Around this time last year, I picked up a Surface Go. It's been a great piece of hardware. While it might not be the most powerful Windows PC going, it's got more than enough guts to power me through a day of writing, editing and photo tweaking in situations where hauling along my laptop isn't desirable. Better still is the fact that, at the end of the day, it's an absolute beast for consuming comic books and RSS feeds with. My only complaint is that most of my workflow is made possible by rocking a system driving Mac OS. While the situation has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, a number of apps that I rely upon to get shit done aren't available as a desktop app outside Mac OS. Day One, a journaling app that I use to record my PTSD symptoms and travelogues is a big one. OmniFocus, a GTD project management app is another. Up until now, I've been getting by by using the iOS versions of these apps on my iPhone when I'm on the road with my Windows 10 machine. It's less than ideal. Happily, I think I can put a pin in this workaround, now. Today, I sorted out a more desirable workaround: Using Android apps in Bluestacks 4 inside of Windows 10.
The last time I took Bluestacks for a spin was a few years back. It was intriguing, but still too buggy and slow to be of much use to me. The latest version of the software, Bluestacks 4, is nimble as hell. Over the past few days, I've been running the Android iteration of DayOne and Focus GTD: a third-party OmniFocus client. Both have been working like a champ, having a significant impact on how I work on my wee Windows 10 tablet. Downloading the Android New York Times App to Bluestack has proved a great reading hack for use on my Surface Go as well. It provides a superior reading experience over browsing the website version of the paper.
I'll have to do a bit more reading to see exactly how secure all of this is. I'm already aware that using a third-party app to access my Omnifocus data isn't the most sound idea (but it I access it with its own compartmentalized email address and password, so meh). But I'm pretty happy with how this has been working for me, so far.
