New iPad Air and iPhone

A number of teachers have asked me about the new iPad Air that Apple announced last month. It has been updated to look and function a lot more like the iPad Pro line and many are wondering if they need to go Pro or if the Air will satisfy their needs.

iPad Air and iPhone 12 (announced last week) reviews are out, and I have been reading through them this morning. Here are a few that stood out to me:

2020 iPad Air review: Almost Pro | Sixcolors.com

iPad Air Review: Forward-Looking | MacStories.net 

The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro | Daring Fireball

iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro Review: The Best iPhones-but Note for the 5G

Based on everything I have learned so far, there has never been a better time to buy Apple's entry level products. The regular iPhone 12 and iPad Air are spectacular products, and I am guessing that a very large majority of users, even tech nerds, and professionals, are going to feel totally satisfied with them.

I have not tested pro apps like StaffPad, Ferrite, or LumaFusion on the iPad Air because I am still using the 2018 model iPad Pro. My educated guess is that you would not feel limited by the iPad Air, even if you use these apps. You would especially not feel limited using music apps like Tonal Energy and forScore.

When it comes to the iPhone, I am more compelled by the new Mini size and the Pro Max size (which comes with a much better camera system than the regular 12 Pro). Reviews for these are not out yet.

I will probably upgrade my phone, and it will probably be the Pro Max, just because I have a 9-month-old and want to take the best pictures possible of him. That said, I really miss the iPhone 5 days of the tiny phone and might consider a Mini in a future year if I read good things about it later this season.

I am going to keep my iPad Pro around for a bit, but if the Mac were ever to come equipped with a touch screen and Apple Pencil support, I would have to re-evaluate needing the larger-sized iPad Pro and whether or not I need an iPad altogether. I do miss the comfort of the smaller iPad size, particularly for reading, and my gut says that this iPad Air might satisfy my needs down the road.

Conclusion - You probably won't regret not going Pro on Apple's fall lineup of products, but the differences are definitely in the details so make sure you read up on them first.

METT Episode #18 - Productivity Boot Camp (Part I): Notes and Tasks, with Dr. Frank Buck

Thanks to my sponsors this month, Flat for Education.

Dr. Frank Buck returns to the show for the kick-off of my mini-series, Productivity Boot Camp! Dr. Frank Buck is a productivity master with a background in band directing and administration. I share my knowledge of Apple products and native third-party apps, and he shares his experience with web-based, cross-platform apps. We bounce back and forth about good digital task and note management and share our favorite apps!

Show Notes:

• SSO stands for "Single Sign-On"
• Dr. Frank Buck's latest appearance on Music Ed Tech Talk (then called Robby Burns + Friends)
• METT #15 - Double the Burns, Double the Fun!... With Amy Burns
• METT #16 - Master Your Virtual Teaching Tech, with David MacDonald
• David Allen - Getting Things Done
• Steven Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Charles Hobbs - Time Power
• Robby's Use of OmniFocus Project Templates, including concert planning
• OmniFocus Workflows with Robby Burns | LearnOmniFocus.com
• My blog post on Staying on Top of Teaching Responsibilities With Omnifocus Perspectives
• Remember the Milk
• Toodledoo
• OmniFocus
• Todoist
• Things
• Evernote
• If This Than That
• Drafts App - Where Text Starts
• DEVONthink
• Flute Resources for Home Practice | Dr. Frank Buck
• OneNote
• TaskClone
• Feedly
• Feedbin
• Reeder
• iOS Widgets
• New Software Updates from Apple: Exploring Widgets! | Music Ed Tech Talk

App of the Week:
Robby - Sticky Widgets
Frank Buck - Feedly

Album of the Week:
Robby - The Lost Art of Longing | BT
Frank Buck - Handel Flute Sonata V - Recording of Dr. Frank Buck Performing

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Frank Buck - Twitter | Website

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

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Thanks to this week's sponsor, Flat for Education:

Flat for Education offers music educators and their students the most affordable cloud-based music notation software on the market. Empowering teachers to create playful and engaging music activities, creations, assessments on any device at any time.

The platform integrates with every well-known learning management system available: Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, Canvas, Schoology, and MusicFirst to name a few. Everything will be synchronized with your existing setup to avoid any time loss.

Flat for Education offers an advanced system of assignments allowing you to create playful and stunning music activities with your students.

Create a template for all your students to start working from, or simplify the toolbar to have them only working with eighth and quarter notes. The only limit is your imagination.

Save a lot of time by generating worksheets and quizzes in just a few clicks for your students to practice music theory.

Finally, Bands directors and choirs conductors can have their students directly recording their performance from home for review.

Whether you are teaching remotely or in-person, Flat for Education will support you in creating playful and engaging music activities in no time. Try it free for 90 days on flat.io/edu

Post Sticky Notes to Your Home Screen

Speaking of widgets on the iPhone home screen, this is one that I have a feeling a lot of people will appreciate. 

Sticky Widgets allows you to post sticky notes straight to the home screen that come in different colors and say anything you want. The experience is as simple as you can imagine.

Sure, I advocate for using proper note-taking and task management software, but there are times where you just want to write something directly and trust that it will be plastered in front of your eyes indefinitely.

Check out a full review from MacStories...

Sticky Widgets Brings Simple Sticky Notes to Your Home Screen:

Sticky Widgets enables placing sticky note-style widgets on your iPhone or iPad Home Screen which can be modified simply by tapping on the widget. It’s utility that’s such an obvious fit for widgets, I’m surprised I haven’t seen a hundred other apps doing the same thing.

New Software Updates from Apple: Exploring Widgets!

iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and tvOS 14 came out a few weeks ago. I have a lot to say about these updates, but today I wanted to write about widgets for a moment.

Widgets are catching on as a significant feature amongst the masses. As someone who plays around with the way apps are organized on the home screen at least twice a week, I can tell that widgets are going to add a lot of excitement (and anxiety) into my life. I have been toying with them since July when this software entered the public beta, and I am far from resolved.

Here is where I have landed for now…

Page one (middle image) contains my most tapped app icons. This will be a hard habit to break, but I find lots of value in having upcoming calendar tasks and weather permanently on my most visited screen. Weather Line and Fantastical have the best small-sized widgets, in my opinion. Even this smallest widget size takes up four app icons, so they need to be beautiful and information-dense for it to be worth me sacrificing four apps.

I didn’t think I would want weather on this first screen, but now that it is always visible to me, I don’t see how I could live without it. The Weather Line widget is awesome because its user interface depicts the weather on a line, almost like a chart. It even manages to fit an hourly rain graph into its small space when it is raining out. Not even my second favorite weather widget, Carrot Weather, does that.

The Today View (left image) is where I keep Siri Shortcuts and the older, legacy style widgets from iOS 13. As much as I like the newer widgets’ look, the older style widgets are interactive. I keep OmniFocus, Timery (for time tracking), Streaks (for tracking daily habits), and Waterminder (for quickly logging water) all on this screen because I can tap right on the buttons to act on these apps without the widget needing to launch into the app.

I am continually playing with page 2 (right picture). I like it to be mostly another grid of tappable apps, but I am experimenting with various widgets here. I think what I have settled on is to have the Maps and Notes app widgets stacked on top of each other at the top, and then to use the Siri Suggestion widget, which shows me two rows of apps that swap in and out throughout the day based on my phone’s predictions of which apps I want to use in which contexts. The image above shows some other widgets I am experimenting with, but I think I prefer having more app icons there.

On the iPad, I keep: calendar, weather, notes, Apollo (a Reddit app I use to keep up on the latest news about my interests), Siri Shortcuts, and the Files app for launching into recently modified files. 

On both my phone and iPad, I am waiting for an OmniFocus widget to track my tasks. Even though I like the one in the Today view where you can mark the tasks as done right from the widget, I think I might want to have my next few upcoming tasks permanently visible on page one.

9to5Mac.com and MacStories.net have been two great websites to follow if you want to stay up on which apps offer widgets.