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The Trials of iPad Continue

Life with a tablet continues to be a back and forth between "I really like this thing" and "I can't believe they didn't do [fill in the blank]!"

For instance, I never thought I'd miss the TAB key. I got used to simply formatting a paragraph indent with Word. But while you can do that with Pages for iPad, you can't for any of the plain text editors I've seen (mostly IA Writer and Daedalus). Now, when I work with Q10 on a Win7 machine, it's not an issue since it automatically double-spaces paragraphs; neither IA Writer not Daedalus do that.

The result is this string of text with invisible paragraph breaks. Unless you press TAB and manually indent the first line of a paragraph. Which you can't do with the software keyboard built into the iPad. For that simple little feature, you need an external keyboard. Silly, just silly.

Other writing frustrations are the lack of keyboard shortcuts for basic formatting. So I tried Pages, which does allow the setting of a paragraph indent, but if I want to underline something (or italics or bold) you have to tap the on-screen display. Heaven forfend if the thing understood Ctrl-I (or Option-I, or whatever).

I also like how Pages keeps referring me to a service that Apple has now discontinued for uploading files To The Cloud, rather than updating the software so it now talks to iCloud. Microsoft would be drawn and quartered for such an oversight.

I know that the argument is always going to be that the iPad is a content consumption device and not meant for content creation, but that's nonsense. If that were true, why even have Pages? Why does Blogsy exist? Why bother with even simple text editors at all?

I believe this presents the crack through which Microsoft can successfully enter the tablet market. A Surface tablet, running nothing more than Windows RT, is instantly productive. Add a keyboard cover if you want, but it's not mandatory.

Are there enough users out there that want this in their tablet? I honestly don't know, and even expect that the answer is "no." But if the answer is no, why does Apple (and its assorted software partners and providers) persist in producing half-ass productivity software for the iPad?

Right now I'm using the iPad with Daedelus to transcribe Derelict into a digital format (something I should have done 20 years ago). It's a decent system that I can do at work during downtime. The iPad sits in a dock, an Apple Bluetooth keyboard right in front of it. It works because the keyboard is actually quite nice and has a TAB key.

But when I leave work, the iPad becomes useless for further work, despite having what is otherwise an excellent software keyboard. Unless I want to lug around the keyboard. Maybe iOS 6 cures this, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

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