Saturday, December 17, 2016

Sanity arrives at Apple's iPad section

[Update: Oh no! This whole post is a mistake, Apple has NOT fixed the problem. I just overlooked (it's very late here) that I was looking at *screenshot* images, so they already had the black background built in! Sigh, the futile wait continues... will it take most of a decade to get fixed like it did in OSX?]

Sanity on the iPad screen. FINALLY! Somebody at Apple has finally kicked the benzos and fixed the long-standing wallpaper problem which was driving me nuts: the braindead situation that one could not fit the whole of an image on the screen of the iPad as wallpaper without cropping it, unless it happened to have exactly the same dimensions as the screen. Now we can. Thank you, sane person, and stay off the pills.
 (They also fixed the newer problem that wallpapers were made darker than the source image. Also thanks for that.)

 (See, a week ago this painting would have been cropped at both ends instead of simple being fit in with letterboxing.)

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Faster charging

(This may even work for Android devices, haven't tested.)

The 13-inch iPad Pro, wonderful as it is, unfortunately ships with a charger which i under-powered for the job. It takes a silly number of hours for it to charge this large tablet to full.

One can get faster results by buying a Macbook charger and an adapter, but at a price.

One thing I've found which helps a lot: when charging the iPad (or iPhone), instead of putting the device to sleep, turn it off fully.
This turns off the wireless services, the checking for email and such things. It may even make a difference in the way the charging itself works. In any case, it makes the charging gratifyingly faster.

BTW, I recommend the 13-inch iPad Pro. It's less portable of course, but if you have it in a stand, it makes a great difference to surfing, usability in general, reading of graphic-rich publications, and video. It's a pleasure. Before it came along, I wrote several times about how we needed a bigger "iPad Pro", and I was not wrong.