Losing Work

Probably one of the most hateful experiences has to do with losing minutes or hours of writing work. I love my iPad — combined with the Apple external Bluetooth keyboard — as the perfect tool for writing my articles and blogs. You can’t beat the tool for that kind of work. It’s kind with the environment — burns very little electricity — and it’s extremely easy to take wherever you go.

The problem has to do with applications to create content. Of course, your iPad comes with the Notebook, a great application. It’s always in control of the spellchecking system and never loses a single character. It’s an extremely trustworthy application. However, it doesn’t help at all when you like to write using commands to generate rich text.

Pages is out of the question. It has become an extremely slow application — in my iPad1— and it isn’t flexible at all concerning output in different formats. If you write articles for Blogs, forget it! I like to generate html code, and Pages doesn’t understand or care about that possible need.

One excellent application used to be — and still is — Blogsy. It was specifically created to make the life of bloggers a lot easier when they write using their iPads — not iPhones. The only drawback with Blogsy has to do with a rather constant problem with all iPad writing applications: you need to touch the screen with your fingers in order to generate rich text words, titles, lists, etc. If you’re a touch typist, you simply don’t want to separate your fingers from the keyboard.

That’s where Markdown — and all the applications that take advantage of it — comes into play. Using the MarkDown system, the writer can type and generate rich text without ever taking her fingers away from the keyboard. Phraseology is just one more application that takes advantage of the MarkDown system. It’s incredibly simple, but this isn’t the right place to get an explanation about it.

As I’m typing — using my iPad — I suddenly notice that the program isn’t underlying the misspelled words anymore. That is, it had been doing it, but then, suddenly, it simply stopped doing it. When this happens, it’s a real hassle; you can’t know right away if your text is coming out all right. It seems to be all right, but since the spellchecker is resting — or whatever, Apple People could give us a hint, because the fault is in all applications, except the native ones — but it might not be OK. One can’t know, unless one types a crazy combination — a sure misspelled word — like kisharma — whoa! it’s working, so far — and as it appears underlined with the red little dots, you know you’ve made a mistake.

Phraseology is a rather decent application. So far, I haven’t lost an article. However, if I need to paste the html code in Blogsy, I need to make it in 2 steps: 1) I need to copy and paste into yet another application — Textastic — and then, 2) from there I obtain the html code, that I will be able to paste into Blogsy or directly into the Blog Web Editor — they all accept html.

When I leave my city to stay at a far away place to write my book — and screenplay — I will want to take with me nothing but my iPad, and of course, the aluminum Apple bluetooth keyboard. I just hope all of these applications will have already been perfected to the point of Zero Faults. Something tells me that I will leave for my trip before the Zero Faults condition is met.

I spent most of my active life using Windows® PCs, until the iPhone appeared. I was unable to resist the iPad. I haven’t tested any other tablets out there. However, let me tell you that if the Mother Of All Tablets has all of these faults, flaws and drawbacks — applications crash or slow down — then the world is still rather far from overcoming the PC.

Did I mention that the most expensive keyboard in the world — the Apple Aluminum Bluetooth — doesn’t have an On/Off switch? Do they have a special commission from the battery companies? I know, it’s extremely economical as far as using batteries is concerned — a set of two, lasts for about 3 months, using it 3 hours daily — but, why the lack of switch? I take out the batteries when I won’t be using it for a while; and I need to do it during transportation, or else the keyboard is “live”, looking for matching equipment — and wastefully burning batteries!