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Using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement

By Bobby Voicu

For the last 6 months or so I found myself developing a new, interesting habit. Whenever I sat on the couch watching a movie, a football match, a tennis match or anything passive enough, I’d want the iPad next to me, as the device to do things on. Until then, the devices I prefered were a 2012 MacBook or my iPhone 7+.

The thing is I felt the iPhone wasn’t big enough when I was writing emails or messages and the MacBook didn’t have a touch screen, which made it more cumbersome to use.

So I found myself using the iPad Pro 9.7 I’ve had for about 2 years. It used to be my girlfriend’s device of choice to use with the Apple pen to do lettering and illustrations, but since she now uses an iPad Pro 12.9 – 2nd gen, the 9.7 was there for me to use.

Another thing I noticed is that while the 2012 MacBook is great to take with you while traveling – and I did travel a lot in the last 3-4 months – I wasn’t happy with what it offered me. I wanted more performance for the common enough tasks and more battery life. So I switched, for a while, just to experiment, to the iPad. After attaching a Smart keybord, I didn’t open the MacBook since.

I have to tell you that I also own a 2015 MacBook Pro which is my main working machine. I hate the “butterfly” keyboard on the newer MacBook Pros, so I won’t switch anytime soon.

Finally, about 2 weeks ago I took the plunge in making this iPad Pro my main computer. I will not quit on the MB Pro, I still use it often enough for some things, like video calls or podcast recording, but I discover more and more ways to not use it. I also can’t use my bank’s website on my iPad because it has JavaScript. Scratch that, I just found out they released a tablet app. What do you know.

Here’s what I use the iPad for, at the moment:

  • surfing the web. Most of it it’s from the iPad now. I rarely open Chrome on my MacBook, unless I need a specific extension of the browser.
  • reading and replying to emails
  • using FB messenger and Slack (I don’t use Whatsapp almost at all, so that’s only used on my phone)
  • reading Kindle/iBook books. I still prefer a Kindle Oasis most of the times, but I find myself reading from the iPad more often now.
  • writing long form text (I write what started as a longer article on how to keep investors and potential investors updated and it morphed into a longer potential PDF). I use Scrivener and Ulysses – this is the app I’m using right now to write this.
  • games (simple ones, I have a Nintendo Switch and a PS4 for more heavy duty gaming)
  • browsing Reddit, YouTube;
  • listening to music (Spotify) and podcasts (Overcast)
  • booking hotels and planes;
  • watching Netflix (most of the times in a PIP window, while I do something else)

If I think about it, I do most of the things that I normally would on my laptop. There are still some things I prefer my laptop for, but almost 80% of my day is iPad and iPhone based right now.

It’s true, my speed and efficiency aren’t at the laptop level yet. As an example, I still find using files on iPad frustrating (even with the use of Documents by Readdle, a really good files app the compensates a lot of things lacking from the iPad Files app). I’m looking to use Workflow to automate some tasks, but it’s still early to give you any kind of real examples. I tried adding a specific meal in My Fitness Pal and failed because MFP doesn’t allow Workflow use.

All and all, I’ve found the experience interesting enough to keep me doing it. I’ll keep you updated as new things come to light.

Conclusion

Using the iPad is becoming easier for me, even for work related tasks. The learning curve is there and I think iOS is still far from being a true computer, but for 80-90% of my tasks, it’s more than good. I don’t expect it to complete remove my need for a laptop, but I find myself looking more towards a media server (and, hence, a Mac Mini), rather than a full blown MacBook Pro.

And now I’ve published my first post on the blog using just the iPad. Nice.

Resources

Some more articles to read about iPad as a laptop, articles I’ve found and read in the last 2 weeks:

– Matt Gemmell’s iPad series

– MacStories – A Computer for Everything One Year of iPad Pro

– How to Blog on an iPad

– The Overspill: Life on an iPad

Photos: my “office” while I’m in Greece and my first screen of the iPad.

Shitfaced meaning

By Bobby Voicu

No, it’s not me. I rarely, if ever, drink alcohol. But I just found out the history of the word and it’s quite funny :))

It seems like the word shitfaced, as we know it (meaning drunk off your ass) appeared back in the day, in Scotland. Before they had any toilets, they used to throw their, um, chamber pot contents in the street. Only they wouldn’t do it anytime during the day, they would do it early in the morning, at a special time, when the church bells rang and everybody would open their windows, chamber pots in hand. They would yell “gaurdy loo!” and splash everything into the street. Only this time coincided with the time the bars closed and drunk people would stumble into the street on their way home. When they heard yell “gaurdy loo”, drunk and disoriented they would look up and… that’s how they’d get shitfaced 😁

Tea and Milk

By Bobby Voicu

Over the last 6 years, since Ireland is an integral part of my life, I learned to love drinking tea. Combined with milk, as it should be. Today, while drinking another tea pot filled to the top, I wondered: do I really like tea or am I just using this as a pretense to drink milk without the social pressure of ordering milk as a drink in a restaurant?

P.S.: if it feels like someone hacked my blog and keeps posting shit, don’t worry, it’s just me. I’m kinda thinking of stuff these days so I find things to keep myself entertained. Among them is using my blog as a Facebook page. This is why I also drew a tea pot and wrote something above it. Looking for my creative side, you know. Stay tuned, who knows what I’ll think about next!

Early Stage Investing is about Trust

By Bobby Voicu

I’m surprised how many early-stage entrepreneurs forget that raising money at this moment in their company’s life is all about trust.

You don’t have numbers to show, all you have is a story and potential. So how come most of the entrepreneurs don’t try anything to establish trust in the relationships they want to build?

Just a thought :)

Books I Read in 2017 – The CEO Library Podcast

By Bobby Voicu

At the beginning of December, we launched a podcast at The CEO Library.

Well, the last episode we recorded, the fourth, was about the books we’ve read in 2017. The best books, the worst and some in between.

Just to give you a taste, the best book I read was, I think, The Hard Thing about Hard Things. Or was it? :)

Listen to the episode, if you have the time, and let me know if you enjoy it. You can listen to it on Apple devices, on Google Play, on Libsyn or on the website. Any feedback you have is really appreciated.

Add Favicons to Safari on MacOS

By Bobby Voicu

I dislike Chrome more and more every day. The memory issues, the fact that when it comes back from sleep the extensions stop working…

What stopped me from using Safari more is, among other things, not having favicons on the tabs. When you are working with multiple tabs it’s a lot easier to use the browser if you have visual help in form of those favicons.

Here’s a solution for Safari. Not the best one, but not horrible:

Using Faviconographer to enable favicons on Safari tabs

Step 1: Download and install Faviconographer.

Step 2: Run the utility.

Step 3: Open System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Accessibility and enable Faviconographer.

Step 4: Configure the utility’s preferences to your liking (enabled favicons on tabs, bookmarks bar, or both).

solution from 9to5mac

Just thought you’d want to know :)

The CEO Library Story – Months #2 & #3

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve missed the monthly update on The CEO Library. I have a good reason, though :) I’ve been in the US for several weeks giving a helping hand to FreeBusy, one of the companies I invested in. As an offtopic, go and test their product if you’re frustrated with the back and forth of emails when it comes to setting up a meeting. FreeBusy really solves the issue, giving you a suitable time for every participant in as fast as 60 seconds (if everyone is connected to the service).

Now, back to The CEO Library. Last time I wrote something about it we had just three weeks since we started.

2 months later, the enthusiasm of the initial start has calmed down. The traffic in the last 2 months is almost equal to the traffic in the first 3 weeks. Not so much of an up and to the right line, right?

Once we started the project, we saw the biggest issue with it: it’s difficult to gather the recommendations. Once we went past the first flurry of “Top books about…” articles, it became really clear that it will take a lot longer than we thought initially. Listening to a podcast just to find out what someone says about one book is not an efficient way to do it.

We refocused the site on interviewing the people that recommend the books. It’s now quite obvious in the design of the site (we are focusing more on the people we talked to than on the books), but the heart of it is still what books they recommend. Just so you know!

The above is one more reason for people to read “The Lean Startup” and understand why you should launch a product/company as soon as you can so that you can get real feedback. Both from users and the realities of the market. “Done is better than perfect”, right?

And we started a podcast, as well.

What are the numbers?

Traffic: 4261 unique users (Oct+Nov)
Email total subscribers: 229 emails
Facebook total likes: 667
Twitter total followers: 185
Instagram total followers: 186
Shares through SUMO widget (Oct+Nov): 73
Interviews: 40
Collections: 4
Books total added: 1260

As you can see, the biggest jump is in interviews, which was our focus in November, as well as the number of books recommended by people. The lower numbers are a consequence of our lack of focus on social media or getting more newsletter subscribers. Once the process to get interviews is in place, we will start focusing on those as well.

The most important thing that happened in the last 2 months was the addition of two more team members to help with the technical side of things (Vlad) and database building – adding books and recommendations (Theo). This allowed Cristina to focus more on outreach for interviews and adding those to the site.

This is it for this month. I’ll keep you updated as new things happen.

P.S.: The last 2 months were driven by the quote in the image on the top: “Done is better than perfect”. We’re testing things and we just launch them to see how they work. This is why I chose this illustration for the article. It was made by Miruna, The CEO Library official illustrator :) She’s gonna illustrate more and more quotes and phrases specific to the business environment. If you are interested in her work, check her store here.

The CEO Library Story – Month #1

By Bobby Voicu

I talked about The CEO Library here. It’s a passion project I started about the books recommended by the people we look up to.

After 3 weeks, we have some numbers from the project. The reason I’m adding writing this post is to keep me and my team accountable and, frankly, I think it’s an interesting exercise and it could be a good resource for the future. In the last 2-3 years I was often sorry I didn’t write more about MavenHut’s evolution, so I’m doing this for The CEO Library.

Traffic: 4190 unique users
Email subscribers: 164 emails
Facebook likes: 405
Twitter followers: 120
Instagram followers: 70
Total shares through SUMO widget: 47
Interviews: 9
Collections: 3
Books added: 605

Genuinely, I didn’t expect 4000 users in the first 2 weeks. I announced the project on my newsletter, to about 250 people. I’m not a hypocrite, I expected someone to share something, but I expected spikes of about 150 people and about 10 per day after the first several days. I was wrong :)

Even more important, though, I didn’t expect the excitement around the project from people that found out about it: I got about 100 emails/messages/calls about how interesting the project is, how they found more books to read and how they understood more things from the interviews about the books they already read.

OK, what’s next?

Well, we’ve grown the team, actually. Starting in the first week of October, Vlad and Theo got involved, as well. They were building another project I was involved in that wasn’t going where we wanted, so we got together to build The CEO Library faster.

We need to add more books to the database. More and more interviews and collections rely on them and, even if it looks like it’s a lot, 600 books added already is not that much :)

We’re also adding more providers for the books. Besides Amazon US and Amazon UK, we’re adding Book Depository and, hopefully, Barnes and Noble (they rejected our affiliate account request).

This is for this month. If you want to know something specific in the future, let me know.

I launched The CEO Library – book recommendations from the people we look up to

By Bobby Voicu

About two months ago I was looking for some book to read from my Kindle collection. I was seeing titles like:

  • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything
  • The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence
  • Letters to a Young Contrarian
  • Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity
  • Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
  • The Turnaround Strategies of Jim Harbaugh: How the University of Michigan Head Football Coach Changes the Culture to Immediately Increase Performance

I had no f#$ing idea how I got those books on my Kindle. I still don’t. No, let me correct myself on that: I know HOW they got on my Kindle, I don’t remember WHY, though. I was sure I read about them in some book or in some article, recommended by someone. Who, though? And why did I think it was interesting? I had no answer to this.

The idea of The CEO Library

Several days later I told one of my friends about this. He felt the same. Then another. The same story. Hmm, I thought, I could write some posts on my blog as I find these recommendations. But, if people look for this kind of thing, maybe I can transform reading and books, that were common in my life since I was 5 years old, into something more: a passion project.

So this is how The CEO Library started: a list of books recommendations from people with interesting things to say. People that had success in their chosen fields in some way and I think it’s worth learning from them: entrepreneurs, investors, C-level executives, senior people in companies. I wanted the site to be a database of all the books you find recommended online

Of course, once I started to actually think about the project, I understood that I couldn’t do it alone. Just a happy coincidence, about the same time Cristina, with whom I worked on another successful project 10 years earlier, started to be interested in a project about books. She approached me to ask my advice and when I told her about my idea, she said: “cool, let’s do it together”. And that’s how I became a co-founder of The CEO Library :)

Launching the MVP

It took us about a month and a half after that to structure the site, understand how the content should look and what we should have on the site and, of course, it took that long to get the first 400-500 books in the database. Scouring the web for interviews, lists and similar is not as easy as you think after the first 10-20 articles :)

Of course, it took me about two weeks to think about a name – what do you think about The Thrive Library? Or CEO plug? My cousin, Vlad, laughed an hour about the last one. Sex toys, anyone?

Also, the design. I knew from experience how long it takes to get a good design and I said to myself that in the week with the 15th of September I will launch the site no matter what. I needed feedback from users before getting any kind of definitive design in place, because, in my mind, it should follow the structure of the site. And I can’t know the structure of the site until I have some users, right?

Learnings from the first days of “alpha” launch

Finally, here’s the site: The CEO Library.

I initially wanted a small “alpha” launch, to see what people think of it, so I sent it to my 250 people email list to get some feedback. Frankly, I expected a little bit of feedback on the email and that would be it. I expected somebody to put it on Facebook or something and get 200 visitors for the next 2-3 days. That, I thought, would give me enough feedback on what visitors look for. Cristina also offered to tell her list, as well.

Well, since Wednesday to today we had about 2,000 unique visitors on the site, about 20-30 feedback emails sent to me or Cristina, multiple shares on Facebook. And some people actually subscribed to our weekly newsletter :)

The most important learnings I got: people really love talking about books (I should know, though, this is why we started the site) and the most interesting things for the visitors are the Collections and the Interviews. Which we’ll add more in the time to come.

I’m finishing this “official” launch by saying that I will add a monthly article about the project, with numbers, what we want to do next, how it worked and stuff like that. I love this kind of “business journal”. I’ve read the entire archive for the blog of a guy that built an app called Bingo Card Creator and I want to try something similar (maybe not as detailed as he did, though).

If you have feedback, please let us know. Go to Contact Us on the site and send an email. Any kind of feedback is appreciated (even if not acted upon).

Oh, one more thing: if you want somebody to be interviewed, someone that you know personally so that you can put us in contact with them, please let us know. Again, the Contact form on our website :)