Apple agrees. That's why they make the MacBook Air with full mouse support. The mouse is sold separately, though. But, did you know that the MacBook Air comes with a built-in touchpad? It can be used like a mouse. A lot of PC users have very wrong assumption about Apple products, so just trying to help clear the Air (pun intended), so to speak. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't believe that a hybrid truck-car is better than a car or a truck. If you want a confused tablet-laptop hybrid, Microsoft has what you want.
Regardless, the Surface Pro 3 is still a fantastic product and for a similiar same price as the MacBook Air I would rather have the Surface with it's touch screen, capability to run a 4K external monitor and OSX Yosemite looks fantastic on it's 3:2 2160x1440 display. That's just me though, I'm sure most of you would still prefer the Air but I'm not as biased against Apple products. I like to mix it up every once in a while, I won't get rid of my MacBook Air anytime soon but I won't be buying another one either, at least not for another year or two. I really like devices with touch interfaces, especially on laptops as using Abelton Live this way is an absolute dream. Now that I have that ridiculous Panasonic 20" 4k tablet, two more iPad Air's,a Surface Pro 3 and soon a Mac Pro connected to a Lenovo 4K touch monitor my little music studio is going to be awesome.
Regardless, the Surface Pro 3 is still a fantastic product and for a similiar same price as the MacBook Air I would rather have the Surface with it's touch screen and OSX Yosemite looks fantastic on it's 3:2 2160x1440 display. That's just me though, I'm sure most of you would still prefer the Air but I'm not as biased against Apple products. I like to mix it up every once in a while, I won't get rid of my MacBook Air anytime soon but I won't be buying another one either, at least not for another year or two. I really like devices with touch interfaces, especially on laptops as using Abelton Live this way is an absolute dream. Now that I have that ridiculous Panasonic 20" 4k tablet, two more iPad Air's,a Surface Pro 3 and soon a Mac Pro connected to a Lenovo 4K touch monitor my little music studio is going to be awesome.
Surface Pro 3 128 GB i5 for $999 does not include the keyboard.
Surface Pro 3 128 GB i5 for $999 does not include the keyboard.
Okay, what's your point, I said similar priced not exact, I got my keyboard for only 80 anyway, I had a rebate card from Microsoft for 50 off of assecories and a lot of stores are selling it for only 100 when purchased with the Surface. The rebate came in the Surface Pro 3 box along with a 200GB OneDrive voucher, I was actually going to skip the keyboard because the Surface Pro 2's was so bad but after playing with it I changed my mind, they really made it a lot better this time around.
Implementing the cursor keys and copy/paste buttons from the iPhone keyboard into the iPad keyboard would probably help.
AFAIK, the cursor keys on external Bluetooth keyboards have always worked in iOS (at least from the first iPad), as have key combos like CMD-C/V/X/Z. The cursor keys also accept the alt/cmd/shift modifiers of OS X, moving the cursor or selecting text by word and line increments. The up and down cursor keys also work as expected.
They specifically state in the review that this keyboard also has dedicated keys for copy, paste and cut.
I would rather have the Surface with it's touch screen, capability to run a 4K external monitor and OSX Yosemite looks fantastic on it's 3:2 2160x1440 display.
Intriguing. How good is driver support? Any issues or annoyances using OS X with touch?
Intriguing. How good is driver support? Any issues or annoyances using OS X with touch?
The Wifi drivers don't work but the Hackintosh community is working on a fix. In the mean time I'm using a little WiFi Dongle from EdiMax, the EW-7811Un, only 12 bucks, it's the same size as a Logitech wireless adapter for their keyboards. Touch is still a problem, though I just got a new driver set that's supposed to be promising, everything else works. It's a work in progress but we should have everything working by the end of this month, though at this point it's like having a MacBook Air, the experience is the best when I have it connected to my MS Wedge Keyboard and projector, it looks and feels like a real Mac, you wouldn't know it unless you saw the Surface 3. I'm actively helping the community in creating a post install script that will install all the patches in one go, making it much easier for not so technically minded people to get OSX up and running. I would be more than happy to share it here with you guys when it's finished.
If you interested in a something that works out of box that doesn't need much in the way fussing around with, Dells Venue Pro 11 is a good option, it must be the i3 or i5 model however as the Atom CPU doesn't support 64Bit EFI, it's also one of the only tablets on the market with a removable battery, so you can carry an extra one for only 60 bucks more. The model with the i5-4210Y, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD drive can be had for now only $480.00 on Amazon, $640.00 if you add the keyboard and stylus, the keyboard has an extra battery in it so you can get about 12 hours of operation from it. It's not a bad setup actually, especially for only $480.00 dollars, great machine to goof around with Linux and OSX on.
It works just fine, although I wish the pointer was a little smaller, it's really nice to have if you copy and paste text a lot, which I do when I'm coding or even writing in forums, yea it's worth using and the keyboard's shortcut functions also work making it even faster.
I've become hugely productive using Voice to Text, which in iOS is toggled by the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard. On a Mac the same function is available by double-tapping the Command key (via Settings>Keyboard). However none of the physical Bluetooth keyboards I've tried have a "microphone key" or any way to set up the equivalent of double-taping the Command key. So the only workaround is to lift your hand form the Bluetooth keyboard and use your fingertip by tapping on the iPad screen to bring up the virtual keyboard to toggle the microphone key off and on. After paying $169 for a "state of the art" physical keyboard this is a ridiculous arrangement and ultimately a deal-breaker for me.
It works just fine, although I wish the pointer was a little smaller, it's really nice to have if you copy and paste text a lot, which I do when I'm coding or even writing in forums, yea it's worth using and the keyboard's shortcut functions also work making it even faster.
So you plug in a mouse to the keyboard and you have cursor? I didn't even know this was possible.
The port for the lightening connector is not big enough to allow the use of even Apple accessories such as the Apple Lightening to VGA connector, a critical piece of equipment in my work as I use the iPad to show presentations. Everything the review said about the product is corrrect, but it is useless to me as I cannot use it to connect to a projector.
So you plug in a mouse to the keyboard and you have cursor? I didn't even know this was possible.
Yes, however your iPad will need to be Jailbroken, once that's done just install a program by the name of BTstack Mouse , easy peasy. Jailbreaking is defiantly worth doing, I used to be against it because I managed to make my last iPad very unstable but it seems to be working pretty good this time around, especially to get full multitasking. Being able to run multiple apps on an iPad is great, I have no idea why Apple just doesn't allow this to began with, especially now that theirs is 2GB of memory. Though running 3 or more music creation apps all playing sound at ounce does result in some latency, nothing to bad though.
I've become hugely productive using Voice to Text, which in iOS is toggled by the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard. On a Mac the same function is available by double-tapping the Command key (via Settings>Keyboard). However none of the physical Bluetooth keyboards I've tried have a "microphone key" or any way to set up the equivalent of double-taping the Command key. So the only workaround is to lift your hand form the Bluetooth keyboard and use your fingertip by tapping on the iPad screen to bring up the virtual keyboard to toggle the microphone key off and on. After paying $169 for a "state of the art" physical keyboard this is a ridiculous arrangement and ultimately a deal-breaker for me.
Another Jailbreak tweak to the rescue, use an app called BeeKeyboard, it allows you to assign custom keys to you keyboard.
The clamshell case simply helps to facilitate productivity.
Really? What productive things can you do on an iPad with iOS? Properly productive, so you can complete business work, arts and graphics, student needs, etc.
...also because creative suite simply doesn't exist as an iOS option and i need the sophistication.
Well, it does...sort of. There is a fairly robust Photoshop app...I know...it's not full-on Photoshop but it does work to an extent. After that, Adobe seems to think designers need a whole host of strangely overlapping sketching apps that all do things pretty much done better by other sketching apps...aside from connecting to Creative Cloud. I think they could do InDesign and Illustrator for iOS...but I think they're mostly just testing the waters with these other apps. I'm not sure if they could do full-blown versions of them or just watered down "get your ideas started on iOS and finish them on your Mac/Win machine"...which is sort of what I see these other apps being useful for...so that might be a "no" then. Not sure.
At any rate, I'm running an iPad 3 with the original ClamCase and it really is a pretty nice piece...especially bought used for half-price on eBay. Also found out they can be taken apart to replace a soda-soaked keyboard...not sure if the Pro version can do that, though.
I can do without a mouse, but what I'd really like is someway to get apps like Safari to scroll with the arrow keys. I'll gladly do some key combination as long as it's not too carpal-tunnel inducing.
<div class="quote-container" data-huddler-embed="/t/183194/review-clamcase-pro-for-ipad-air#post_2633009" data-huddler-embed-placeholder="false"><span>Quote:</span><div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by <strong>Quadra 610</strong> <a href="/t/183194/review-clamcase-pro-for-ipad-air#post_2633009"><img src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" class="inlineimg" alt="View Post"/></a><br/><br/>The iPad already *is* a "productivity machine."<br />
<br />
The clamshell case simply helps to facilitate productivity.</div></div><p> </p>
Really? What productive things can you do on an iPad with iOS? Properly productive, so you can complete business work, arts and graphics, student needs, etc.
I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.
I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.
And you do all that with the touchscreen? I couldn't image word processing and web development on a touch screen. Proof printing without a pen to mark things?
I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.
And you do all that with the touchscreen? I couldn't image word processing and web development on a touch screen. Proof printing without a pen to mark things?
I code on my tablets as well but I use a Unix command line via a terminal session connected to my server at home. I never had any reason to use a WYSIWYG IDE, word processing is also pretty decent, especially with this ClamCase Pro. There really isn't much you can't do on an iPad, especially with web apps to fill the gaps, the only thing holding it back is full multitasking but even that can be rectified by JailBreaking it. Like I said above you can also add mouse support.
<div class="quote-container" data-huddler-embed="/t/183194/review-clamcase-pro-for-ipad-air#post_2633347" data-huddler-embed-placeholder="false"><span>Quote:</span><div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by <strong>carmelapple</strong> <a href="/t/183194/review-clamcase-pro-for-ipad-air#post_2633347"><img src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" class="inlineimg" alt="View Post"/></a><br/><br/><br />
I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.</div></div><p> </p>
And you do all that with the touchscreen? I couldn't image word processing and web development on a touch screen. Proof printing without a pen to mark things?
No. As mentioned above, I use a ClamCase to type on. For my artwork and graphic design, I use apps like iDraw and Procreate which work well with a touchscreen interface. Procreate even makes good use of my Wacom BT stylus. Also, I'm talking about proof printing of design...just simply printing a proof to be approved by a client. A lot of people are still stuck on this ridiculous idea that iPads (and strangely mostly just iPads) are content consumption devices not suited at all for any sort of productivity. I get a lot done on mine.
Comments
Regardless, the Surface Pro 3 is still a fantastic product and for a similiar same price as the MacBook Air I would rather have the Surface with it's touch screen, capability to run a 4K external monitor and OSX Yosemite looks fantastic on it's 3:2 2160x1440 display. That's just me though, I'm sure most of you would still prefer the Air but I'm not as biased against Apple products. I like to mix it up every once in a while, I won't get rid of my MacBook Air anytime soon but I won't be buying another one either, at least not for another year or two. I really like devices with touch interfaces, especially on laptops as using Abelton Live this way is an absolute dream. Now that I have that ridiculous Panasonic 20" 4k tablet, two more iPad Air's,a Surface Pro 3 and soon a Mac Pro connected to a Lenovo 4K touch monitor my little music studio is going to be awesome.
BTW, I hav
Regardless, the Surface Pro 3 is still a fantastic product and for a similiar same price as the MacBook Air I would rather have the Surface with it's touch screen and OSX Yosemite looks fantastic on it's 3:2 2160x1440 display. That's just me though, I'm sure most of you would still prefer the Air but I'm not as biased against Apple products. I like to mix it up every once in a while, I won't get rid of my MacBook Air anytime soon but I won't be buying another one either, at least not for another year or two. I really like devices with touch interfaces, especially on laptops as using Abelton Live this way is an absolute dream. Now that I have that ridiculous Panasonic 20" 4k tablet, two more iPad Air's,a Surface Pro 3 and soon a Mac Pro connected to a Lenovo 4K touch monitor my little music studio is going to be awesome.
Surface Pro 3 128 GB i5 for $999 does not include the keyboard.
Okay, what's your point, I said similar priced not exact, I got my keyboard for only 80 anyway, I had a rebate card from Microsoft for 50 off of assecories and a lot of stores are selling it for only 100 when purchased with the Surface. The rebate came in the Surface Pro 3 box along with a 200GB OneDrive voucher, I was actually going to skip the keyboard because the Surface Pro 2's was so bad but after playing with it I changed my mind, they really made it a lot better this time around.
AFAIK, the cursor keys on external Bluetooth keyboards have always worked in iOS (at least from the first iPad), as have key combos like CMD-C/V/X/Z. The cursor keys also accept the alt/cmd/shift modifiers of OS X, moving the cursor or selecting text by word and line increments. The up and down cursor keys also work as expected.
They specifically state in the review that this keyboard also has dedicated keys for copy, paste and cut.
Intriguing. How good is driver support? Any issues or annoyances using OS X with touch?
Intriguing. How good is driver support? Any issues or annoyances using OS X with touch?
The Wifi drivers don't work but the Hackintosh community is working on a fix. In the mean time I'm using a little WiFi Dongle from EdiMax, the EW-7811Un, only 12 bucks, it's the same size as a Logitech wireless adapter for their keyboards. Touch is still a problem, though I just got a new driver set that's supposed to be promising, everything else works. It's a work in progress but we should have everything working by the end of this month, though at this point it's like having a MacBook Air, the experience is the best when I have it connected to my MS Wedge Keyboard and projector, it looks and feels like a real Mac, you wouldn't know it unless you saw the Surface 3. I'm actively helping the community in creating a post install script that will install all the patches in one go, making it much easier for not so technically minded people to get OSX up and running. I would be more than happy to share it here with you guys when it's finished.
If you interested in a something that works out of box that doesn't need much in the way fussing around with, Dells Venue Pro 11 is a good option, it must be the i3 or i5 model however as the Atom CPU doesn't support 64Bit EFI, it's also one of the only tablets on the market with a removable battery, so you can carry an extra one for only 60 bucks more. The model with the i5-4210Y, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD drive can be had for now only $480.00 on Amazon, $640.00 if you add the keyboard and stylus, the keyboard has an extra battery in it so you can get about 12 hours of operation from it. It's not a bad setup actually, especially for only $480.00 dollars, great machine to goof around with Linux and OSX on.
The Apple mouse? How does that work?
It works just fine, although I wish the pointer was a little smaller, it's really nice to have if you copy and paste text a lot, which I do when I'm coding or even writing in forums, yea it's worth using and the keyboard's shortcut functions also work making it even faster.
So you plug in a mouse to the keyboard and you have cursor? I didn't even know this was possible.
Yes, however your iPad will need to be Jailbroken, once that's done just install a program by the name of BTstack Mouse , easy peasy. Jailbreaking is defiantly worth doing, I used to be against it because I managed to make my last iPad very unstable but it seems to be working pretty good this time around, especially to get full multitasking. Being able to run multiple apps on an iPad is great, I have no idea why Apple just doesn't allow this to began with, especially now that theirs is 2GB of memory. Though running 3 or more music creation apps all playing sound at ounce does result in some latency, nothing to bad though.
I've become hugely productive using Voice to Text, which in iOS is toggled by the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard. On a Mac the same function is available by double-tapping the Command key (via Settings>Keyboard). However none of the physical Bluetooth keyboards I've tried have a "microphone key" or any way to set up the equivalent of double-taping the Command key. So the only workaround is to lift your hand form the Bluetooth keyboard and use your fingertip by tapping on the iPad screen to bring up the virtual keyboard to toggle the microphone key off and on. After paying $169 for a "state of the art" physical keyboard this is a ridiculous arrangement and ultimately a deal-breaker for me.
Another Jailbreak tweak to the rescue, use an app called BeeKeyboard, it allows you to assign custom keys to you keyboard.
The iPad already *is* a "productivity machine."
The clamshell case simply helps to facilitate productivity.
Really? What productive things can you do on an iPad with iOS? Properly productive, so you can complete business work, arts and graphics, student needs, etc.Well, it does...sort of. There is a fairly robust Photoshop app...I know...it's not full-on Photoshop but it does work to an extent. After that, Adobe seems to think designers need a whole host of strangely overlapping sketching apps that all do things pretty much done better by other sketching apps...aside from connecting to Creative Cloud. I think they could do InDesign and Illustrator for iOS...but I think they're mostly just testing the waters with these other apps. I'm not sure if they could do full-blown versions of them or just watered down "get your ideas started on iOS and finish them on your Mac/Win machine"...which is sort of what I see these other apps being useful for...so that might be a "no" then. Not sure.
At any rate, I'm running an iPad 3 with the original ClamCase and it really is a pretty nice piece...especially bought used for half-price on eBay. Also found out they can be taken apart to replace a soda-soaked keyboard...not sure if the Pro version can do that, though.
I can do without a mouse, but what I'd really like is someway to get apps like Safari to scroll with the arrow keys. I'll gladly do some key combination as long as it's not too carpal-tunnel inducing.
I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.
I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.
And you do all that with the touchscreen? I couldn't image word processing and web development on a touch screen. Proof printing without a pen to mark things?I do a fair amount of email, word processing, web development (only a hobby right now), graphic design and even some proof printing. The apps are there...some you can take, some you can leave. I think as time goes on they will become more powerful and better designed, but they do exist. Right now I'm looking for an InDesign/Quark style app. Quark actually makes one, but it's garbage...even Microsoft Publisher puts it to shame...and that's bad. Really bad.
And you do all that with the touchscreen? I couldn't image word processing and web development on a touch screen. Proof printing without a pen to mark things?
I code on my tablets as well but I use a Unix command line via a terminal session connected to my server at home. I never had any reason to use a WYSIWYG IDE, word processing is also pretty decent, especially with this ClamCase Pro. There really isn't much you can't do on an iPad, especially with web apps to fill the gaps, the only thing holding it back is full multitasking but even that can be rectified by JailBreaking it. Like I said above you can also add mouse support.
No. As mentioned above, I use a ClamCase to type on. For my artwork and graphic design, I use apps like iDraw and Procreate which work well with a touchscreen interface. Procreate even makes good use of my Wacom BT stylus. Also, I'm talking about proof printing of design...just simply printing a proof to be approved by a client. A lot of people are still stuck on this ridiculous idea that iPads (and strangely mostly just iPads) are content consumption devices not suited at all for any sort of productivity. I get a lot done on mine.