I typed happily on the train, on cafe tables and beds. The key action is perfect and there are only a few, random double strikes now and again, which are probably due more to my over enthusiastic typing than to the Bluetooth. Lambda Tek shipped it with its four necessary AAA batteries – make sure you have them on hand or it’s tears all round – and after visiting the Logitech site and pushing one little “connect” button, I was off and running. It connects via Bluetooth to your iPad and ships in a nifty, rigid plastic sleeve that folds back on itself to make a secure easel to tilt the iPad upright into position, like a laptop screen. It’s the Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad. When looking for travel keyboards, you’d be surprised what they try to fob off on you – from fiddling round with key placement to dinky space bars, as well as messing with the whole QWERTY system, which will, no doubt, go the way of the dinosaurs once all we touch typists have popped our clogs.Īfter days of obsessive googling, I found the travel keyboard of my dreams. The keyboard must be full-sized, have return buttons on both sides, as well as a delete key in the correct place, and it must have a wide space bar, just like a “real” keyboard. (Thanks, Ma, for insisting on those high school typing classes – oh, and Happy Mother’s Day!) I may not be picky about a lot of things, but, apparently, I am about keyboards. I end up jabbing with one finger when I am a touch typist. Some people are a whiz on the iPad’s keyboard. Formatting in Storify isn’t as straightforward, and tabs won’t line up and things, but if that doesn’t get in the way of your editing, it’s plain sailing from there. A txt file is bug-ugly on screen, but once opened in Storyist, it looks formatted and fine – I don’t know how, but it does. Having a Dropbox app is a work around and once all your software is synching to Dropbox, you can import straight from there as plain text. Storyist didn’t like rtfs and didn’t recognise emails. The app says it will open emails in rich text format, but that didn’t work for me. It isn’t straightforward to import text into, but not impossible. It’s straightforward to use, but not to edit in, which is what I wanted to do. David recommended Storyist, so after having a Google around, I plumped for the app. What if you could write – and I mean really write – on your iPad?ĭavid Hewson blogged about software for the iPad, so I already knew that my beloved Scrivener was a non-starter, though I believe it is in development. Can’t be doing with that) And then when it came time to pack for a weekend away of writing, I hefted the laptop in my handbag and looked at the slim creature I would be leaving behind. I use it to read magazines, mostly at that aggregator and app-of-wonder Zite (but not books. The iPad is a thing of beauty, to be sure – but what is it actually for? I didn’t even know when I bought one. Maybe you did, too? And in one purchase, I turned into a virtual cliche’, juggling the constant charging of Apple products, phone, laptop and iPad, and having to buy more gadgets to boost the wifi – sigh… Then that evil genius Steve Jobs went and wooed me with an iPad. My laptop used to do everything for me, but it increasingly saw less email action with the invention of that gadget known as the iPhone. And I write on my laptop, no matter where the writing is happening. Be on the look out for new posts – and maybe a little more news about my first novel, too – very soon! I have all my research books back together, where they belong, and I’m leaping back into “the war”. In the meantime, I’ve had a good old clear out in the Blue House, where I write, as moving back to the second book seemed to require a massive spring clean, paint job, and repair of drooping foundations. So, this blog will continue to focus on research for my second novel and thoughts on writing in general, but it bears my name now. Renaming this blog lets me back up from the initial brief on the blog, which was to blog research, and to deal with other matters, like my first novel, Amity & Sorrow. Now, I’m in the midst of the second draft of the second novel, which will not be called The Victory Stitch, I hasten to add. The picture above was taken during a community play I wrote and directed about the women’s internment camp on the Isle of Man, subject of my second novel. The Victory Stitch was the name of this blog for quite a while, while I cut my teeth on WordPress and swam around in the first draft of my second novel. If I learn how to organise it better, I’ll do it. You can still find things by searching for them via their categories or clicking through the Blog Post monthly folders. It’s set as a default, but I don’t know where the archives are to link them. Like the Archive button, which leads to nowhere. I’m still ironing some kinks out in this new site.
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