Book v. iPad Air v. iPad Pro

I put together an online iCloud photo album with some pictures comparing books with the same or equivalent e-book on iPad Air and iPad Pro.

While the iPad Air is a better size for typical novels and articles, the iPad Pro is (IMHO) better for textbooks† (like technical books and RPG books) and comic books.

Digest-sized RPG books are often better on the Air. Although, the Pro does allow viewing two of them side-by-side.

Unfortunately, to get the two books side-by-side I had to load them into different apps. (In this case, iBooks and PDF Expert.) Although I haven’t played with PDF Expert enough to know what it can do. My PDF app of choice, GoodReader, hasn’t been updated to support side-by-side or to fully support the iPad Pro yet.

Being able to view two arbitrary pages in the same PDF side-by-side could be useful too. While you could do this with the two apps workaround, it would be better if a single app added such a feature. GoodReader has the ability to open multiple pages from one PDF in separate tabs, so that seems a reasonable addition to better support the iPad Pro.

But being able to view a book at full iPad Air size on one side of the Pro while having another app—e.g. Pages, UX Writer, Evernote, etc.—at full iPad Air size on the other side seems promising.

†Ironic that the word “textbook” seems á propos to me here since what distinguishes these from typical novels and articles is that they have lots of images, tables, and diagrams in addition to text.

The extraordinary among the ordinary

So, I’m listening to Grimm Studios Podcast episode 1 and the subject comes up about whether a hero is an extraordinary person or an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.

(I think both. I think it’s also interesting to note, however, that when the hero is extraordinary, the challenges faced are often so much more extraordinary that the hero’s extraordinariness† is immaterial.)

It occurs to me that this might be why I’m not crazy about things like The Watchmen. In some ways they are about extraordinary persons in ordinary circumstances. I can appreciate that sort of thing but only so much.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy The Watchmen‡. I did. It’s just never going to be on my list of favorites.

†Wow. This derivative of extraordinary—as awkward as it is—is actually explicitly listed in the Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary.

‡Not the movie. The comic. Although I haven’t actually so much read the comic as watched the “motion comic”.

Bucky?

If you occasionally enjoy reading comic books and are even further out-of-the-loop than I am, the following contains spoilers for The Death of Captain America.

Let me get this straight.

Captain America’s sidekick, Bucky... One of the few comic book characters that had managed to stay dead... Who’d become a symbol of a character who stayed dead... Whose death served a major role in Captain America’s character... Whose death served as a reason why Marvel heroes don’t have kid sidekicks...

Is back from the dead.

...and...

Cap dies and the retcon’d back to life Bucky becomes the new Cap.

My head hurts. I’m going to have a little lie down now.