

A lot of people I respect and admire have written out in detail what their resolutions are. I have a list, but I think most of them are boring. They mostly revolve around changes in my personal life, which I don’t mind sharing:

• In June, I’m marrying the love of my life (insert mandatory cuteness here). I’m thinking a lot about how to win the 2015 Award World’s Best Husband after the wedding day, and about the goals my fiancée and I have set for ourselves in our life together.
• After the wedding, we’ll be living in Toronto — the ​“hub of the universe”, in case you’re not from Canada and aren’t familiar. I live about an hour from there now, but irregardless, it still implies a large shift in clientele and my current business relationships. I want to keep my business above water during this change. Apart from gaining deeper knowledge of my finances (which I have hired a bookkeeper for), I have no further business goals than that.²
• My friends and I are launching the Wildfire Community this year, probably in the next month or so (I hope). I want to have a positive impact on my hometown of Guelph, even if that means I have to be involved in making it a better place from my future home in Toronto.

Most of my goals revolve around these circumstances, and as a result, all my goals involve being mindful as a spouse and as a leader. They involve looking after myself, so I can take better care of the people who are important to me. And they involve equipping the few people I lead to become better leaders than me, so they can make the world a better place than I alone could.

I know I don’t necessarily believe in ​“New Year’s resolutions”, but I do believe in mindfulness and in self-improvement. Setting manageable goals and coming up with an action plan to achieve them is important. And sharing what you’re attempting to do is important too, because it keeps you accountable.

So I’m sharing my goals here for prosperity. I hope that a year from now, when I look back on them, I’m able to recognize where I grew and where I re-aligned my priorities as the year progressed.

A few weeks ago, I wrapped up the first year of writing my music blog, Unsung Sundays. Technically speaking, I’ve been writing it for a year and a half, but I took time away from it at a couple points last year (usually holiday seasons), and it took a couple months longer than expected for me write 52 posts. Unsung Sundays is an experimental blog for me. I listen to a lot of music while I work, and I wanted an easy way to share my new favourites with my friends. Instead of just telling people what was new whenever we chatted about it in person, a blog seemed like a faster and more frequent way to communicate. I share about five records every Sunday — some old, some new, hopefully all worth listening to. I summarized how much time I’ve spent on Unsung in another blog post, but here’s a quote:

• 52 weeks (obviously)
• 84 posts
• 223 recommended records
• 2,809 recommended songs (!!)
• 2 special playlists (1 for Stanley Cup 2013 and 1 for Kanye West songs)
• 1 guest post
• 61 followers on Tumblr
• 63 likes on Facebook
• 15 followers on Twitter
• 116 tweets
• Countless hours listening to music and creating content.

I’m not kidding about Unsung being my experimental blog. I think it’s been a learning exercise in more ways than one. It’s on Tumblr, and I’ve learned that long posts aren’t exactly the best way to communicate there. I’ve had no fewer than three major formats on Unsung:

• a long post with full-length album reviews of three to five records a week
• a short post with one full-length album review for one record every Sunday
• five short posts throughout the day on every Sunday with tiny snippets explaining why I’m recommending the album. (This is the current format.) In the future, I’m going to be changing this again because I haven’t found the sweet spot. For some people, this comes naturally, but for me, I’m still experimenting with the best way to get messages to people. The people that read Unsung really seem to love it, but there just aren’t a lot of people that do that. And while the audience count isn’t everything, it’s good encouragement to continue writing. The point is this: it’s been a year, but keep following the blog (or start following it). It’s been fun, and it’ll be interesting to see if any changes in the future cause a significant change in my readership. (And as you can see from the numbers above, I’m pretty honest about my readers.)

This week, Robin Williams sadly passed away. I think every member of my generation — really, everybody under 25 — can relate to the loss we feel. Robin Williams was with us throughout much of our childhood. For some of my friends, his role in Mrs. Doubtfire alone was enough to make them want Mr. Williams as a surrogate father in their own lives, when they were living in similarly fractured homes. He was a brilliant actor, a wonderful comedian, and an inspiration for so many of us. For me, his performance in Good Will Hunting taught me more about what real love looked like than any traditional romance film.

What shocked me the most about his death wasn’t just the manner of it. What shocked me was how alone he was. In the days since his death, we’ve learned his wife slept in another bedroom the night before he died. I don’t know if she did this every night, or if it’s even true, but its implication astounds me: we all crave intimacy.

I struggled with depression a lot in my youth. In university, I had a serious drinking problem. In hindsight, I can admit these things, but when I was going through them, it was easier to pretend the issues didn’t exist. I had neither intimacy nor a real sense of community in my life. Both are necessary to fluorish.

When I found community and started building real and loving friendships, my entire life began to change. My outlook is wildly more positive, my faith is a real priority, and I have a healthy romantic relationship for the first time in my life. Community changes everything.

There’s this sad myth that creative people do their best work when they’re alone. People believe that depression and isolation breed creativity. The myth exists because we believe Hemingway wrote alone. It exists because we think Steve Jobs was a rebel who did his best work when he rejected every societal standards and treated other people poorly. This myth exists because we think Tolkien was a hermit, or that Picasso’s art existed because of his fractured relationships with his mistresses. It’s simply not true.

Hemingway and Picasso hung out in the same cafés and went to the same parties. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were close friends, confidantes, and creative allies. Steve Jobs did his best work when he was surrounded by a team who made him better. The best art anybody has ever made was made in community.

And the best life anybody ever lived was in community.

You need to know three things if you want to do good creative work. First of all, you can do it. Seond of all, you are worth it. Thirdly, you have value. When I was depressed, I didn’t know these things. I drank because I didn’t know these things. The only way to learn them is by surrounding yourself with a community of people who want to tell you.

If you’re struggling, know that you’re not alone. Get help. Trust me, it’s not a sign of weakness. Talk to me if you think it will help. I don’t even have to reply if you don’t want me to, but I’ll keep you in my thoughts and prayers. The only way to get somebody to pull you up is to reach out.

We need more people like Robin Williams. We need them to make us laugh. To show us things about ourselves that we’re too blind to see. To inspire us when things are bad, and to remind us that a child-like sense of creativity is always a beautiful thing. But most of all, we need these people to know their worth. Because the stigma surrounding creativity and mental illness is worthless.

You have value. You are worth it. You can do anything. Now go make the world better.