Text manipulation on the iPad

I complained about it in earlier posts and I'm not the only one:

I find highlighting text, copying and pasting, and other forms of text manipulation to be infuriating on the iPad. It isn’t that it's a bad system—it’s probably as good as it can be, given that the device relies entirely on touch. An external keyboard would make the application better, but at that point you're practically carrying around a laptop wherever you go. The iPad, a keyboard, and Pages could make a decent word processor for a kid, but with the abundance of cheap laptops, desktops, and older machines that can do the same thing for cheaper, it’s hard to justify the cost.

Arstechnica

I absolutely dread having to go an manipulate text I've entered on the iPad. As I indicated before, you're in for a "warm" time if you have to place the cursor within a word or God forbid a URL. Zooming helps a bit but still this needs to be addressed.

Another iPad Suggestion

Reading about the 256MB RAM and the lack of swapping on the iPad/iPhone OS, I'm thinking that Apple ought to take a page from Nokia Maemo (soon Meego). On my ancient N800 (you note I keep mentioning that it is ancient), I can assign memory swap to one of the SD cards. That enables more apps to run concurrently before they enter a sleep mode (a little "zzz' on the application icon).

I see no reason why an iPad (or iPhone for that matter) could not have it's memory extended to the built in 16,32 or 64 GB of solid state RAM sitting in the iPad. Is it slower than the main 256MB? Probably. Is it as slow as a spinning disk? Absolutely not. Maybe we'll see something like that in the 4.0 OS (or 4.1) particularly for the iPad. But really Safari ought not have to reload tabbed pages. That just needs to stop.

More iPad issues

And so last night after unsuccessfully scoring a decent iPad case/stand combo I perched the thing on a laptop angled stand and attempted a blog entry. Now on my laptop I have the option of using a stand alone weblog editor or blogger's online tool. On the iPad I had no such choice (though I suppose I could have used the notepad). Therefore I loaded up the blogger editor in Safari and went to work. Part way through the blog post I needed to cut and paste text from another website so I went and called up the website which refreshed. That can be bad but it wasn't. This time. I copied the text and went back to the blogger page to find that Safari had to reload the page. It "reloaded" a brand new blank blog post page. That was not cool at all. Fortunately blogger auto-saves your work so I was able to get back to it from the saved draft. God forbid someone is writing in an online tool that does not auto-save, they are one "let me check that last tab" click away from a world of hurt.

Then I needed to style the text I use custom CSS for blockquotes and bold items so I always add them in manually. DO you know how many keystrokes it takes to get a bracket? What is worse is that Safari believes that < blockquote > should be < block quote > and will GLADLY auto-correct for you.

So I will definitely be in need of a stand alone blogging tool for the iPad. Typing on it with a prop is not that bad at all (noted quibbles aside). Multi-tasking cannot come soon enough for this purpose. It is sad that my ancient N800, 3 years old @ 400 Mhz and 128MB RAM can out-blog this new kit.

If anyone knows a decent iPad weblog app drop me a note.

[update]
Some people may ask why I don't get the iPad dock and a wireless keyboard. Let me answer that right quick.

The iPad dock allows for portrait only orientation. As much as I can appreciate the throwback to manual typewriters I'd prefer landscape for that. Secondly I don't believe that the iPad ought to need a physical keyboard to write at length. As I indicated, once I got the iPad on a stand I was satisfied with the speed at which I could type on the onscreen keyboard in landscape mode.

I currently have an Addesso flexible USB keyboard for use with my N800. I don't like BT keyboards because that is yet another set of batteries I have to think about. If there was a iPad connector that would allow a keyboad to be connected to the iPad sans dock I would purchase it without delay. Still though I would prefer for the iPad to be fully functional without such attachments.

[Update 2]

Seems that the BlogPress app may fill my wants here. Too bad I can't try before I buy.

More iPad woes

I just tweeted about the inanity that is attempting to place the cursor somewhere in a word and the apparent inability to copy just the text of a link rather than the whole URL. But the following is an example of just how bad some things on the iPad is. As any iPad owner knows, there is no viewable filesystem or a means of filesharing. Yes there's a SMB client, but it does not allow two way sharing. anyway here's another example of the truely sorry state of file access on the iPad:

it gets worse. There is no way to share the same document with more than one iPad app. For example, a Word document imported to Pages cannot be accessed by any other iPad app, even other apps that can open Word documents. The only work-around is to import the document twice, once for each app. Further, if you ever delete an app from your iPad, any documents stored with that app are deleted as well. Thus, to make sure your documents are preserved, copy them to your Mac before deleting the relevant iPad app. Shared files are included in a Sync backup of your iPad (at least that what this Apple support article claims), but they are not accessible for a restore of specific files.

Just wow.

iPad

having my iPad for a week now (and accidentally leaving it at home attached to the charger) there are few thoughts I want to share about it.

As others have pointed out the iPad is really a gateway. It is whatever app you're running on it. It gets out the way and really going from it to my desktop or laptop is pretty jarring. the "Oh I have to grab this thing over here to point and click on something over there" paradigm really looks old.

I can really see getting work done on it. The key being to stop thinking that it should work like your desktop. But as it stands there are definitely some things that need addressing.

I did not get the stand. Big mistake. I will be rectifying that mistake this weekend. You simply cannot type at any length without a stand. Some people are using bluetooth keyboards with it. I'm not quite ready to go there yet. But I am a semi-touch typist, so I expect some kind of slowdown. Once I have the stand though I'm going to attempt to go the week without the laptop.

Multi-tasking. Yeah this needs to happen. Particularly for things like Twitter and IM. I wanted to download an IM program but I was not going to pay to have an IM program that can't be run in the background. No, I will not. My Nokia Internet Tablet N800 with less available RAM and a 400 MHz old school armel processor can multi-task. The A4 should as well. Yes I know OS 4.x will address that on the iPad "later" but really, this needs to ship sooner rather than later.

File access: It is clear that the original idea for this thing is to consume media not create or share it. That view is Myopic. I have already created documents on this thing that I needed to send to another computer. Lack of networking reared it's head in the most unholy way. Of course if I had multi-tasking I could have done what I wanted on the 'Pad without involving my laptop but well, that's point number two.

Worse though is that I cannot access my NAS. Well I could if I install an app that would access it via SMB. But then, as far as I've read I would have no means of saving it back to the NAS. That's just nasty. This lack of AFP access to volumes is a huge deal. the iPad is certainly capable of more than what it has by default. It is certainly more capable of being a media consumption device. I certainly can see doing a LOT on it that previously was done on my laptop.

Bluetooth: What is with this bluetooth module? I tried to connect my Nokia to it to act as an input device and it failed because it didn't recognize it as a keyboard. It simply ignored my bluetooth GPS module. Why? I can't tether it to my cell phone to get internet access. Why? Oh that's that ATT thing right? I don't want to go the Jailbreak route but it's pretty inexcusable to not be able to pair with a bluetooth GPS on something that has maps. It's not cool to not be able to tether either. I MIGHT get one of those MIFI devices but I shouldn't have to.

That's it for now.