I took the 12.9 inch M1 iPad pro for a test drive using Webflow.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of Webflow and Code where I teach you the underlying code you’re writing and Webflow you might notice a little bit of a different setup here and the keen eye among you might also notice I have the 12.9 inch Ipad Pro with M1 chip right out in front of me and today we’re going to see how Webflow fares on it while using the magic keyboard.
[Music] So actually I already have the 2018 11 inch Ipad Pro with I guess the smart keyboard and I’ve been using that for a couple of years now, I wanted to see if the 12.9 inch screen made any difference while using Webflow and I’ve never actually used the trackpad before and how that actually might impact my workflow using Webflow I was tempted to go to the 16 gig version and for that you would have to purchase the one terabyte version of it but I’ve learned recently the apps actually don’t take advantage of those 16 gigs but I can’t imagine safari the browser being any different.
If the Ipad OS unlocks more the ability to access more RAM I went for the white magic keyboard just because I wanted to see how it looks and also I went for the silver um Ipad Pro, so with all that out the way let’s dig into Webflow I’m going to be building a simple one-page website using some interactions maybe some custom code and give you my thoughts at the end of it on whether this is something that’s actually viable when it comes to using an ipad as your sole computer, if you’re a web flow designer or developer, so this is the page I’m going to be building.
I’m probably not going to build it all but I want to get far enough where I kind of experience using web flow use a few interactions and develop some custom code the first thing to notice is actually referencing a design in something like figma if you’re going to be doing that I suppose it doesn’t matter so much if you’re going to be designing actually in web flow but if you’re going down the route of referencing a design, uh you’re probably going to want a separate screen or something like that.
A device to be able to actually reference it uh without them to switch tabs it’s not impossible but it is nice obviously when you’ve got that extra screen to show the design on of course you can split the two but obviously there’s just a space issue here and you know there just isn’t enough screen real escape to do that the other thing to notice is that figma doesn’t respond to the trackpad, so I can zoom in but it’s actually just zooming in the browser rather than zooming in on the document.
Also I’m not sure if it’s this particular project itself but I’m able to get this file out of memory error uh it could be the document I don’t know what it is but it keeps on coming up whenever I interact with it or whatever but um but I’ll probably do this by memory because this keeps happening um it’s pretty easy for me to do so but just something I picked up so shortcuts seem to work okay um so let’s just create their header and the one thing that I would suggest is that on the top right here is to select focus mode because for whatever reason um if I expand all here for whatever reason you can’t actually scroll down on this right hand side.
I’m using my finger, I can use the mouse it doesn’t actually scroll down so by putting focus mode on allows us to open just single uh styling properties at any one time which helps us access everything really so let’s just start cracking on with things and see how far we get.
[Music] So I’ve been working on my website for the last couple of hours and I think, I’ve got to a point now where I sort of understand the kind of pros and cons of.. of using Webflow in an Ipad setting to cut long story short I probably wouldn’t recommend using an Ipad as your primary device if you’re a Webflow designer or developer mainly because it’s perfectly usable and I’ve explained there are certain things you can do like the focus mode that will help bring certain things on.. on the page.
Eeverything pretty much works I didn’t run into any kind of things that didn’t work and I played with interactions I wrote a little bit of code I kind of used uh pretty much all of the all of the styling that was available to me but I guess the the major issue that i encountered which means I can’t recommend it is that because of the screen real estate sometimes find that you can’t access elements um mostly when they’re behind the…the page structure dialogue to have to kind of cut to be constantly trying to work around it like I was pinching and zooming and just zooming into the page double clicking and various things like that to encounter that every single day which you most certainly will.
I would think it would drive you absolutely bonkers so yes although Webflow does work if it’s all you’ve got because you…you’re on holiday or you quickly need to change something or whatever then it’s absolutely usable and it’s.. and it’s even better with the with the trackpad but I really wouldn’t recommend this setup as your only development platform unfortunately I think there’s some easy wins that Webflow can probably implement to make it a bit more usable on an ipad the focus mode helps but it would be better if you could scroll.
It is nice you know seeing um visually some of the indicators of where different stylings are so just enabling that to scroll would be an easy thing to do and being able to like pin or undock or move the the page navigation or the element navigator that…that was the major reason why I wouldn’t recommend this and I feel like, yes like I say being able to pin it or dock it or whatever or move it around that would be an easy win to then you can start actually recommending this.
The screen size is quite good I couldn’t imagine working on an 11 inch it would feel quite cramped so 12 12 inches really the um the minimum I would.. I would sort of go for for a screen size but overall I was pleasantly surprised like I was.. I was happy to work on it.
It was a little bit annoying here and there particularly trying to use figma again it kept crashing that could have been an issue with the file or something I’m not too sure but not being able to use figma very well and and having to work around to kind of get values and things like that was a bit difficult but if you are jumping into…into Webflow with designing actually in Webflow then that wouldn’t so much be a bother it’s just those little hiccups that slow you down and over time will probably end up costing you more.
Because you’re taking longer to try and work around these issues sometimes I was stuck on it for up to a minute basically so while I’m editing I thought I’d jump in with a few more points that I kind of thought about that aren’t directly related to Webflow first of all I think the battery life I have to say isn’t very good I would leave it on um you know not really doing anything and I would come back and…and the battery is drained significantly I had to basically keep it charged most of the time maybe that’s an issue with my device but I…I wasn’t that impressed with the battery life considering I have the 11 inch and and I.. I’ve used Webflow on that one haven’t really has not really jumped out of me that the the battery life hasn’t been too good.
The screen obviously being mini LED doesn’t really make a difference I think that’s pretty much a no-brainer it’s more HDR content so there’s no reason to get it just because of the the mini LED screen and the M1 chip really you know just generally actually on the device doing it doing anything else as well as the Webflow stuff.
I honestly really don’t notice that much of a speed difference from my 2018 um not a significant amount so if you do have the 2020 version and are considering buying one for the speed you’re probably not going to notice a difference I think Ipad OS is really a bottleneck here and hopefully they’ll look to expand on Ipad os ability in the future and maybe we can revisit this episode at a later time so that’ll do it for this episode uh.
If you enjoyed it then I appreciate it like I…I had fun just kind of experimenting with different camera angles and just doing a different kind of format and my usual stuff if you want to support me um and the channel then you can do so at patreon.com fake sound gregory where you could buy me a coffee just the ones or whatever just to support the channel and keep these videos going so until next time happy no coding [Music]