Easter iPad Odds and Ends

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had my first guest post over at Ryans blog. Over the last few weeks I’d been noticing a trend among a number of the online bloggers and thought it was worth taking note of. I actually spent some time talking to my sister-in-law and wife this weekend and I think we may have found a race for this fall. More on that in a later post though, I just wanted to tell everyone I’m actively working on entering into that second category of people, are you?

iPad Blogging

I’m actually writing this blog post in the new universal (iPad, iPhone, iPod) WordPress application. While it works and is a free app it’s far from ready for daily blogging use. You can’t easily insert links, apply HTML styles, copy & paste rarely work, and access to your media on the blog isn’t even present. I also got about half way through this piece and promoted it to a remote draft and it lost half my edits which was completely unacceptable.

I know they’d prefer you to use the web interface to your blog as that is where most of their effort is focused but jeez this thing is bare. I really hope that Red Sweater comes out with MarsEdit for the iPad, I’d buy it in a second.

In case your wondering, the difference is that the application works in offline mode when you don’t have an internet connection whereas the web page requires that you have to have connectivity. A large chunk of my blogging free time is on the train to and from work when I don’t have a network connection. So offline blogging tools that let me do everything I want really help a ton.

iPad Keyboard

I’m sure a number of you are wondering what typing on the iPad keyboard is like, especially for blogging. I can type a lot faster on a normal keyboard than the iPad, there I said it. I’ve also been using a normal keyboard for 20+ years and I’ve maybe had 4-5 hours on the iPad to date.

At first I was hitting a lot of the wrong keys and may have inadvertently tweeted and instant messaged some of you with short messages. The keyboards are laid out slightly differently than that of the iPhone or my MacBook Air thus causing some bad touches. I am however much faster now at typing on it than I was in the first few minutes. I’ll update you more as I use it but as an advocate of touch based interfaces I really do like the keyboard, it’s responsive and quick to grasp.

Other iPad Comments

I have to admit I was surprised how nice a lot of these applications are on the iPad. Especially if you think about how few if any of the developers had access to a real device, they only had access to a simulator. Kudos to all of them for making the launch so fun and interesting. In all I have about 26 applications in total of which about 10 I’ve actually paid for.

So many of these applications are very fun and engaging. They aren’t just webpages put in applications nor are they just quick ports from their iPhone counterparts. Applications like Twitterrific, Articles, NewNewsWire, WSJ, AP News, BBC News, ABC Player, NPR, Things and more are completely new applications with all new slick touch based interfaces.

I do have to warn you up front though that these applications are not as fully featured as their iPhone counterparts, not yet at least. For example the Twitterrific client (the only decent one on the iPad right now) has maybe 1/4 of the features of the iPhone version. Things like exporting to Instapaper, posting photos, geotweeting, filtering, etc aren’t present. I fully expect the developers to knock out some quick updates bringing the features in line but as of now they are fairly sparse. You have to keep it in context though, they’ve only had 3 months with the development tools for the iPad whereas the iPhone has 2.5 years of development.

Easter Weekend

On a non-nerd topic, I’ve been less than perfect this weekend. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a longer holiday weekend or because I hit a milestone on Wednesday but meals have been off this weekend. I had two days of less than stellar meals and no workouts that I’d like to take back. No I wasn’t pigging out all day but I certainly wasn’t on track eating healthy and working out.

I did get up this morning nice and early and got 50 minutes in on the ARC trainer at the gym. That went a long way toward righting my trend mentally. Now I just have to get past this evenings Easter dinner and start next week.

I’m not looking forward to returning to work on Monday but I am looking forward to returning to my routine. Weird how that is isn’t it? Anyone else feel the same way?

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• Where I’ve Been And What I’ve Been Doing