Tuesday, April 20, 2010

OS4 and keyboards (and a writing app)

I'm just watching the Jobs "keynote" about iPhone OS4 et al. I always enjoy his talks.

I noted that in the padform OS4, coming for the small devices in summer, and for iPad in fall, will include support for bluetooth keyboards. That's great. I can just see an idyllic road-side cafe in the countryside outside of Paris, a writer type arrives with a backpack, you know him, fifty-ish, grying hair and mustache, a denim jacket and fisherman's hat. From his backpack he picks out the beutiful tiny one-pound Apple wireless keyboard, and then his iPhone, and orders a café au lait and sits down, continuing to write on his novel on the iPhone...

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... And so far, the most promising app I've found for it so far (there's bound to come many more) is My Writing Nook. Pages is good, but it's being sold as a word processor, and it's really not, it's a Desktop Publishing App, isn't it? It's more concerned with placing things on pages and presentation, than in the process of writing. We need a real writer's tool, like Nisus lite or Mellel.

My Writing Nook syncs with a web site, which is quick and off-site backup. And from the site you can download the document with one click. (Pure text document.) Also, both the web site and iPad (or iPhone) app lets you email instantly what you have written, also a nice backup.

Update: in correspondence with the author, I've found out that MWN does not yet have Undo capability. I have urged him to add this soon; to me being able to undo things is perhaps the most vital of advantages of digital media.

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