Hi everyone.
A while ago I decided to switch away from Mac towards Windows 10 laptops. There were a few reasons: I despise the MacBook keyboard and I find myself avoiding typing rather than using it; I want to do more dictation and it’s far easier on windows (I have been using dragon naturally speaking on win 10 running on parallels); I’ve been using an ergonomic keyboard on my desktop Mac and I love it, but I’ve not found a good ergonomic keyboard that works on Mac and IPad.
If dictation and ergonomic keyboards worked well on iPad then I would have been happy to stick with my iPad Pro. I’m an author so these things are important to me!
Last week I bought a ms surface go. It’s the iPad-mini equivalent of a surface pro. It’s slow but it does dictation well and it works very nicely with an ergonomic keyboard. And it has a mouse! As well as a pen.
I like it, but it’s small and slow, so I suspect I’ll get a full spec surface pro over time.
But … I’m not abandoning Mac and iOS.
So, I’m interested to find apps that work well across win 10, iOS, and Mac.
(I’ve got scrivener, ms office, drop box and one drive. I haven’t found a good drawing package. I’m not sure what email client to use - but since I work with all gmail accounts I can stick with chrome and gmail. I like the convenience of iCloud photos but it’s not so good for windows!)
Anyone else living this multi-platform life?
For drawing, I would look at the Affinity apps, Inkscape (open source) and the Adobe apps if you have the budget (or an available discount.)
I live the multi-platform life but kind of in the opposite direction. I started on PC running DOS 3.3 before there was a Windows. I bought my first MacBook Pro in 2011. I currently work on Windows all day at work as a developer and have a 2014 MacBook Pro for portability and a 2017 5K iMac at home.
For me Dropbox is the glue between the two environments. Keep in mind you can access your iCloud data and Apple apps from iCloud.com from your Windows PC.
I’m not sure what you are looking for in a drawing program. For diagraming Visio on the PC and Omnigraffle (pro version) will allow file exchange. Photoshop of course but very pricey with their subscription model.
Apple makes an iCloud Windows client that will sync your photos from iCloud to the PC. It used to be not that reliable but seems to have improved. I use the Dropbox client on iOS to upload my photos and then have a Hazel script that moves them from the Dropbox folder onto the locally attached Drobo on my iMac. This give me a second copy of my photos in case of an iCloud issue. They also make iTunes for Windows.
For password management I started with a program in the early 2000’s called Password Safe which I still use today. By now a day standards it has an ugly UI but is totally functional and has a Mac and good iOS client that syncs the encrypted safe in Dropbox. Keepass has a more modern UI and has options for all environments. Those are both free options with a small fee for iOS clients. And of course 1Password for a paid solution.
For text expansion I still use the non-subscription version of text expander on the Mac and a program called Breevy on the PC. The snippet file is shared in Dropbox between the two applications. PhaseExpress is another Windows program the can read the Text Expander snippet file.
For Notes, I use Evernote as it has clients and syncs everywhere. Backblaze for backups, has Window and Mac clients.
Anyone looking for a Hazel like program for Windows, check out File Juggler. I use MultiMarkdown Composer on the Mac and MarkdownPad to edit markdown on Windows.
A couple of things I missed from Windows in macOS was the ability to right click in a folder and create a file. New File Menu provides this capability. The other was to select some text, right click on it and print it. Print Selection allows me to do that.
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Not sure if you meaning drawing like sketching/painting , or drawing like illustration. Interestingly, lots of people use PowerPoint to create things like posters, and other OmniGraffle-style illustrations.
The Notebooks app is cross platform. But so is OneNote.
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I’ll take a look. Thank you.
Very thorough! Thanks. I’ll go investigating.
I also discovered that ithoughts mindmap software works on all platforms.