Being Productive with Vision Pro: My Working Setup

I have here the new Apple Vision Pro and I have been using this thing a ton I just I absolutely love it so I figured the best place to start talking about Vision Pro is to start by talking about how I'm using it and in this specific video I'm going to talk about work and productivity this video is sponsored by surf shark so when I've been using the Vision Pro for work I like to come into my office here and I actually sit at this desk not that one this is my filming desk and it's about in the center of the room this means I can have plenty of space to throw up Windows and different apps now usually this is a completely empty desk with the exception of the two homepods in this little iPad stand that I have in the corner here this desk never has anything on it now when using the Vision Pro I exclusively use the Dual Loop band uh this is the band that has a back part and a top part now this one doesn't look nearly as nice as the solo net band but what I found and when I did the kind of like the pre-release demo down in La is that the knit band the solo knit band it puts a lot of the weight kind of on your nose now I have this really stubby nose it just it doesn't work for me it sags down too much so I've been using the the Dual Loop band I've been able to wear this for hours on end and get work done with the Dual Loop band now at this desk right here I have a couple of USBC cables I have one over here this way when I sit down on my desk I just put the battery pack next to me and if it needs to be plugged in I can plug it in I also put a magic keyboard and trackpad on this desk some of you are going to be shocked to hear that I am using the magic keyboard over one of my Min mechanical keyboard options right now the hardware keyboard bar in Vision OS only tracks the magic keyboard I tried it with all of these keyboards that have Bluetooth that I comp pair with Vision Pro and the magic keyboard is the only one that Vision Pro would track properly and what I mean by that is when I start typing that keyboard bar gets slotted right above the keyboard kind of behind it so that way I can type and it's you know it's out of the way but it's above the keyboard so when you're typing you can see what you're typing you can also get to things like emojis and stuff like that but it tracks the magic keyboard so if you move it around it moves with it when you start typing it automatically just pins right to the magic keyboard other keyboards it doesn't work for that the keyboard bar will just pop up anywhere and you have to move it around and after a day that got super annoying this keyboard bar is really important for those that have to look to type this way you can keep typing and you can see what you're typing right there on that bar you don't have to constantly look up now the hand and eye tracking when using Vision Pro is really good you I'm able to pinch move apps and stuff around but when using iPad apps and we're going to get into this a bit more in just a second with some of these iPad apps the buttons can be quite close close together so the ey tracking can get confused so for a lot of these iPad apps I just like to use a trackpad with Vision Pro now the software keyboard is a whole another story I find it to be kind of frustrating when you're typing out more than just a half a sentence a small sentence it it's it you're you're having to Peck at it you can't fully type like you would with a normal keyboard you have to use your pointer fingers to type around so you're you're hunting and pecking essentially so anything more than a couple of words it it gets a bit frustrating I always go back to a hardware keyboard if I'm taking notes writing a script anything like that this video is sponsored by surf shark surf shark is a VPN service that not only protects your devices but protects you as well I've told this story before but I think it's really important I worked in the it field for almost 9 years and one day we decided to set up kind of a a fake coffee shop open network you know you can see what's going on kind of thing and it was scary how much data we were able to collect now with a VPN that is going to prevent that from happening with surf shark your traffic is completely encrypted from your device to the destination protecting your privacy now this really isn't uh I have nothing to hide so I have nothing to lose kind of thing data is the new gold and people will do really scary things to get a hold of it now one thing I really appreciate about surf shark is they don't keep logs of your traffic VPN services that keep logs are defeating the purpose of using a VPN the other thing surf shark is good for is watching TV and movies we all know Netflix and other streaming services have different catalogs based on which region you're in so I could be in the US and I can go check out UK Netflix or I could be in Canada and check out American Netflix I really like surf shark in fact a couple of years ago I paid for it myself it's one of those services that I just love having on my iPad when I'm traveling I'm going to put a link in the description below for you to go check it out use code Loi to get an extra 3 months for free my thanks to Surf shark for sponsoring this video so once I've got my Hardware space set up throw on the headset and typically immediately I spin the digital crown and turn on the environments now I spin the digital Crown to only about 2/3 now when they were Deming this I wasn't quite sure why you would want the environments to be like kind of semi on semi off I figured you'd either want them always on or always off fully because the environments can be immersive they can be 360° around you but the issue with that is is if you're sitting at a desk working with a keyboard and trackpad you can't see your keyboard and trackpad anymore uh so I dial it down to about 2/3 so this way it's blocking out everything in front of me but I can still see that keyboard and trackpad in front of me but most importantly I can still see my Dr Pepper what I really wish would happen is that Vision Pro would cut out the desk in your environment or small area so this way I could go 360° immersive environments and block out everything in this room because when I do 2/3 the back wall is not blocked out so what I'd love is to cut out a little area on the desk be able to see my keyboard my trackpad my Dr Pepper and be a happy camper now the biggest issue for me right now when working from Vision Pro is Windows and widgets and things like that aren't persistent especially when the battery dies or Vision Pro gets shut off because you have to reboot it or something like that the battery life on Vision Pro isn't great that's something we all knew going into it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone uh even in standby mode it it dies pretty quickly so this means every morning I'm having to reset up my workspaces I really wish Apple would kind of come up with a way to make workspace templates whether it's just you know you run a shortcut and it launches all the apps or if you run a shortcut and it remembers you know the positions relative to where Vision Pro is on your head you know you know I have a window over here and a window over here remember how you know the distance how relative it was and what happened stuff like that and just let me launch those workspaces that would be handy so like I said the first thing I kind of do is I set up my workspaces and I start with widgets now unlike apps on the iPhone and iPad widgets aren't just baked into them um widgets are essentially kind of a class of apps so they're they're actually apps that you are launching and you're moving those windows around so apps like shortcuts don't actually have widgets built into them but a developer made an app called shortcuts button and this allows you to make shortcut widgets and pin them around your environment this way you can just tap on one and it'll run that shortcut right from the shortcuts app so what I did is set up my action cut shortcut this is one I've talked about a lot I originally made this to run from the action button of the iPhone but this works out great because what this is is a list of shortcuts that adapts to my focus mode and then I can just tap on it and it runs but this way if I need to create a new task make a note something like that I can just tap the button run it and you know go from there the next widget I like to have is spatial noise this is from the developer of dark noise this allows you to put different sounds all over your environment and then it uses spatial audio to make it sound like those clips those sound Clips are coming from that place so if you take you know rain and move it over here it's going to sound like it's raining coming from over here if you put a fan over here it's going to make it sound like there's a fan now I like to use this for focusing and just kind of drowning out background sounds I can't sit in silence I did discover something kind of cool when playing around with these if you have two native Vision OS apps you can play audio at the same time which is something you can't do on the iPad you can't have audio from two different sources playing at the same time so this means I could have spatial audio and uh the music app going at the same time then another widget I like to pin in my workspace is just a simple clock widget from widget Smith there is no persistent clock in Vision Pro you have to go into control center to pull up the clock and that's just a bit too much when I just want to glance to see what time it is so I just put this widget in my environment the last widget I've been using is just a simple battery widget app this just shows me the battery life for My Vision Pro I really wish it would also show me the battery life from my keyboard and trackpad and other connected devices not sure vision apps can do that that's something I need to look into now when I'm setting up this workspace I just put all of these widgets just to the right of me about 90° over to the right this way they're not in my field of view like they're not taking up you know that precious real estate that's of space that's right directly in front of you but if I need to see something or run a shortcut or whatever I can just glance to the right usually in the morning one of the first things I do is all of my administrative work this is stuff like emails go over my calendar at task manager uh make sure I log all my business expenses and income that's come in organize my day and other stuff like that all of this I can do really easily from Vision Pro like I mentioned in the past my default email client is just the built-in mail app I've never really found a third-party mail app that I've been really happy with that isn't buggy or doesn't try and do like a bunch of weird things with your mail just I just use the mail one but I use a service called sanbox for uh Inc email filtering now there really isn't anything too special about the default mail app it works just like the iPad app like I said I'm one of those people that I can't sit in silence so when I'm doing administrative work I like to have music playing in the background but I can't use lyrical music that really distracts me so what I've been doing is just opening up the music app throwing it behind me and I've been using my friend Tom from the bite review Channel his kiraku radio station albums these are albums that are non- lyrical c music and they're kind of inspired by things like Zelda and other Nintendo properties and things like that they are amazing for focusing and just getting work done and you know not being distracted but also not sitting in silence I actually made a playlist and took all of his albums and just put them in there so that way I can just hit play and let them run one surprising aspect of Vision Pro for me is that numbers is actually just an iPad compatible app it is not a native app at all it's just the iPad version running on Vision Pro for me it it gets the job done but I would love a native numbers app uh right now the the touch targets are a little small so when you're using the gestures the eye tracking and the pinch gesture sometimes I can pick the wrong thing so a lot of times when I'm sitting down with numbers I use a hardware keyboard and a hardware trackpad which is fine because I'm inputting data and stuff like that it's not the end of the world um but I use numbers for all of my business tracking income and expenses keeping my books there you know I my spreadsheets they aren't super complicated but numbers Pages they're here keynote though is a native app so it does make me think that okay maybe pages and numbers uh will get native apps eventually there just wasn't enough time now when working with a hardware keyboard I use Spotlight a lot to launch apps you can just hit command space just like on the iPad or the Mac to launch Spotlight type your app and hit enter command 8 also works but this brings up the app picker uh it doesn't hide anything like the Mac it brings up the full-on app picker uh so you can you know pick an app or something like that if you want to use like the pinch gesture something I really wish Vision Pro had was the ability to command tab through windows or at least the ability to select an open app and bring it right to the foreground right in front of you you can hold down the digital crown and it'll bring everything right in front of you but if you're like me and you're setting up really particular environments that will mess those up and that's a huge bummer really quick another app that came to Vision Pro and it's an app I use every single day is things three they made a native Vision Pro app and it is very good it works very similar to the iPad in the Mac App you know you have your columns and lists and projects all on the left side and then you have your tasks on the right but unlike other Vision Pro apps you can actually go in and launch stuff into multiple windows Vision Pro doesn't support multi- window natively so you know unlike the iPad or something like that you can't open up multiple safari windows or multiple files Windows or anything like that but things they figured out a way to allow you to open up multiple windows of their app which is really handy with things three running on Vision Pro I have all my tasks right in front of me uh often when I am using things three I throw it over to the left side of me so it's always there it's always open but again it's not taking up that precious real state of what's right in front of you what's in front of your keyboard it's just off to the side so if I need it I can look over I can bring it over if I want to but it's just there now my one complaint about things on Vision Pro is it's light mode only and this actually is more of a system complaint Vision Pro really really likes light mode it it does kind of automatic switching with environments and stuff at night but it really likes light mode and having a big white window right in front of you a bright white window is not fun for your eyes uh so honestly I really think Vision Pro should be defaulting more towards dark mode than light mode when I made my what's on my iPad productivity video I mentioned I was moving away from Fantastical to an app called mini calendar I just wasn't using the Fantastical features and it was getting a really expensive it just wasn't worth it for me they were going much more big business Enterprise features and stuff like that and it wasn't worth it for me then comes Vision Pro and they made a beautiful native app for Vision Pro so I'm back on Fantastical now it looks great it's it's kind of grayish but transparent so it's really nice to look at um you can make it super big you have your month day week views you have your event views just like you do on the iPad my only complaint is you can't make it really small like you can on the iPad so you just see like the calendar and the vent views uh I really actually was missing fantastic Cal for one particular reason calendar sets that's something that wasn't in mini Cal I didn't realize how much I appreciated calendar sets so I'm kind of glad to be back now fantastic Cal isn't the only calendar app I use on Vision Pro there's an app called day ahead that I've been using and day ahead is a really interesting App instead of having like a window like you would traditionally do for an app this just has a 3D tube and inside it are your your calendar events so you can see your events and when they will be happening you can see where you currently are and how far along your events are you can then look and select an event and it'll show you all the details for it this is a really clever app I absolutely love playing with this for a digital 3D environment I think this is a really clever way of showing calendar events it's a simple looking app I'll totally admit to that but I think a lot of really good native Vision OS apps aren't trying to be these big complex UI that you would see on something like the Mac they're just simple utilities that you can just interact with they do a particular thing and then you can move on all right creative work is my bread and butter it's how I pay the bills this is stuff like writing editing photos editing video that kind of stuff and I need a computer that can be flexible to do that right now for me that's the iPad I've been doing all my writing editing photos editing videos for years on the iPad but Vision Pro has one one big knock against it for my creative workflow there is no Final Cut Pro which is the app I use the app I want to edit in such a bummer there are certain aspects of my creative workflow that I can do on Vision Pro the major one is writing I absolutely love writing on Vision Pro I loaded up obsidian immediately and just went off and just started writing all my scripts here now obsidian is another app that is running an iPad compati ability mode they don't have a native vision app I really hope they're working on one though there are a few bugs in it like it tries to default to light mode quite a bit you have to go in and turn on dark mode if you're a dark mode person like me all the time you also can't load up custom fonts on Vision Pro so I can't use my beloved jet brains mono in obsidian like I like to but what obsidian does extremely well is work with environments in Vision Pro if you're somebody that gets distracted easily like me I have ADHD turning on those environments and just focusing on your writing or whatever it is that you're doing is amazing I can block out all the distractions whether I'm here in my office living room maybe my girlfriend's house I I still haven't worked up the courage to wear this thing like in a public space I I I just I'm not there yet but being able to just have a massive text editor window in front of me is just amazing I can focus on what I want and even though there isn't multi- window support obsidian has a built-in split view mode so I'm able to put my notes side by side so if I have a document I'm working on and a notes document for that I can reference the notes while I'm working in this other document now one thing that's really cool about iPad compatible apps is you're going to see this rotation button up at the top so apps like obsidian or maybe Ivory that make way more sense to use in portrait mode you can select that and it'll go from landscape to portrait in order so you get a much taller window using Vision Pro has become my favorite way of doing all my writing and note taking and research uh when I'm doing research I can have a big obsidian window open and a big Safari window open I'm not cramped to a 12.9 in display I have every all the tools that I need in massive windows and I'm not limited to a screen size because there is no Final Cut on Vision Pro I can't do my video editing workflow on here which is a bummer I wish I could I actually think the iPad version of Final Cut would work really well with a keyboard and mouse on Vision Pro I do see the big issue though is transferring files because there's no USB port on here that means I would have to import my files on my iPad or a Mac or something like that upload them to the cloud and then wait for Vision Pro to download them and that's just kind of convoluted but my photography workflow is Alive and Well on Vision Pro Adobe brought over light light room which is their best mobile app Lightroom is hands down adobe's best mobile app I really wish Adobe would let the light room team tackle the Photoshop iPad app but that's a whole another video there is nothing like having a photo you took in a massive window in front of you and being able to edit it it's just I I can't even explain it so my girlfriend and I we took a trip a couple weeks ago uh we went up to the lake and it was snowing it was absolutely beautiful up there I took a few photos and I edited some of them on my Vision Pro and there was just like an emotional reaction because I was remembering back to that trip I was editing these gorgeous photos of this beautiful spot and just having this big canvas was extremely nice I absolutely really enjoyed editing photos that way and honestly I think for the most part that's probably how I'm going to edit photos going forward Vision Pro is very much a 1.0 this is just how I've been using it there are a lot of complaints I have about it but there's also a lot of things I really like about it but what I'm really excited about is to see how this platform evolves over the next couple years because it's not always going to be a 1.0 so that's kind of how I've been working from Vision Pro I want to hear from you all if you have a Vision Pro how are you working from it if you don't have a Vision Pro are you wanting to try one let me know in the comments below my thanks to Surf shark for sponsoring this video if you like the video hit the Thumbs Up Button subscribe if you haven't already and have a great day

Channel: Christopher Lawley

Views: 39,853

Keywords: Apple, iPad, iPad Pro, iPad Pro 12.9, iPhone, iPad Productivity, Getting things done on iPad, Working off iPad, iPadOS, iOS, App, Shortcuts, Automation, Vision, Vision Pro, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Headset, Apple VR, Productivity, Apps, Recommendations, Workflows, Setup, How To, New, Can you work, How to be productivite, Task manager, Things, Things 3, VR, AR, Working in VR, VR Productivity, What’s new

Id: aFvvxqFEiy4

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024