I have been using it exclusively as my primary—nay, only—writing tool. Anything that needs writing (aside from tweets of course) gets written in Writer. It’s one of those rare, special apps.

Much of what makes Writer special is it’s simplicity, and that’s why I was sad to be informed by the Mac App Store that there was an update. Updates mean bug fixes which is great—new windows always opening under my Dock drives me crazy—but they also mean new features, and that’s not so great.

Writer is devoid of features by design, but that’s not to say that adding features isn’t a good idea. For a writing application based on using a markup language it only makes sense to allow document export that uses and shows the markup changes. It also makes sense to get it to open all standard text documents such as RTF in order to allow their editing. What I’m afraid of it bloat.

For me, adding even keyboard commands for auto-markup does, in a way, take a little from what makes Writer great. It’s useful for sure, but not quite in keeping with the feel of the app. There are many more and better examples being thrown over Twitter, and maybe that’s the problem.

Pressure from customers to add, adapt, even change the philosophy of an application can easily overwhelm a developer. I urge the guys at iA and all other devs around the world—remember your vision and stand up for it. For the likes of Writer it should be pretty easy—it’s what made it popular in the first place isn’t it? Do more of that.

I don’t write a lot of blogs anymore. You probably realised that. The main reason is redundancy. Odds are I will write about one of two things; tech or bikes. Both have their shortcomings.

If I write about tech then not only is it likely old news, it’s often not going to be in depth enough to say anything you couldn’t get from better sources.

If I write about bikes then the vast majority of people reading this will simply ignore it, and those that don’t would usually be better off getting a more interactive, thoughful discussion from me in person.

Shorter notes on either topic are often discussed on twitter and the rest probably doesn’t matter. All that said, I do have a few topics I’d like to talk about coming up, so perhaps I can find an angle that keeps us all interested until I’ve finished them.

In the mean time, hit me up on @houltmac and say hi!

Some iPad notes:

Keyboard

My first experience using a touch based, software keyboard was the iPhone. At first it was odd not feeling the keys under my fingers but i soon got used to it. The main thing everyone says about the iPhone Keyboard is that you need to trust it and just keep going. Learning this is like learning very counter intuitive, but it works and eventually you can get very quick at typing—possibly even more so than on BlackBerry devices as someone once blogged.

The iPad is a little different. Instead of learning from scratch (due to the size of the iPhone screen) you feel that the landscape keyboard is the same as a standard MacBook keyboard and so old reflexes and muscle memories can become a nuisance.

There are three big issues I find when typing on the iPad; lazy finger, special characters, and going too fast.

Lazy finger is simply that I never previously noticed how much I tend to allow my right pinkie to rest on the keyboard. On a touch keyboard that will have disastrous consequences (new lines, caps, and completely inappropriate words).

The same goes for special characters. I often find myself trying to type the apostrophe when I get flowing which again tends to result in a return instead. Any which way it’s not good. The same rule applies here as applies on the iPhone though—trust the software and keep going. The other side of the characters issue is simply typing in markdown. It’s not too painful, since most markdown is simply plain text, but it can become tiresome changing to the second character pallet after a while. Writer has added an extra line to the iPad keyboard which id very handy. I’d like to see this kind of thing added to a markdown editor with those characters instead.

As a side note: the iPad keyboard auto-correction does seem a little less predictable than the iPhones, especially with device names (proper case in iPad for example works 50% of the time only) and I is often not capitalised by itself. The space bar is also a little more awkward I find (often typing a lower line letter instead).

The final part of the puzzle is simply trying to go too fast. I can certainly type faster on my MacBook Air keyboard than this iPad keyboard, but I’m getting there. There is certainly a danger of trying to run before you can walk here though, and it all stems from the same single issue:

It might be the size of a standard keyboard, but it’s not so learn new muscle memory and habits for it.

Orientation

I find the iPhone has a natural portrait orientation for my uses. It gets quite annoying when led in bed and the orientation freaks out. I was relived when the software lock button was added for that.

The iPad feels very different there though. Firstly, its size means it’s more difficult to accidentally change orientation, which is brilliant. Then I also find I want to change orientation more.

I like certain things landscape, and some portrait. For example, my favourite app is Twitter and due to it’s column view style it just begs to be used in landscape or it feels very odd. Equally, I find the landscape keyboard much quicker/easier to type on.

Other things are obviously better in portrait however, like reading long documents or web pages. Instapaper is a portrait must.

I have noticed that while reading long articles in portrait view however, I rarely get more than 2/3 down the screen before scrolling. That seems a little counterintuitive but also quite natural.

The iPad is a fantastic device, but in many ways it has to be remembered that it’s neither a laptop, nor an iPhone because old habits die hard.

I use Twitter a lot. I love the new website design, which for a while even stopped me using Twitter for iPhone and Tweetie (Twitter for Mac) before Twitter for iPad snapped me out of that. There is one truly annoying bug in all the official Twitter software however: @replies.

For example:

I’d like to see what @donmowry is responding to in his reply. On the website I can see what @gruber said to warrant such a response.

twitter.com example

Sadly, on any of the official software, I loose that ability. What’s up with that Twitter?

Twitter for iPhone example

Twitter for iPad example

Tweetie for Mac example