Adjusting To iPad

My two day trip to NYC with just an iPad for company has been enlightening.

Overall I have adjusted to the keyboard, which is certainly adequate for typing blog posts and twittering. Many other annoying issues have come up, even in the first 24 hours. I don’t use Safari on my Mac so I expected transition headaches. One annoyance: when I select a link to open in another page, I am transferred to the other page. I have gotten used to the opposite: remaining on the original page. What I am used to doing is opening a series of links, like stories in the New York Times, and then reading them one by one. This morning I tried to do that, and it didn’t flow. Also, on returning to the original page the point of focus had shifted back to the top of the page, so I had to scroll down and wait for the page to resove. Ugh.

I also seem incapable of selecting text in Safari. I can drop the magnifier, and click on a single word. But dragging the edges of a selected word — to grab an entire paragraph for example — seems fluky: sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t.

I read somewhere that quadruple clicking is supposed to work, but this confuses Safari, since a double click zooms in (or out) of the page. So grabbing text and opening the Tumblr bookmarked doesn’t word as I had hoped.

The lack of cursor keys in the iPad keyboard leads to a lot of unnecessary retyping, since it is faster to backspace and retype a misspelled word than it is to tap the screen in the appropriate place and correct, and then touch the screen again to return to the end of the sentence again.

Other glitches annoy but Im not sure they are iPad issues. I tried to login to Times People at the Ny Times, but couldn’t recall the password. When I entered the email address to get my password reset, I wound up with a server error, for example.

Most devastating to me is that Tumblr doesn’t have a dedicated iPad app, and editing Tumblr posts in Safari on iPad is basically impossible. The editor requires character entry in HTML mode, which agonizing with the iPad screen keyboard, because special characters are two levels down in the menu. But even worse, iPad’s screen keyboard doesn’t include cursor keys, and as a result there is no way to move to the bottom of the text editing block on the Tumblr edit page. In order to do that I was forced to buy an Apple wireless keyboard, which solves some of the headaches with Tumblr, but not the need to edit in HTML mode.

I also learned that the Tumblr API doesn’t allow external apps to edit an existing Tumblr post, so there is no hope from that quarter.

So, at present, if I am to use the iPad as a blogging tool, I am reduced to using email to send posts to Tumblr. It appears that they support markup, as well, so that may work out, although I haven’t used it in the past.