iPad Laptop

I’ve recently been on holiday and decided that I wouldn’t take my laptop with me, I’d stick with my iPad Mini. I felt that I’d be able to do everything I needed to with just iOS.

Turns out, I’m not far wrong.

Keyboard

Perhaps the biggest bugbear was the keyboard. I’ve got the Logitech Keys-to-go and whilst it’s small and lightweight, I’m not a fan of using it. I’ve found that I have to hit the keys quite hard to get them to register and that isn’t that comfy. However, for what I needed the keyboard for whilst travelling, it does the job.

Zim

Zim has become my journalling software of choice since Day One went to self run cloud sync. Zim doesn’t have an iOS app so I’m not really able to get the full effect of using it on my iPad. However, it stores all of it’s data in text files, so I’m able to use any text editor on the iPad to write in it.

I use Editorial to edit my files on the iPad, using the workflows I describe here.

With this, I was able to keep up my journalling habit without much hassle and was even able to add photos to my entries. When I got back to my PC, I was able to view everything had worked fine in Zim itself (access either via VNC on my Linux machine or the Linux Virtual Machine I keep on my Mac).

iCab Mobile

Where needed, iCab Mobile was able to download files etc for me where Safari would let me down. For example, with iCab, I was able to download GPX files from Strava and place them in Dropbox ready for when I returned to a computer and could file them on my NAS (as it was down for the duration of my trip, due to a house move).

Overall, it worked pretty well and I didn’t miss the laptop to much - certainly not with the carrying it around!